Story by Abby Miss
When Pastor Jay Meadows first arrived at Duke Memorial Baptist Church in the unincorporated community of Justice, N.C., members of his new congregation greeted him with a sign on the parsonage door.
“Welcome to God’s Country,” the sign read.
Two decades later, Meadows has a little experience knowing what God’s Country can look like. After leading rural congregations in Justice, Baxley, Ga. and Canton, N.C., he now serves as the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Mount Airy, N.C.
With a population of approximately 10,000, Mount Airy is the largest town he has ever served. But Meadows didn’t set out to dedicate his life to rural ministry, at least not initially.
Though he grew up in a fairly large town in Georgia, attended Mercer University and Duke Divinity School, and worked as a youth pastor in Durham, N.C., he has always felt called to places with a slower pace, where he could connect with his community, raise a family and still make time for himself in the outdoors.
When given the opportunity to lead a large congregation outside of Atlanta, Meadows turned it down. Just two years after being called to Baxley, he wasn’t willing to pack up and move on.
He always told people he wanted to live somewhere that reminded him of the Andy Griffith Show, where you could walk down the street and know the names of neighbors passing by. He wasn’t aware that Mount Airy was the setting of the popular show before he first visited, but instantly felt at home among the town’s Mayberry charm.
Mount Airy is located in North Carolina’s Surry County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As of July 2025, the county’s population was estimated to be approximately 72,000, per the United States Census Bureau.
Surry County is just one of the 78 rural counties as classified by the NC Rural Center. The Center categorizes a county as rural if its population density is fewer than 250 people per square mile.
In these rural counties, churches are often bastions of the community, connecting its citizens and providing important social functions. However, they also face aging membership and transportation barriers, among other constraints.
Critically, these churches often struggle to recruit and retain ministers, leading to a “drought” among rural pastors. In many of these communities, there’s a persistent disconnect between the number of available ministers and the number of open ministry positions.
Sponsored by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, the NC Baptist Job Board publicly lists three current ministerial openings in Mount Airy and the surrounding area. Haymore Memorial Baptist Church in Mount Airy, Fairview Baptist Church in Dobson and Jessup Grove Baptist Church in Pilot Mountain all have confirmed vacancies for senior or lead pastors.
All three of these churches are located within 14 miles of Mount Airy’s town center.
This cluster of confirmed vacancies only considers Baptist churches across the state and doesn’t indicate that all rural churches are experiencing vacancies, or that no pastors are interested in pursuing careers in rural ministry.
Rather, the shortage of rural pastors speaks to larger issues within the church, Meadows said.
“I think people don’t know what to do with the church, or they don’t want the church to be part of their lives,” he said. “So people are not being called out from the church to serve the church.”
Meadows indicated that, at First Baptist, hiring support staff has been especially difficult. Though the church has historically employed three ordained ministers, bringing a “professional” to a rural congregation has become nearly impossible.
Most of the candidates they’ve interviewed, Meadows said, have taken positions in bigger cities, such as Washington D.C, Atlanta, Charlotte or Raleigh.
Alex Martin, the senior pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Mount Airy, suggested that ordained ministers who attended urban, progressive seminaries might not be interested in pursuing ministry in more conservative, rural communities. He noted that change comes slowly, if at all, in these churches, and that they often lack the “broader cultural opportunities” that can be found in an urban environment.
“I think in a way, that maybe some of the issues are deeper than that,” Martin said. “They’re kind of about cultural divides that just happen to split out that way in terms of the way a lot of communities are structured.”
In the absence of ordained ministers, the church is often staffed by local people. First Baptist’s current minister of music, Cheryl Hicks, worked as a band director and school administrator for 25 years before serving the church in her retirement.
Pastors who are retired, semi-retired, or are approaching retirement are also working in these rural communities, largely because they can afford to. These pastors often make concessions to support smaller churches that might not be able to maintain a full-time professional minister.
“I think the smaller churches that are just holding on by their fingernails are finding that a retired or semi-retired pastor is the way to go,” Beth Brittain, the associate pastor at First Baptist, said.
Meadows said that most rural churches, which lack the budget to pay their staff comfortable salaries, are often apologetic about what they can offer to candidates. He predicts that this will only get worse due to rural healthcare disparities and the rising cost of health insurance.
But money is tight across the board. Churches with aging congregations depend on older people to support the church financially, but an increasing number of these members are relying on social security to make ends meet. Younger families, if they’re coming into the church at all, often aren’t able to contribute as much financially, Meadows said.
Despite these challenges, the goals of ministry for these pastors remain the same. In these tight-knit parishes, service to the community, no matter how small, is a top priority.
“For what it’s worth, in my opinion, we’ve got to get out of the walls of the church and out there,” Brittain said. “Not necessarily preaching with our words, but with our actions. We need to be helping people with what their needs are.”
With this philosophy in mind, every Thursday, First Baptist serves between 350 and 400 meals to community members in need. Brittain says that these evenings are where she often sees ministry take shape.
“Is it going to bring money and members of the church? Probably not, Brittain said. “But last time I read it (the Bible), Jesus worked in small groups.”
