Expectations
What’s it going to be like to pastor in the rural areas of North Georgia and Southeast Tennessee? Honestly, I’ve struggled with the answer to that question. I also struggle with the pictures I use on my correspondence and website. It’s easy to portray the area with the usual suspects of poverty; gutted single-wides, chickens rummaging through front yards, toothless grannies, bare-chested and dirty kids that seem to only develop in black and white. Yet, people who have visited know that it’s a beautiful place with lots of attractions geared toward vacationers. The reality is . . . I don’t know what to expect. I do expect it will be complicated.
Blue Ridge, Georgia is a relatively progressive town when in season. The siren call of fall leaves and wineries have attracted the wealth of Atlanta and the heat-adverse of Florida into her arms. They have plundered the mountains for funding their AirBNB’s and vacation homes. Blue Ridge is now home to several fancy restaurants, craft breweries, and a handcrafted bamboo fly rod company with startling prices of $2500.00 minimum for a stick that might catch fish, depending on who wields it. Most places are closed Mondays and Tuesdays, which hints that the town isn’t really ready for what has inevitably arrived.
I suspect that locals are conflicted. They benefit from the service industry of tourism yet cannot afford the land their families once possessed. I spoke to a local pastor whose church is made up primarily of transplants. He confessed that they have struggled to gain traction with locals and the amount of meth addicts, alcoholism, and high suicide rates. I wonder why.
Fifteen minutes to the north of Blue Ridge is McCaysville/Copper Hill. It’s a satellite town in which I intend to minister. Just driving into town speaks volumes of its identity struggle. The Toccoa River splits the town in two. To the north it’s called Copper Hill, TN; a land once stripped bare for its copper and promise of prosperity. The houses are crammed onto a hill overlooking the town. Your nose could touch the road as you climb to visit your neighbor. Cross back south over the Toccoa River and you are back in McCaysville, Georgia. A passenger train revels in the scenery from Blue RIdge to this dual town. Once passengers are given a two hour pass in McCaysville/Copper Hill, I’m not sure what they do. Eat at one of two newer restaurants, drink beer at a new brewery, and then wait restlessly for the train’s exit? There ain’t much there. Again, I expect the locals are conflicted. The poverty seems much more prominent in McCaysville/ Copper Hill.
To the south of Blue Ridge is the seemingly pass-through town of Ellijay, Georgia. It also is a satellite town I plan to frequent and of which I desire to know. It seems a more typical small southern town with a quaint downtown square. I know little of this place but that it’s “on the way to Blue Ridge.” Again, I expect its identity is a mish-mash of personality disorder.
What I do not want to do is develop a crop of churches of just Atlanta transplants and tan Floridians (we need them and they need Jesus too!). I want to ask a lot of questions. I want to hear their cries. I want to listen for the heartache. I want to know what brings joy and laughter. And I want to gently, slowly offer a solace and hope that whispers, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Only the gospel of Jesus can bridge the dividing wall of wealth and poverty; white elitist and the disparaged “hillbilly”; hillbilly and the trail-of-tears Cherokee. Ahhhh . . . there is a bigger history. We are all apart of it. We all have been dispossessed and we have been the dispossessor. We all need rescue from our twisted-up selves and what we communally produce.
Will you help me? Will you help me figure it out. Will you help me ask the right questions and attempt to listen with ears that want to hear what people are truly saying beneath their facades? Will you help me to enter into the mess that we have created and to give Someone else’s Word of hope and rescue?