Nebuchadnezzar in a Small Town [T, 4-4-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—Nebuchadnezzar in a Small Town [T, 4-4-23]

 

The East Gibson School District board [Gibson County, Indiana] just voted to close the Francisco elementary school. Budget reasons, of course. Not enough kids to justify a school there. Cheaper to bus everybody to Oakland City, five miles away.

My mother graduated from Francisco when they had not only a grade school but a high school. She learned good grammar there. She sang in musicals there. A good school. A progressive school. In fact, she was the first woman in the state of Indiana to graduate high school with her married name on her diploma. That was almost 100 years ago, 1928.

When we moved in 1947 from Indianapolis to the Forsythe community, between Oakland City and Frisco but in the OC school district, Mother mourned the deterioration of her home town. It still had the same population, about 600 people, but only 3 grocery stores, including that of Ted, her oldest brother. No doctors, although there had been 2 when she grew up there. No hotels, but there had been 2 in her youth, basically for salesmen who rode the trains. Only 3 service stations. Only 2 restaurants. Only one barber shop. Only one blacksmith. Only one bank. One hardware store, owned by her youngest brother, John. No passenger trains stopped there anymore.

Then around 1960 the school burned. There was talk of not replacing it, but my uncles, Ted and Johnny, knew that would be the death of the town, so they pitched in and literally built a new one. But even before Uncle Johnny’s own children were through high school, the school was reduced to elementary only. Now it’s not even that.

Many small towns maintain their population, if they are in driving distance of bigger places, because houses are cheap. Frisco still has 600 people, just as it did 100 years ago. But there are no grocery stores. No hardware store. No barber shops or restaurants or service stations.  Now no school.

This is the story of almost every little town in America over the past 100 years. Gone from a community to just a bunch of people who happen to live in the same area. Blame the automobile. Now everyone in a small down drives five miles or thirty miles to the grocery, the doctor, the bank, the barber…to places where there are services, but no community, not for the people who don’t live there. They are just customers, not neighbors.

I have lived through that decline of small-town community. When I went to school in Oakland City, the town had 3200 people. Now only 2249 by census count. The Oakland City schools alone had around 1200 students, with 300 in high school. Today the East Gibson schools—Oakland City, Francisco, and Mackey, which also had a high school in my day--have only 796 students, kindergarten through high school.

Which leaves the church. Small towns still have churches. They are the only possibility for community. Unfortunately, the word “community” requires the word “unity,” and that small town churches do not have. They are divided by secular politics rather than united by sacred mission.

That is sad, but I recall something one of my professors, the famous church historian, Albert Outler, said: “The church has never done the right thing except under pressure from the world.”

In other words, God is at work on the church through the world. That’s a significant Old Testament theme, God using foreign forces like Nebuchadnezzar, to force Israel to be true to its mission.

Maybe God will use the loneliness of small-town Christians to force us back into community. Watch for it…

John Robert McFarland