Small towns in rural America are big but often overlooked mission fields. Special guest Ty DesEnfants shares his experience planting a church in Wyoming.

0:28 Lee Stephenson, executive director of Church Planting for Converge, introduces Ty DesEnfants, who planted Prairie Hills Community Church in Lusk, Wyoming.

1:00 Ty talks about how God called him to start a church in a small town like Lusk.

3:00 Ty describes Wyoming "as a small town with really long streets." The population of the entire state is less than 600,000. The county Ty lives in has 2000 people. "We’re about 90 miles from the nearest Walmart."

6:05 Lee asks Ty what advice he would give people thinking about planting a rural church.

9:25 Ty talks about where he grew up and why he’s uniquely positioned to pastor a church in Lusk. 

12:25 Ty discusses how the pandemic has affected his church and the adjustments they have made.

13:25 Ty shares about his church’s experience having a drive-in church service for Easter in a snowstorm last year.

16:49 Ty talks about resources for people interested in rural church planting.

Lee Stephenson: Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you to the Unfiltered podcast. We are recording live from Orlando right now. My name is Lee Stephenson. I get the privilege to be the executive director of Church Planting with Converge.

Danny Parmelee: And I’m Danny Parmelee. And I oversee church planting for Converge MidAmerica out of Nashville, Tennessee, but it sure is great to be in some nice sunny weather right now.

Lee Stephenson: And we’re in the middle of break time in one of our assessment centers, having a great time, but we have a special episode today because we’ve got a guest with us, Danny. So this is Ty DesEnfants from Lusk, Wyoming, the church planter of Prairie Hills Community Church, and you’re about five years old at this point. Is that right?

Ty DesEnfants: That’s absolutely right. We’re five years old this last September.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about Lusk and why in the world would you want to plant a church in Lusk, Wyoming?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, you know, the harvest is plentiful.

Ty DesEnfants: That’s absolutely right.

Lee Stephenson: I mean, this is the epitome of rural church planting. And we are in the midst of seeing a level within our country of people exiting the large city and partly because of COVID, people are realizing we can do more things virtually. And they want to get out of the hustle and bustle, moving into more rural corridors around the country, in that there may be few guys out there kind of go, man, I think God’s calling me to do some type of church leadership, whether or not it’s church planting or taking an existing church in that kind of rural community. What are some things that, you know, if you were to give three major tips of advice to those that are thinking of doing rural ministry, or specifically rural church planting? What would you tell them? Like think this, don’t do this, that kind of thing.

Ty DesEnfants: The first message is that it matters. And whether it was intentional or not, the thrust of church planting for the past 50 years has been to urban and suburban areas. Honestly, from a strategic standpoint, there’s a lot of people that live in those areas. And so we need urban and suburban church plants, but not to the exclusion of rural America. And what we’ve seen is since in that strategic move to go where the people are at, to follow the population shift from rural America into urban centers, the strategy, the planning, the strategic thinking has all been based upon, how do we plant churches that are effective in those areas, to the exclusion of the creativity and reaching rural America. And so whether it was planned or not, the message to people about rural ministry has been don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your time, it’s not worth it, go where the people are. And if you don’t have people, then it’s not worth your time. Even, you know, we’re assessing people here, and one of the metrics that we’re assessing is their capacity to lead people, I think that is a great metric we need to make, to measure people’s capacity to lead others. However, a metric that’s not often measured is where has God positioned you uniquely, to be effective for his kingdom. And the reality is I would not be effective in Orlando, I just wouldn’t, in the same way that Lee or Danny or anybody else that’s here at this assessment would not be effective in the little town that I live in. And so, you know, if you’re out there and you’re thinking, man, rural ministry doesn’t matter. Yes, it matters. And it could be that God has uniquely positioned you, what’s the, you know, Paul in a sermon in Acts says, you know, that God has appointed the time and the place where you were born, like, it’s not by accident that you were born in some Podunk town, it could be that the next town over needs you because you could do something there that no one else in the world could do. Because God has positioned you in the time and place that you were born.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, so I have it’s actually kind of a two-part question. First of all, if you can just share a little about where you grew up. So you said that you were kind of uniquely positioned for this, so did you grow up in Wyoming small town? And are you saying that there isn’t a possibility for someone to do cross cultural? Do you understand? So you’re kind of saying like, Hey, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Or is it like you could like, let’s say, You grew up in suburban, whatever, you know, 100,000 people 15 Starbucks on every corner, you know, type of thing. Because maybe there’s even not going to be this appeal or this sexiness to Oh, yeah, I just want to live the rural life. And I’ve seen the paintings just laid back and I’ll have this little country church. So I don’t know I kind of threw a lot at you right there. But I mean, just kind of speak to a little bit of that, or is it only if you grew up in a small town should you consider it?

Lee Stephenson: That’s, I love that picture. And I think that’s important, no matter what culture people are called to plant and it’s never going to hurt you to be a student of that culture. That’s first and foremost. How has the pandemic as a whole affected life, ministry for you, your family in a more rural setting at this point?

Ty DesEnfants: Yeah, I mean, that’s a, it just is the common theme. When you talk with any pastor right now, of course, COVID has affected us. When COVID first hit our community, and we kind of had to change course pretty radically in the course of a week. We decided, man, what’s the only thing we can do? We tried to do the online thing. The problem with doing online stuff in rural America is that the infrastructure for the internet and such is so bad. So you know, my first call, when we decided we were going to do, you know, try and stream something online, was to the internet company to try and upgrade my internet speed to the fastest they had available. And the fastest upload speed you can get in in my town is two megabytes up, which for streaming something live, it’s impossible. And then you add on to that if you don’t live within the city limits. The options if you live in the country are satellite internet, and their download speed is so poor that, you know, they couldn’t watch it. So we tried doing some like prerecorded stuff where we would upload it and then have it available to download so people could download it overnight. Yeah, sometimes, like they would download overnight, and watch it so it wasn’t buffering all the time, or whatever. But it quickly became, man, we’ve got to meet. And so Easter, we had plans, and we had heard just through a Zoom call that Converge Rocky Mountain had put on with a church in Minnesota. We had heard that they were doing drive-in church like radio transmitter. People drive in, in their cars, like a drive-in movie and tune their radio to a certain frequency and you can have church, but everybody stays in their car and it’s all safe and good. So we said, man, we got to figure that out. And so I tried to find a radio transmitter. Of course they were all sold out because everybody was like we got to do drive-in church, but I was able to find something on eBay right and we get it shipped and we plan for an Easter drive-in church service. And man it was like when people are hearing about it. There’s a buzz around town like, oh man, we’re gonna have church again and stuff and then we look at the weather forecast, like leading up to Easter and it’s like there’s gonna be a snowstorm on Easter Sunday. And sure enough, we wake up on Easter Sunday morning and it is flat out snowing like big chicken feathers snowflakes, just, I mean, it’s flat out putting it down. We’re thinking, Oh, nobody’s gonna show up. Nobody’s gonna show up and kind of find out. I mean, this parking lot is just packed full of cars. People are, so I mean, there’s, you could, you can just see people smiling ear to ear as they’re driving in because they’re seeing people again, like they’re gathering and people are honking their horns, you know, like, as a way of saying amen. Amen. Like we agree. And it was just, it was something we’ll never forget. My wife and I are standing up on top of the enclosed trailer that we keep all of our equipment in. And we are freezing our tails. I mean, we’re in our coveralls and we got gloves on. I mean, we’re bundled. Yeah. Because it is, it’s cold. And everybody’s in their cars and can’t even see him it’s snowing so hard. But it was an unforgettable experience. And it’s something honestly, that will be part of the story of Prairie Hills for generations. Just, do you remember? Do you remember the drive-in Easter, you know?

Lee Stephenson: I love it. I love it. And I think it’s just a good reminder to everybody, like, be creative. Think outside the box. We got to do whatever we got to do in order for people to hear the message of Jesus. And I admire your courage to be able to kind of push forward with that. This has been a fun conversation. And I appreciate you taking the time to just kind of continue to enlighten us about rural church ministry. And what resources out there would you recommend for people that just have an interest in being more involved in rural church planting?

Ty DesEnfants: Yeah. So you know, there’s the go-to book that I point people towards is a book called Small Town Jesus by Donnie Griggs. And, man, it paints the picture of why rural ministry matters. In that book, he talks about the population of rural America. And if you define rural America as towns of 20,000 or less, then the population of rural America is bigger than the population of like 90-some countries in the world. It’s still like 30 some million people that live in rural America. And so we have to, we have to look at that and say, this is a largely unreached people group right in the United States of America. And they’re worth reaching. So Small Town Jesus is a great resource. Stephen Witmer is another author you can look up. And let me get the name of his book. I think it’s called Big Things in Small Places or Big Gospel in Small Places or something like that. His name is Stephen Witmer. It’s a brilliant book. It’s more practical in how it’s laid out, gets more into the how-tos of rural ministry, and it’s an excellent resource as well.

Lee Stephenson: That’s fantastic and for all our listeners, I know if you would love to have a conversation with Ty, he would love to be able to connect with you and so reach out to him at Prairie Hills Community Church. He’s a great leader, great visionary and has a great heart to reach those within his community. Thanks for tuning in everyone. This has been the Unfiltered podcast. Until next time, keep it real.