Rural faith communities are shaping hope, healing, and connection in small towns across the country. Their stories — grounded in service, resilience, and relationship — are at the heart of a multi-year project from the Center for Rural Strategies.

Through the Daily Yonder and Rural Assembly, Rural Strategies seeks not just to document how faith congregations can help rural communities but also serve as a connection point for people across the country. Sign up for rural faith news, stories, and events here.

Stories

Through audio storytelling, documentary work, and written stories, Rural Strategies aims to show how rural faith communities can bring people together, serve as anchors in small towns and the countryside, and help drive solutions for rural America’s biggest challenges. The project also aims to convene faith leaders and their congregations — to listen, to learn, and to support relationships within and across communities.

Leaning on faith

The Rural Faith Initiative unfolds against the very real backdrop of violent partisanship and counterfeit theologies, and that’s what makes it essential and important. Hear more from Whitney Kimball Coe, Rural Strategies’ Vice President of National Programs, about our Rural Faith Initiative and how to follow along.

News Stories on Rural Faith in the Daily Yonder

Our correspondents at the Daily Yonder report on how faith communities and rural life intersect. From Q&As with faith leaders to features about finding belonging, explore our reporting on the Daily Yonder website.

Drawing Resilience: A vehicle for people of faith

Nhatt Nichols interviews Richard Witt of Rural and Migrant Ministries, which works with farmworkers and rural families in New York to build community and develop leaders through programs that support advocacy and education.

 Stay Connected

Our Team

Community and Partners

Over the next five years, Rural Strategies will work with faith communities and ecclesial hubs and networks to provide media resources, coaching, and tools that will support the naming and claiming of what is true and essential about rural congregations: They are anchor institutions within their communities. They are creatively finding ways to collaborate with other community entities to serve their neighbors and neighborhoods, and they are committed, through faith, to showing up and staying in.

With the help of our Community Facilitators, we are currently walking with faith leaders in Greene County, PA, and Letcher County, KY, as they engage in dialogues and storytelling to surface opportunities and challenges that face their communities.

Sign up for our newsletter to follow along as we listen together, gather together, pray together, toward working together.

Our Partners

How to Get Involved

If you are interested in getting involved in the work of the Rural Faith Initiative, please reach out to Whitney Kimball Coe, Vice President of National Programs for Rural Strategies.

We’re especially interested to offer media and communications resources, including:

• Storytelling facilitation and coaching

• News reporting

• Multimedia tools and products (from photos to podcasting to audio-visuals)

• Idea generation and narrative brainstorming

• Creative collaboration and steady allyship

 This project is supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, made through its Ministry in Rural Areas and Small Towns Initiative, a national effort to help churches in rural areas and small towns enhance the vitality of their ministries and strengthen the leadership of the pastors and lay leaders who guide them. The Center for Rural Strategies is one of 20 organizations from across the United States receiving grants through the initiative, including colleges and universities, denominational agencies, church networks, and parachurch organizations, among others.