How A Small Nebraska Church Thrives Without A Preacher
HASTINGS, Neb. — “A loss is not the end. Don’t make it one,” proclaimed the Hastings Church of Christ marquee sign.
Across the parking lot, a second sign listed Russ Dudrey as the church’s minister. But Dudrey, the preacher for nearly 15 years, left the southern Nebraska congregation almost two years ago to accept an adjunct teaching position in Missouri.
The elders of the Hastings church — about 40 miles north of the Kansas state line — posted ads to fill the position.
They contacted preaching schools in Colorado and Texas.
They reached out to Christian universities.
Few candidates applied. Even fewer had ties to Churches of Christ.
“Before Russ came … I’m guessing we had at least 30 applicants,” elder Everett Hinton said. “Times have changed so much now.”
And it’s not a matter of money.
“We’re very well situated financially,” Hinton added. “The reason we don’t have a full-time preacher is because we can’t find one, not because we can’t afford one.”
The congregation has relied on York University — located about 60 miles away and associated with Churches of Christ — to supply speakers on Sunday.
Garrett Best, chair of York’s Bible and Ministry department, is one of several faculty on rotation to make the two-hour round trip.
“Their church is really the archetype of Midwestern churches,” said Best, minister for the Lifewalk Church of Christ in York. “They had 125 people 15 years ago, and they have just declined since.”
“That’s just been the trajectory of a lot of churches in our part of the country,” he said of Hastings’ difficulty hiring a new minister after Dudrey’s departure.
‘Family Focus’
On a recent Sunday, believers crowded into a classroom in the Hastings church’s fellowship hall at the corner of Home Street and North Laird Avenue.
Bulletins on the table, titled “Family Focus,” called the Hastings Church of Christ “a place to call home.”
Alongside prayer requests and wedding anniversaries was a birth announcement of a member’s great-granddaughter, who weighed 6 pounds, 6 ounces.
DudLee Brennfoerder, a member of 32 years and a deacon, held his youngest granddaughter during the Bible class prayer. Brennfoerder and his family are just one of several who drive about 40 miles to the Hastings church each Sunday.
“Davenport (Church of Christ) is closer, but there’s not very many there,” Brennfoerder said. “And when our kids were younger, we started coming here.”
But the youth population at the Hastings church, once vibrant, has dwindled.
North Plains Leadership Training for Christ plaques gather dust on a storage room shelf.
“When we arrived, the church was running buses back in those days,” recalled Hinton, who joined the congregation in 1976 with his wife, Ann. “It had two buses going. I don’t know how many kids we brought in, but our Sunday morning attendance would be 140 or something like that, and I think half of that was kids.”
The bus ministry was discontinued in the late 1980s. These days the congregation averages 55 on Sunday morning.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a small church, relative to what’s around,” Hinton said. “We’re a good-sized place, because if you go to Nelson, Davenport, Gothenburg, Seward, Columbus — there are quite a few churches around here — there is just not much there anymore, very few people.”
While a few younger families do attend the Hastings church, the elder is conscious of the aging majority.
“We have a really good core of people — getting older — but a number of people that are really solid, really dependable good workers,” he added.
One such person is Paula Witt, who jokingly described herself as a “victim of a door knocking campaign” in her early 20s. Witt became a part of the Hastings church 43 years ago with her husband when they moved to this Nebraska town of about 25,000 people.
“It’s a real family,” Witt said. “Nebraska is such that I think everybody knows everybody, and there’s a connection to things, especially in the church.”
While the Hastings congregation’s former minister has yet to be replaced, their Christian family is doing all right, Witt added.
“We’ve stayed stable,” Witt said. “The men do the preaching, and then what they’re doing is tapping York University, and York is sending preachers over.
“I think most of us are pretty happy with that,” she added. “We get a variety of teaching styles and preaching styles, and we get a variety of topics, which I think we all really enjoy. From my perspective, I would like to know who’s coming when, because this one is doing a series on prophets and this one is doing a series on something else, so your chance to prepare for classes is a lot more challenging.”
The Hastings Church of Christ worships on a recent Sunday. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
Small, rural and overlooked
For York faculty, providing preaching requires sacrifices elsewhere.
“As it’s been so far, York — it’s almost like the dam that keeps getting more holes, and water keeps coming out,” said Best, who only preached for his congregation once during February due to his speaking schedule at churches without a minister.
“We’ve just been trying to stick our fingers in and hold back as much as we can,” he added. “We have a group of people here at York that are just constantly out visiting these churches.”
It was York University’s outreach that caught Mike Cope’s attention. Cope happened to read a 2024 Christian Chronicle feature on York’s Equip Conference, which focused on the theme “Hope for Churches.”
Cope, Pepperdine University’s director of ministry outreach, oversees a $7.5 million grant that the Malibu, California-based university recently received from Lilly Endowment Inc. for ministry in rural areas and small towns.
“When you look at where Churches of Christ and the schools associated with Churches of Christ are located, most of them are in the five states where apparently almost 60 percent of our members in the United States are: Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma,” Cope said. “Those are critical. Those are important. But here’s York out here, around all of the Plains states, and surrounded by rural and small-town churches.”
Through its Equip and Empower Program, Pepperdine will distribute the grant money through partnerships with other universities, ministries and organizations to update data, provide leadership training and encourage churches in rural areas and small towns.
York University will receive $940,000 over five years from Pepperdine for outreach into its surrounding communities.
While the grant partnerships are aimed at areas with a population of less than 20,000 or over 30 minutes from a city, Cope said the parameters were situational.
“There are areas that are still rural even though the population may be bigger,” Cope said. “For example, we were talking about places in Nebraska that technically have over 20,000 people, but it still feels rural. The surrounding is rural. The churches have a foot in both worlds.”
York plans to use the grant money to open the ministry center, strengthen the university’s Equip conference and provide free coaching to ministers for small or rural churches, Best said.
“The primary thing that we’re going to use the grant money for is to open a new center and hire someone to come in who can, in a more strategic way, start working with churches on a full-time basis,” Best said. The university recently announced the hiring of Anessa Westbrook and Scott Laird as co-executive directors of the ministry center.
Other grant partners include the Siburt Institute for Church Ministry at Abilene Christian University in Texas and a network of universities, like York, that are associated with Churches of Christ.
“Too often these churches have been overlooked, and partly that’s distance,” Cope said. “They’ve been a long ways from some of the larger gatherings of Churches of Christ, so to have the resources to go to them or to invite them onto the York campus, to know that there are people specifically there to bless them, to encourage them, to hold up their hands — that’s what I hope this could do.”
Future, opportunity and possibility
But while the Hastings church waits — on resources and coaching from York, on a minister, on the Lord — the members of the modest church are doing their best to pour into the community.
A thank-you letter from Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Effort to the elders of the Hastings Church of Christ for donations in 2024 hung on the bulletin board in the hall.
The church mission budget report hung nearby, noting that it had $18,500 for 2025.
“Hastings does a really good job in serving the community,” said Matt Eldred, who intermittently attends the Hastings church with his wife, Becky. “They have a food pantry. They have a fellowship hall that is used by the community, whether it’s homeless outreach or addiction recovery.
“And it’s even happened in the absence of a preacher or a leader,” he added. “That really, to me, tells the strength of a church that they have.”
The “Little Free Pantry” is the newest addition to the church’s community outreach, posted beside the street for easy access to pedestrians and drivers.
Food items — like fruit cups, chicken noodle soup, garbanzo beans and tuna — lined the shelves.
The congregation also helps new mothers with infant supplies.
“One of our members is an administrator at the hospital now, and she said about half of the mothers were on Medicaid, or something like that,” Hinton said. “So we’re providing a little kit that has a couple of days worth of stuff until they kind of get set up with their other aid.”
The congregation packed similar boxes for new mothers in the African nation of Malawi, hoping to give every new life an opportunity from the beginning.
“There’s something just so special about what’s happening here,” Becky Eldred said. “There’s a sense of energy in the future and possibility that I love every single time we’re able to come and worship in this church.”
This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.
Audrey Jackson, a 2021 journalism graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, is The Christian Chronicle’s managing editor.