How Great Is That Darkness
Six hours ago I was squeezed into a small, white-washed stairway of stone. I think the headroom was less than five feet. My shoulders touched both side walls. And I was descending, round and round, inside a castle turret. The Bunratty Castle was last used in the late 1600’s by the O’Brien family in Ireland. It’s thought that the child William Penn was sheltered there during a siege. As I descended round and round, I suddenly came down on an even smaller door through the stone in front of me. It felt foreboding. This was the dungeon, one of four in the castle. The dim outside light coming through the stairwell’s narrow firing windows seemed to smack up against a wall of darkness at the mouth of the dungeon. I could sense it dropping away just beyond the door. My iPhone flashlight was utterly futile. My camera flash revealed just enough to make out a floor twenty feet down. Engulfed by stone walls a dozen feet thick, the dungeon was a darkness you could taste.
I’m sure the unlucky prisoner down there was never given a small candle. If he were, wow, would it ever stand out in a darkness like that. It might not illuminate much of the chamber, but it would be spectacularly obvious in that level of darkness!
There are different grades of darkness. Imagine you’re in Boston at midnight and you were given that same small candle. It would stand out a little, sure, but nowhere nearly as much as in that Irish dungeon since there would be an array of other lights in your vicinity.
As leaders within small New England churches, I think we can take both comfort and conviction from this thought. Often at our conventions and conferences, it feels to the pastor of a remote church that there is no resonance for him. It feels like the happening churches get the spotlight. Too many of the remedies and prescriptions offered seem aloof and out-of-touch with our real-world situation in a small town in the sticks. Recently, discussing a remote church in need of revitalization, someone said to me, “I’m not sure a community with such a small population really warrants its own church”(!). Yet he “who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands” says to you, “Little church, out in the woods, I have placed you there as a single small candle in the stark absence of any other light.” (By the way, quite literally, no church has to die! If your church is struggling, I’d love to chat.)
Even New England as a whole is that pitch dark Irish dungeon compared to the South. Take heart, little New England church, your light stands out so much more brightly here than if you’d throw in the towel and go south.
It should bring us conviction too. There are places more pitch black dungeon dark than here. Something Sam Taylor has awakened me to over the last few years is this: just because I have a small, weak, struggling church does not excuse us from taking some of our resources we cannot spare to send light to places yet darker. Or, more accurately, because my church is weak she should commit what she cannot spare to mission. In Ireland, for example, there are 84 towns of 5-10,000 that have never had a church in them. There are 30 towns of 10-25,000 that have never had a church in them. You can drive the Irish countryside for an hour through town after town and never see a church. “If then the light within [those places] is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23). There, my friend, the light given off by the little candle from your New England church will be spectacularly bright.
If your church hasn’t yet partnered with any churches in the IMB’s Europe affinities, would you prayerfully consider it? Contact Sam Taylor, even just to have him pray with you about it. And if it’s Ireland to which the Spirit of the LORD is nudging you, I’d love to talk with you too. (Look me up below). Let that little light shine.
Shawn Keener is the pastor of Brookville Bible Church in Holbrook, MA, a member of the www.revitalizingchurches.com consulting team, and the author of Nimble Church.
