Spirituality in the countryside


This spirituality of Christians in rural areas includes God’s care for trees, birds, animals and insects. So knowledge and love for the countryside’s seasonal cycles is profoundly linked to spirituality. Walking about and noticing the environment are ways in which God attracts people’s attention. Jesus says that God knows when every sparrow falls, but who notices when sparrows are disappearing altogether from our woodlands and gardens?


There can be an intense connectedness in rural communities between the needs of the land and spirituality. The Bible tells of the need to lose oneself in praise of God’s goodness, but also to recognise brokenness, hardship and loss. Both of these can be features of rural spirituality which have something to teach the comfortable church. Harvest can be a time of the spirituality of the fields and field-workers, where thanksgiving is not just a sop, but a gathering up of all the land has to offer under human nurture in its due season. Yet also, when farming and fishing fail, animals die and people lose their livelihood, prayers acknowledging that loss and spurring Christian action have a prophetic element that can lead to new hope. This reflection and action in response to God’s world is truly missionary.


But rural spirituality is often less clerical and ‘churchy’. There can be a strong spiritual life being nurtured well beyond the walls of the church and this can be an important means of witness to others even if it does not come ‘by the book’.


An elderly farm worker in Oxfordshire only ever used to come to Book of Common Prayer Evensong. When the vicar asked why he never came to Holy Communion, the farm worker said that when he had finished his work on Sunday and cleaned up he went to have a meal with a widowed friend in the village and to share with her the joys and tribulations of the farm’s work during the week. For him, he said, that meal was as spiritually nurturing as coming to the morning service. The vicar said that clearly it could not be the same, but the man replied ‘for me, it is the same’.


Society often has criteria for success which spill over into notions of church. Dwindling congregations in cold churches are seen as evidence of decline and failure, but Jesus himself was out in the countryside eating and drinking, healing and loving, saving the lost and meeting with God in a silent wilderness. In rural communities that hospitality, hard work and healing ministry is so often evidence of God at work through his people.


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