I first came across Stephen Witmer through his writing for the Small Town Summits initiative, which encourages gospel ministry in the small towns of New England. He has served as the lead pastor at Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Massachusetts for eleven years, and his work on God’s heart for ‘small places’ has been a real inspiration for me in my own context.

Stephen was kind enough to share a final draft of his new book, A Big Gospel in Small Places, with me as I worked on my MA dissertation on a similar theme in the UK context. The book has released this week and Stephen generously took the time to answer a few questions:

– Stephen, thanks so much for writing this heartening book. In it you speak very openly about your own journey, both in terms of ministry aspirations and in terms of geography. What has led you to write this book?

A Big Gospel in Small Places is an overflow and expression of my thinking and wrestling over the past decade of pastoral ministry in a small town. I grew up in a tiny, remote village, but decided as a young man that to make something of myself, I should be living far from home in a big city. I aspired to city ministry – the message I was hearing from those I most admired was that the best way to make my life count was to influence influencers in a big city. All through my twenties, I was on track toward that future. Then, unexpectedly, I was called to pastor a small-town New England church at the age of 32. In the eleven years since, I’ve fallen in love with my church and town. I’ve come to see that ministry on the periphery needn’t be peripheral ministry. I’ve also had to work through pride, ambition, and how my life fits with the evangelical prioritization of ministry in big places (cities and suburbs). I’m hoping that what I’ve learned about small-town ministry and about myself will be helpful and encouraging to many others who are living and serving (whether as lay-leaders or pastors) in small, forgotten places.

– Can you give us a summary of what you are trying to do in the book and who might find it helpful?

My goal in A Big Gospel in Small Places is to build a theological vision for rural/small-town ministry, akin, in my own small way, to what Tim Keller has done for city ministry (Tim Keller is a hero of mine and has profoundly influenced this book). The way to build a theological vision is to consider your place and to consider the gospel, and then to consider how the two engage. In the book, I argue that small places are both better and worse than we often think they are. They’re much more needy and broken than we see when we idealize them (as our culture often does), and they’re much more beautiful and valuable than we see when we despise them (as our culture often does). The gospel of Jesus Christ opens up a broad space for the kind of small, slow, ‘unstrategic’ ministries that we often find in small places, because the gospel is the news of a patient God who brings a mustard seed Kingdom and lavishly pours out his love for ordinary people. So, gospel logic itself gives us permission and encouragement to do small-place ministry, and it gives us instincts for how best to do small-place ministry once we dive into it.

I’m praying that small-place laypeople and pastors will find this book very encouraging – that it will renew their understanding that what they’re doing matters very much. I’m also hopeful that the book may cause some aspiring ministers to be more open to God’s call to go to a small place. Finally, I’d love pastors in big cities to see and celebrate what God is doing in small places – and also to read and engage with my critique of the ‘urban apologetic’ literature which seeks to prioritize city ministry. I find many of these arguments unpersuasive and believe it’s important to allow God to prioritize for each person where he wants them to minister.

– As you point out, it’s very easy for us to aspire to ‘bigness’, in church size and location. What would you say to those perhaps just beginning in full-time ministry as they aspire to a life of service? What would you want them to consider or ask of themselves as they evaluate those aspirations?

I’d encourage every follower of Jesus to be fully open to God’s call and to follow him wherever he leads, even if it’s in a surprising direction. There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to have a big impact for God, as long as it’s really for God and not for ourselves. I’ve been struck again recently by God’s words in Isaiah 48.11: ‘For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.’ God’s not willing to share his glory. John the Baptist had it right when he said of Jesus, ‘He must increase, and I must decrease.’ As Ray Ortlund points out, John doesn’t propose a glory-sharing arrangement (‘He must increase, and I must increase’). I’d encourage every aspiring minister to long to leave a huge impact for God – whether in a big place or a small place. When it comes to the numerical increase of our churches through conversion growth, we should want it more and need it less. That is, we should work and pray for revival, never settling for the status quo. But we should never need revival in order to validate ourselves or our ministries. The gospel already announces our acceptance with God through Jesus Christ.

– In the book you engage with the work and writing of Tim Keller and particularly his emphasis on the importance of planting in cities. Can you give us a sense of what you’re trying to do with that engagement and why you felt compelled to do that?

I’ve read a lot of the ‘urban apologetic’ literature that calls for prioritizing city ministry. Much of it is written by my ministry friends and heroes. Some of my best friends minister in great cities and I love their ministries. I’m a huge fan of city ministry. But I’m not persuaded by the call to prioritize city ministry as an overall strategy. Because I had never seen any extended, thoughtful engagement with the urban apologetic literature, I thought it was important in this book, as I develop a theological vision for small-place ministry, to charitably, critically engage with this important stream of writing. It’s all there in the concluding chapter of my book. I don’t think I’ve answered (or even asked) all the important questions, but I hope that last chapter will further what I think is a very important discussion.

– Obviously you’re now living and ministering in the US, but you have spent some time living and studying and indeed speaking in the UK. Do you have any sense of what those of us in the UK might particularly need to hear in relation to the issues raised by this book?

Yes, my four years living in the UK were some of the best of my life! I’m married to a Brit, and we have many close, ongoing relationships in the UK. I’m deeply encouraged by the small-place ministry I see occurring throughout the UK. I was recently in tiny Rathfriland, Northern Ireland, speaking at an Acts 29 Rural Collective event. There were many church planters from the north and south of Ireland gathered that day, and I was blown away by the caliber of these folks – really impressive, Christ-loving, faithful church planters. One of my friends, John Hindley, moved several years ago from Manchester to a tiny town in Norfolk to plant a church. He’s doing fantastic local ministry, as well as doing some very thoughtful, helpful speaking and writing on rural ministry. I think most of what I’ve written in A Big Gospel in Small Places maps directly onto the UK scene. The call to value what is small, forgotten, and overlooked is every bit as important in the UK and the rest of the world as it is in the US. That’s because the gospel is true everywhere. We’re meant to proclaim its content and to allow our ministries themselves to be gospel-shaped, to be see-through to the gospel, to embody its values.

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A Big Gospel in Small Places is available in the US now and is available for pre-order in the UK. You can read a sample here and you can get a feel for the book with some of the articles over at the Small Town Summits site.

Over the summer one of my holidays books was Stephen King’s On Writing.

To be honest, I’ve never read a King novel in my life, but On Writing always seems to come up when writers are listing their favourite works on the craft. Though some turn their nose up at his ‘modern horror’, it’s hard to argue with 350 million copies sold. King’s ability to tell a story is undoubted, and given On Writing has been described as ‘part memoir, part master class’, I’d been meaning to get round to it for a while.

I enjoy writing and it plays a big part in what I do. Most stuff that I say in any vaguely formal ministry setting has already been shaped in some way by putting words down on a page/screen. That’s probably the nature of being an external processor (which is why I first started blogging here – and why I’m writing this post!).

As I devoured On Writing, there were countless times where I felt King’s wisdom could apply particularly to preachers crafting talks or sermons. Of course, we should always filter the ‘wisdom of the world’ through the wisdom of God’s word, but here are 9 reflections for preachers from On Writing:

1. Don’t Put Your Desk in the Middle of the Room

Early on in King’s career, he would dream of owning a massive oak slab desk and having it loom large in the middle of his room. But when the paychecks were finally big enough for him to afford said desk, he found its dominance was actually surprisingly unhelpful. He alludes to it almost overwhelming him and leading to an unhealthy and obsessive view of his writing, perhaps even causing the neglect of those dear to him. For King, the size and location of the place where he did the bulk of his writing were symbolic indicators of how he was perceiving his work in relation to the rest of his life.

He sold it and replaced it with a living room suite. As such, his ‘writing room’ became much more of a communal space. His children would come in and watch a baseball game there or enjoy a pizza and leave a pile of crumbs. But he says he learned a profound lesson from the process: ‘Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way round.’

For those of us who believe in the authority of God’s word, preaching is understandably important. But it made me wonder whether sometimes I can drift into thinking that ministry or church is a support system for my preaching? As King learnt, it’s the other way around. We serve a greater end: God’s people growing in faith and love to the glory of God. Sermons and sermon prep and even studies/offices shouldn’t consume us.

2. Writers read.

You’ll hear this advice repeated by many ‘professional’ writers: if you want to write well, you need to read lots.

Essentially this is saying we develop by absorbing others who do it well. Applying it more widely to the preacher – which obviously isn’t technically a written form – we could say that there’s great value in communicators consuming communication. As those who are seeking to herald and persuade in a verbal form, why not seek to consume as much verbal media as possible?

And yet it’s also worth asking ourselves why we’re doing this. King would say there’s not much point if we’re just doing this just to learn to write: ‘I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read… Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lessons.’

3. Learn from the bad ones.

When it then comes to reading, King remarks, ‘quite often the bad books have more to teach you than the good ones’.

I think that puts into words a helpful point. Often we think of learning from those sermons and preachers that we are inspired or challenged by. But of course we’ll also each hear sermons that don’t leave us particularly inspired – perhaps our own!

But rather than leaving it there, we should then ask ‘why?’ Why wasn’t that sermon all it could have been? Of course, this is something we probably should process internally! And by all means, let’s be generous. We all have off-days/months/series! And let’s take on feedback from our own sermons too. But rather than rushing past a sermon that doesn’t really connect, why not see these as part of the learning process? King puts it more dryly that we probably would, ‘What could be more encouraging to the struggling winter than to realise his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone else?’

4. Don’t dress up your vocabulary.

I guess context is king here, but King wittily urges: ‘put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it… [Doing so] is a bit like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be ever more embarrassed’.

Later he puts it another way: ‘Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful’. Hesitation and cogitation will see us come up with other words, but most probably they’ll not be better words.

It goes without saying that writing will always fall short and only ever be representative of what it describes – how much more so of that which speaks of God! – but chances are that the word we thought of first is a better fit than the ones that came to mind after we thought too much about it.

5. The object of [writing] isn’t grammatical correctness, but to make the reader/listener welcome and then tell a story…

This connects to King’s philosophy on vocabulary, above, but it extends to the form of our writing. He reckons that sometimes writers feel the pressure to craft endless ‘grammatically proper’ sentences, when actually the result is that meaning and effect become stiffened. Instead, more fragmented prose will create cleaner images and tension and variation. As King says, ‘language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes’. The point is to relax about the way we grammatically craft our sermons, so long as they’re being effective.

Interestingly, King argues that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the ‘basic unit of writing’. A paragraph is where ‘coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words’. For those of us who do write sermons as whole scripts, we’d probably do well to think in terms of what a whole paragraph communicates, rather than worrying about each sentence being full and proper in itself. Presumably those of us who preach from notes rather than a script, or at least more conversationally/colloquially, will already be subconsciously doing this.

6. Write one word at a time.

King gives this line as a pithy answer at one of his first press interviews. He’s asked, ‘So, how do you write?’. Presumably the journalist was hoping King would unpack some magical method.

But instead he dryly replies: ‘One word at a time’.

The interviewer apparently laughed, but of course King was deadly serious. He meant it. Whatever the genre, whatever the size of the work, ‘the work is always accomplished one word at a time’.

I couldn’t help think that about how King would put this now, in a world dominated by social media (On Writing was published back in 2000). I don’t imagine King would be particularly sympathetic to the budding writer – and thus preacher – who finds themselves frittering away hours on Facebook or the BBC news website. Maybe he’d say something like, ‘Sorry, I thought you said you wanted to write. Tell me again, why did you say you got Twitter?’

His advice on how to make this happen is simple: ‘You need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door.’ A schedule for writing is ‘in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream, just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night.’

7. Tell the truth as you know it.

Ok, this is open to theological misinterpretation, but I think King is onto something profound.

He criticises those writers who believe their success is due to the literary merit of their work, labelling such thinking ridiculous, ‘a product of vanity and insecurity’. What is that book-buyers really want? Well, basically: ‘a good story to take with them on an airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.’

And, for me, here’s the insight: ‘This happens, I think, when readers recognise the people in a book, their behaviours, their surroundings, and their talk. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story’. For King, this is ‘telling the truth as we know it’.

Obviously as Bible preachers, we care about ‘big T truth’. We don’t pick and choose truth based on our own feelings. God’s Word is what we’re called to preach. But hearing King’s point, I think there’s a way of speaking ‘big T truth’ in a ‘little t truth’ way. In other words, a way that rings true with real life. A way that is earthed. A way that understands life in this fallen world, with its challenges and temptations. You might call this preaching with empathy or plausibility or wisdom. Can your listeners recognise themselves in the discipleship we uphold?

8. Seriously consider The Formula

When King was just a high school student he submitted a manuscript and got back a scribbled comment from an editor that completely transformed his approach. It simply said: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft -10%. Good luck.’

King names this The Formula and from there on in everything he writes goes through it.

I know for myself that most of my writing could be put through The Formula – including this! Every sermon is collapsible. It has to be.

Sometimes we’ll be asked to re-give a sermon in another setting with a shorter time limit, and so we have to collapse it. And it’s painful. But King’s point is that often we’d do well to inflict that pain on ourselves before being asked to give the sermon a second time! We’d do well to apply The Formula the first time around. ‘Not bad, but Puffy.’

9. Beware the allure of the Writers’ Retreat

This kind of brings us full circle. King remembers seeing a writers’ retreat being advertised and being sold on the idea. It involved all heading to some idyllic spot where each writer had their own pristine log cabin for working and at lunchtime a concierge would quietly drop off a ready-to-eat food parcel at each cabin door without disturbing the occupant!. The writers then came together in the evening to share their work. At one level it sounds like a life of luxury. And we might think if only we had the equivalent conditions each week to prepare our sermons.

And yet King hated it. After a few days he couldn’t get over how artificial and disconnected from real life it was. And to top it all, when people shared their work each evening, the feedback was often just pretentious waffle. It just seem an entirely self-indulgent exercise.

This challenged me, because I know I am drawn to the same fantasy of some idealised sermon preparation haven. I can easily think that to write the perfect sermon I need a week free of distractions and optimum conditions.

Now, I’m not dismissing the importance of focused preparation time, nor the centrality of God’s word preached in the gathering of God’s people. But the joke about the preacher who wants a passage built from their study to the pulpit rings true because sometimes some of us can view the ‘rest of life’ as being a disturbance and intrusion to the ‘real work’ we’re called to do. And yet what if the ‘rest of life’ actually provided opportunity to give extra substance and earthiness to our sermons? What if each conversation and ‘distraction’ actually was a chance to talk with others about how God’s word might be more applied and connected to the ‘stuff’ of life – all to the benefit of Sunday’s sermon?

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What do you think about King’s advice? I’d love to hear your thoughts and observations!

“We’re all horrible and wonderful and figuring it out.”

So said Harris Wittels (1984-2015), one of the team behind legendary US sitcom, Parks & Recreation. Indeed, humanity has spent much of its history trying to figure itself out. How is it that we can be capable of acts of stirring selflessness, and acts of unspeakable terror. What’s with that?!

Of course, the real mystery is that such extremes can be found within the very same person. As the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn so brilliantly observed:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

So how do we understand each other? How do we understand ourselves?

We try and do this in all sorts of ways: be it culture, nationality or class; be it Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Love Languages – and yet we’re all inescapably complicated beings.

How might the Bible help us?

I first came across the “three S’s” in the writings of Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation (CCEF) faculty member, Michael Emlet. He calls us to remember that every Christian is simultaneously a saint, a sufferer, and a sinner. Personally, I’ve found this a really helpful set of ‘lenses’ for pastoral ministry. Emlet’s intention is to shape care-full pastoral care:

“People are complex. You and I are complex… How do we move toward one another in God-honoring ways? How do we love wisely in the context of everyday relationships and in more formal counseling settings?

However, I’ve found it helpful to add to Emlet’s three S’s with a couple of my own. These five lenses bring biblical perspective whoever we’re engaging with:

1. Splendour

Every human is made in the ‘image of God’. Psalm 8 describes how God has set humanity apart from the rest of creation, crowning us with a unique splendour and honour (8:5). We have a God-given dignity as those created to bear his image. We’re not just mammals or ‘bones and blood’.

This is immensely important to our Christian worldview – and a really significant lens to see people through. Someone’s value lies not in something we – nor any other human individual or institution – assign, nor is it something people are left to create for themselves. It derives from being a person made by God, formed at conception and continuing eternally, whatever someon’s mental or physical state

And that means we’re to treat each other with dignity and honour. Whatever someone has done, however insignificant they may be in the world’s eyes, they have a splendour.

One action point here is to aim to ‘celebrate’ each person. The evangelist Rico Tice says we should learn to share the gospel in this context:

“I also remember that they have been made in God’s image, and I want to celebrate them and enjoy how God has made them … [My wife & I] have a calendar for the year where we plan in opportunities to get to know [our neighbours] and celebrate [them]. For example, we’ll organise golf evenings and a trip to the summer fair, or a day out at a rugby match, where we are able to build commonality and find out all about them.”

2. Sufferer

We live in a fallen world, fractured and torn apart through sin – and groaning for the curse to be lifted. And that means that each of us will be suffering the effects of life in this broken world. As REM put it so perfectly, “Everybody hurts.”

Whether it’s through illness, natural tragedy, bereavement, or whether it’s as a victim more specifically of someone else’s selfishness and cruelty, we’re all sufferers. Every face you look out over at church; every person you walk past on the street; every person who serves you in the cafe or store. As a nineteenth-century pastor Ian Maclaren once said, “Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

Of course, some of us are quick to reveal our suffering – speaking freely, perhaps bemoaning honestly. Some of us will show our suffering unintentionally, in fragility, resentment or distrust. Others of us will do as much as we can to keep things hidden (whether successful or not). Yet there’ll be relationship tensions, mental battles, hidden histories lying beneath the surface. There’s always so much that we don’t see.

Seeing each other through this lens helps foster a compassionate desire to understand, to serve and to empathise with people, which should cash out in our interactions, our preaching, and our care.

3. Saint

If someone is a believer in Jesus Christ, then they’re a ‘saint’. We tend to associate that word with Roman Catholicism and dead people, but it’s actually the English word used to translate the apostle Paul’s description of all Christian believers. You could equally translate it as ‘holy ones’ or ‘set apart ones’.

It’s pretty tragic, then, that the word is frequently ascribed to a special class of Christian ‘heroes’, as if being a ‘saint’ was something individualistic or referring to elevated status.

And so, just as Paul is eager to remind his Christian readers that their identity is found in Christ, so we should be quick to see fellow Christians through that lens. This person is someone loved by God from before the foundations of the world; who has been given a hope that goes beyond the darkest valley of this life; and who is in-dwelt with the regenerating Holy Spirit.

Once we see that it completely changes how we relate to that person. It also means we have a much better understanding of how we can encourage them.

4. Sinner

The Bible is clear that evil does not just happen in the world around us. It flows out of the heart within us. We all turn away from God and live with ourselves as our own gods. We fail to love God and love our neighbour. This means our greatest problem will always be that we need to be reconciled to our Creator. And therefore the greatest way of loving someone will be to point them to Jesus Christ.

I remember a mentor in Christian ministry once plainly telling me, ‘Never be surprised at the sin someone is capable of’. Of course, when we really look into our own hearts, we begin to understand this. We can deceive each other – and we deceive ourselves.

From time to time there are debates about whether or not it is biblical for Christians to still think of themselves as sinners. Of course, it is right that we think of ourselves in our ‘new nature’ (as above), but we are – as Martin Luther famously put it – ‘simul justus et peculator’, i.e. at the same time righteous (through faith in Christ) and a sinner.

Viewing through this lens means we’re not naive about each other, nor about ourselves. It fosters personal humility and a deep love that is willing to challenge. We’ll lovingly speak God’s truth to each other – the truth of the gospel – and put ourselves in relationships where others can do the same for us.

5. Stranger

This is the last ‘lens’, and perhaps it’s the one that pastorally I can most overlook. We’re all different, and so that means we’re all strange to each other. Sure, we’ll identify with some people more than others, but we’ve all still got a whole inner world known only to us (and – if we’re honest – not even fully known to ourselves). Even the closest friendship or most intimate marriage will always have degrees of ‘strangeness’.

Why’s this important? Because so often we can perceive difference as black and white, right and wrong. I remember spending half a year living in a foreign country with a fellow Brit; we ended up coming up with a catch-phrase for when we came up against cultural differences: “It’s not wrong, it’s just different”.

I first heard this ‘strangeness’ alluded to by John Piper in a passing sentence in his book, This Momentary Marriage. When talking about the need to demonstrate forgiveness and forbearance to each other, he explains:

“…there is going to be conflict based on sin and strangeness (and you won’t be able even to agree with each other about what is simply strange about each other and what is sin)…” [my underlining]

Not everything that winds you up or irks you about someone is sin. We’re all strange – and if you don’t think you’re odd, then just ask someone to live with you for a week. Seeing through this lens will mean we’re more ready to be patient, more willing to understand, and more prepared to hold our own opinions lightly.

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So, how do you understand yourself? How do you understand your neighbour, your spouse, or the person you’ve just met.

Every relationship is a journey of discovery – but as we learn to see another person, I hope these five lenses together give us a biblical perspective that is compassionate, faithful, and nuanced.