KNIGHTSTOWN, Ind. (BP) — William Swallers never intended to be a pastor. He’d never preached a sermon. Never had any reason to attend seminary. At 66, he considers himself an old man.
He was attending Community Baptist Church of Knightstown when Pastor Danny Shelton died of a heart attack after contracting COVID in 2020. With only seven members, the church in the community of about 2,000 residents thought it might have to close.
But then, Swallers felt called to pastor the church, and the congregation agreed. Swallers’ only formal training is a seven-course Next Steps Certificate offered through the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana in concert with the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS).
“God’s been stretching me quite a bit,” said Swallers, who became pastor of the church in January 2021. “It’s all for His glory.”
Community Baptist Church is not unique among Indiana Baptists outside a few metropolitan areas where most of the state’s churches are concentrated. The state’s otherwise rural landscape makes it challenging to attract seminary-trained pastors positioned to adjust to the unique community-driven cultures and essential bivocational lifestyles that will allow them to thrive, Joshua Singleton told Baptist Press.
Singleton is part-time association mission strategist of the East Indiana Baptist Association (EIBA), a group of 11 churches, including Community Baptist, and spanning six counties in far east Indiana. He is also a full-time pastor of Crosspoint Baptist Church in Richmond, where he concurrently leads the student ministry.
“The location of some of those churches creates a little bit of a challenge because they’re not in the middle of a town, a large metropolitan town,” he said. “Over the span of our association there are only about 186,000 people.”
Two-thirds of Indiana’s 430 churches are lumped into three of the state’s 14 associations in urban areas, with the remaining 150 or so churches spread among 11 associations in largely rural counties. The Purdue Extension Center for Rural Development describes Indiana as 44 percent rural and 35 percent rural/urban mixed, with only a fifth of the state decidedly urban.
Most pastors are bivocational. Many don’t work in the towns where they live, making it more difficult for them to build the community-based relationships and trust necessary to grow a church in the small towns where most would serve in Indiana, Singleton said. Plainly, communities are largely family driven. Pastors who live outside the communities they serve are not often well received.
Communication is also difficult, with reasonably priced high-speed internet a rarity, and email thereby inefficient. Singleton uses email, texts, Facebook messenger and phone calls to communicate with pastors and ministers in the EIBA.
“It’s a difficult world,” he told Baptist Press. “People want to be in bigger cities, because there are more people they can share the Gospel with.”
With all of the variables, only half the EIBA churches currently have pastors and some of those are nearing retirement, Singleton said. Three churches have pastoral interims.
Chapelwood Baptist Church of Winchester is on the verge on closing, Singleton said, unable to find a pastor since its founding pastor retired after serving since the early 1970s. The church has about 12 members and has operated with pulpit supply, but has been unable to support an interim. The church reported an average attendance of five in the 2024 Annual Church Profile, and $15,320 in undesignated receipts.
No quick fixes are in sight, but Singleton is working through EIBA, his pastorate Crosspoint Church and the Send Indiana team of the North American Mission Board to establish a residency program to mentor a new supply of pastors for east Indiana. A parsonage at Crosspoint is available to house those enrolled and local churches in the association can provide preaching experience and mentoring.
“There’s big opportunity for those who are looking to answer the call to be in pastoral ministry,” Singleton said. “And people in the smaller communities are more receptive to the Gospel than what we would think.”
He also hopes to plant more churches across the association.
“We’ve got a lot of room for churches,” he said.
Doug Jividen, a North American Mission Board-supplied church planting catalyst for six state associations in northern Indiana where Southern Baptists are few, also sees room for more churches. On staff of the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana (SCBI), his goal is to empower pastors to plant eight – 12 churches in Indiana annually.
Most of the associations he works with don’t have association mission strategists, but are led by nonpaid retirees, pastors or association moderators, making it more difficult for Jividen to connect with pastors across the area he serves. The six associations span nearly 40 counties and comprise 117 churches, including a congregation in southern Michigan.
He’s working to help pastors understand the contexts of planting churches in rural areas, particularly the importance of engaging in the community.
“Rural communities are very much built around social systems,” he said. “Communities often can be very closed. Thus a planter or a pastor that’s coming in has to do things that have community engagement. If a pastor isn’t engaging with the school system, isn’t engaging with the community and local leadership, a pastor could find himself on the outside looking in.
“If they don’t make that transition to become ‘one of them,’ it’s very hard for a church pastor to connect and to grow and to engage.”
Through community engagement, Jividen himself took a church of 20 in Indiana in the mid-1990s and grew it to 300 before transitioning to his current role. He connected with the community by connecting by volunteering to coach the high school soccer team, while his wife built relationships through her job at a balloon boutique downtown.
With a goal of church multiplication, Jividen is not only helping pastors thrive, but must also position churches to become sending churches themselves. He helps discover, develop, and deploy church planters, enrolling men in 12–18-month residency programs focused on skill sets necessary to plant a church, including theological training. After residency, Jividen encourages planters to continue their theological education in a Southern Baptist seminary, perhaps beginning with the First Steps program that was beneficial for Swallers at Community Baptist Church.
There, attendance has grown to about 25 on most Sundays. Swallers doesn’t draw a salary, instead living on his retirement income. He’s now aided in ministry by Brady Cook, who joined the church in 2024 and serves as an unpaid bivocational pastor.
Swallers appreciates the help the SCBI provides nontraditional pastors who aren’t able to devote the time to earning a seminary degree.
Scooter Kellum, SCBI team leader for church and leader mobilization, is committed to helping Swallers and similarly situated pastors, touting the Next Steps Certificate program and other resources such as Small Church USA weekend retreats that include yearlong cohorts with other small church pastors.
“We offer an environment of these churches knowing they’re not alone,” Kellum said. “If you don’t, you’ve got a lot of tired, lonely pastors out on an island all by themselves.”
Through Next Steps, NOBTS sends a professor eight times a year to teach weekend classes that fit into bivocational pastors’ schedules, allowing them to learn new skills including administration. SCBI is reviving Vacation Bible School training after restricting the SCBI staff, providing training and limited supplies for VBS ministry known as a key driver of church growth.
Kellum appreciates the connections the state builds through its associations that results in loving relationships with pastors across the state.
“One of the best things that we can do,” he said, “beyond all of the resources we have to offer, is to just cheer our people on. There are a lot of people in rural settings that are doing a lot of really hard work, while holding down fulltime jobs. And sometimes it’s just good to get a pat on the back and say, ‘Hey, good job.’”
In turn, pastors are grateful.
“We’re getting a lot of excitement,” Kellum said. “But ultimately, what we’ve gotten the most is relationships with our pastors and our people in our churches. That in itself is worth it. They know that we love them, and they love us.”
