Do you remember haystacks?
Along with pumpkins, black cats and witches flying on broom sticks, haystacks were the de rigueur for Halloween crayon drawings in 1950s southern rural Appalachia. Haystacks were also high value targets for climbing children; but only once at Grandma Buchanan's. Only once, because when Grandma saw the offence or the evidence of trampled hay, she became scary. No! We did not realize the work it took to rake and pitch the hay up against the pole until it formed a hay stack. No! we did not understand that the cows needed to be able to eat the hay in the winter and they could not do that if it was trampled and rotting on the ground. No! We would never do it again! Who knew haystacks could be such a source of conflict.
The demise of labor intensive haystacks was bemoaned by few. Square bales of hay were a great improvement. It was still sweaty, itchy, work to load the bales on a wagon and then stack them up usually in the loft of a barn.
There was little lament over the gradual disappearance of square bales either. They have been largely replaced by much larger round bales that do not need to be put in the barn nor touched by hands. They are moved by a tractor.
Like haystacks, small rural churches are largely a strategy of the past. After all, they are not efficient, too labor intensive and not a strategic use of dwindling resources. But from the rumbling around the nation from small towns and rural areas, apparently many did not know that, like haystacks, "hayseeds," "hicks" or "hillbillies" could become such a source of fierce conflict -- I say this as one.
Unlike haystacks, the conflict is not simply ignorance about the transgression of trampling on other's hard work. Education is not at the center of the conflict, but ethics are. For the small/rural church, the ethical construct is that small matters, rural matters and neither is subject to devaluation because others are not mindful of the intrinsic worth of simply being.
In contrast, denominational officials are guided by outcome. No doubt, faith must be authenticated by works or outcomes. But must congregations be authenticated by their ability to fund, at least in part, a seminary graduate, to contribute to the upkeep of the ecclesiastical machinery and all of that in addition to providing for their own operations and mission? Is this not an outcome-based ethics of value? It is at least the duty-based ethical construct of obligation.
