THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN to address a massive reality and an urgent need. More than three billion people around the world today—nearly half the world’s population—live in rural areas. Many others live in small, forgotten towns. And many of these people do not know Jesus. Their communities are often remote and underresourced. It can be difficult to go to such humble places, and difficult to stay. But if these billions of souls are to be reached with the gospel, we must go. In this book I’ll make the case that the gospel isn’t just the message we take to small places; it’s our motivation for going to them in the first place and our means of fruitful ministry once we get there. We’ll discuss these big realities soon enough; for now I’ll begin (appropriately enough) with something quite small—the story of my own awakening to the needs and opportunities of small places.

I grew up in Monson, Maine (population 700), on the shores of Lake Hebron. Monson wasn’t just small—it was remote. I rode a school bus half an hour each way to middle school and high school. The nearest mall and cinema were over an hour away. We lived, quite literally, on the edge of the wilderness. The Appalachian Trail passed through town, and between Monson and the northern end of the Trail lay the 100-Mile Wilderness. That meant all the hikers preparing for the seven-day trek north rested and resupplied in Monson. Because our neighbor ran the main hiker hostel in town, I grew up meeting larger-than-life personalities: people like Tuba Man, who walked the entire trail carrying his supplies in the bell of his instrument. Though the pungent odor of hikers permeated the air throughout the summer months, we were thankful for the income they generated for the Monson economy. We needed all the help we could get. Monson had a general store, an elementary school, a post office, a couple of churches, a penny-candy store and antiques seller, a small restaurant, a pizza place, a town museum, a laundromat, a gas station, a volunteer fire department, and a public library. That was about it.

My father pastored one of Monson’s two churches. He and my mother had moved to Maine before starting a family, attracted by its beauty and isolation and eager to do ministry. My father took a three-church parish and for years preached every Sunday morning in three churches in three towns. The church in our hometown, the Monson Community Church, met in a white-steepled building with beautiful stained-glass windows. Attendance swelled to fifty in the summer thanks to an influx of hikers and the seasonal migratory patterns of retirees. There wasn’t much turnover in the town or church. I grew up surrounded by the same church members who had changed my diaper.

There was a lot to like about Monson. Norm’s Store offered an enticing selection of penny candy. Lake Hebron was a good place to swim and canoe. The surrounding woods were a delight to explore, and every winter we cut a Christmas tree from the hill overlooking the town. My brothers and I claimed the street in front of our house as a playground, stepping off only for the occasional passing car (mildly annoyed that the driver had the audacity to make us move). There were colorful characters like the dog catcher who styled himself as a police officer and the town manager who always had a cigar in the corner of his mouth. If you kept your ears open, you’d hear marvelous stories. Two local teen boys made a practice of switching lanes whenever they met each other driving opposite directions on the road. One particular day, one boy switched lanes and the other didn’t. They collided head-on, but both walked away unharmed.

Somewhere along the way I began to grow restless. No one ever told me Monson was too small, too backwater, too isolated. No one ever openly encouraged me to leave. But at some point in my teen years I knew I would. Success, in my view, looked like getting away. As high school graduation neared, I poured over promotional material from colleges and developed an unofficial success ranking in my own mind. Classmates who stayed local came in at the bottom; those accepted at in-state universities were slightly higher, bettered by those who made it to a college further away in New England. The real successes were those who moved to a different part of the country altogether. In fact, I came to view my own success in life as directly proportional to the distance from home I moved and the size of the place where I lived. The further away and bigger the better.

The most noteworthy feature of this attitude was that it wasn’t all that noteworthy. Somehow, without explicit prompting, I had bought into a culturally prevalent disdain for small places and the view that leaving was the trajectory of the bright and promising. This cultural narrative, developed and promoted by people I did not know, in places I had never been, was powerful enough to blind me to the treasures of the place I had known and experienced all my life.

I soon began to make good on my aspiration to get away. I attended college in suburban Wheaton, Illinois; lived for two years in downtown Minneapolis; and then pursued graduate studies on the North Shore of Boston and in Cambridge, England. I lived far from home in well-known, wealthy, historic places. I attended large urban and suburban churches very unlike the tiny rural church of my childhood. I was drawn to the excitement, energy, and resources of these churches, to the well-known and skilled preachers who filled their pulpits, to the energetic college students and educated young professionals who filled their buildings. These churches were admired and emulated by others. They had big budgets, big buildings, and lots of events. I enjoyed being at the center of things. In fact, I began to take pride in it. The important places where I was living made me feel important. Throughout my twenties, as I studied for the ministry, I dreamed of pastoring a large city-center church. My résumé—ministry experience with college students and young professionals and advanced degrees in New Testament studies—seemed to point in that direction.

But life is full of surprising turns. For more than a decade now I have been, as my father was before me, the pastor of a small church in a small place. There have been seasons of heartache, fear, longing, and pain—but I have loved it.

My church, Pepperell Christian Fellowship, is a nondenominational church on Main Street in the town of Pepperell, Massachusetts, an hour northwest of Boston and just minutes from the New Hampshire border. You’ve probably never heard of Pepperell. It’s not a place people travel to so much as one they travel through. It’s a former mill town of twelve thousand people with a rural vibe. There are abundant horse farms, numerous fruit and vegetable stands, excellent fly fishing, and no stop lights. Each year in the Fourth of July parade a fleet of gleaming, refurbished tractors chugs up Main Street. One summer not long ago, a moose ambled through town (that was, admittedly, unusual!). When I step outside my front door at night, it’s dark and quiet, and I can see the stars. Few cars drive past. Once, on my way back across the street from our mailbox late at night, I lay down in the middle of the road just to see what it would feel like.

As a small-church, small-town pastor, I do some things that high-profile pastors of big churches in big places probably don’t do. I once disposed of a decaying squirrel that had crawled into our old education building and then died. (Seminary did not prepare me for that.) My church recruits a snow-shoveling team to clear the steps and decks during the long New England winters; I’m an able-bodied adult and I live near the church, so I’m on that team. Sometimes when I’m moving tables or chairs, hanging a sign on Main Street, or doing some other mundane task with my friend and fellow pastor Jeff, we’ll jokingly identify the nature of what we’re doing with a social media hashtag. #SmallTownPastor!

The truth is that before coming to Pepperell, I wasn’t trying to get to a small town. I hadn’t experienced a dramatic change in my understanding of ministry. I hadn’t suddenly felt a pressing burden for small places. On the contrary, it was God’s clear, unexpected call to one particular small-town church that has slowly, sometimes painfully, led to a change in my understanding of ministry and place and to a passion for seeing small places reached with the gospel.

A decade in Pepperell has led me to rethink, refeel, and reimagine some things. It has caused me to reexamine the Bible, seeking to root my views, feelings, and aspirations in the gospel rather than in what I’ve absorbed from popular culture. It’s forced me to reckon with personal pride and ambition as well as my long-time acceptance of some questionable understandings of city and country.

I’ve also realized that in going from big to small I’ve been swimming against not just the current of my own aspirations but that of evangelicalism, which seems to be increasingly prioritizing city ministry. In the past several decades, evangelicals have responded to the massive needs and opportunities created by a major shift of worldwide populations into urban areas.1 In the 1970s the Southern Baptist Convention focused more intently on planting urban and ethnic churches and saw a major increase in the number of those churches, from one thousand congregations among ethnic groups in 1970 to 2,074 in 1980.2 Throughout the 1980s the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization sponsored numerous consultations in urban centers...