Rural and Small-Town Ministry (D.Min.)

Program Overview

The Doctor of Ministry in Rural and Small-Town Ministry is for pastors who serve where everyone knows everyone, where the congregation is older than the pastor's parents, and where the nearest colleague in ministry may be an hour's drive away. Rural ministry is not urban ministry with fewer people in it. It runs on kinship, memory, land, and a pace of trust that cannot be accelerated, and the leadership habits taught in seminaries built for metropolitan churches often fail there. The program takes rural congregational life seriously as a theological subject. Students study the small church as an ecclesial body with its own strengths — intergenerational presence, informal care networks, deep local knowledge — and its own difficulties: bivocational strain, aging membership, out-migration of the young, single-family power dynamics, and the pastor's exposure in a community with no anonymity. Coursework addresses agricultural and extractive economies, rural poverty and addiction, land and place as theological categories, preaching to a congregation that has heard the same texts for fifty years, the ethics of pastoral care where the elder's daughter is also the church treasurer, and cooperative ministry across parishes and denominations. The applied doctoral project addresses a real problem in the student's own setting and leaves something behind: a revitalized ministry, a shared-pastor arrangement, a community partnership, a discipleship pathway the congregation can actually sustain. Graduates serve as long-tenured rural pastors, regional denominational leaders, rural ministry trainers, and advocates for the small congregation within structures that habitually overlook it.

Core Courses

• RUR 801 — Theology of Place, Land, and Community (6 credits)
• RUR 812 — The Small Congregation as a Body (6 credits)
• RUR 824 — Rural Economies, Health, and Poverty (6 credits)
• RUR 836 — Preaching and Teaching in Long Memory (6 credits)
• RUR 848 — Pastoral Boundaries in a Small Place (5 credits)
• RUR 860 — Applied Research Design for Rural Ministry (4 credits)
• RUR 899 — Doctoral Ministry Project in a Rural Setting (24 credits)

Admission Requirements

• Master's degree in divinity, ministry, theology, or a closely related field
• Three or more years of pastoral, chaplaincy, or ministry leadership experience
• Statement of purpose describing the ministry setting and the problem you intend to address
• Endorsement from a church, denomination, or ministry organization
• Current resume or ministry profile
• Official transcripts from prior institutions when available