Why Chester?
I’m from right outside Charlotte, North Carolina. I grew up there, went away to college, and moved back. For the vast majority of my life, I lived in a neighborhood with 4000 people in it and was within driving distance of at least 2.5 million people. There were at least three churches within walking distance of my house, and a few dozen churches in my town.
Chester, Vermont has right around 3000 people in the entire town. I literally had more people in my neighborhood growing up than there are in entire town we moved to.
In the Charlotte area, there is somewhere around 1000 churches representing a wide variety of denominations, traditions, style, and cultures. There are mega-churches where tens of thousands of people attend every Sunday next to 200-year-old Presbyterian churches with less than 25 weekly attendees. While there are a lot of non-Christians (a number that grows every year) there is undoubtedly a Christian culture to Charlotte. For instance, most places, if they’re even open on Sundays, don’t open after 12pm on Sundays. Speaking from personal experience, it’s more than fair to say that the majority of people in Charlotte know about Jesus, even if they don’t follow Him.
The greater Chester area is different. The everyday, ordinary Vermonter within a thirty-minute radius of Chester doesn’t know Jesus. Many haven’t even heard of Jesus aside from Fox News or holiday seasons. And it’s not that they don’t know Jesus because they’ve outright rejected Him – they don’t know Jesus because Christianity just isn’t a part of everyday life here.
There’s a historical root to this that can easily go overlooked. Chester, Vermont was started in the mid-seventeenth century by New Hampshire residents moving westward into the state. In that time period, New Hampshire town charters required each town to have a church – so the first church in town was started sometime around 1763 and would eventually become the Congregational Church of Chester, VT (the church we moved up here to replant). After the American Revolution, a spiritual revolution began in New England that led people out of Jesus-centered churches and into Unitarian and other non-traditional churches. By the era of the Civil War, many people didn’t attend any church at all. This was especially true in rural Vermont, where the population of Christian churches plummeted in the nineteenth century.
From this vantage point, Chester is not just post-Christian, it’s generationally post-Christian. In Charlotte, most people have a grandparent or relative who, at the very least, used to go to church. For a lot of people here in town, you have to go back generations to find a family member who was a practicing Baptist, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, or even Catholic. Following Jesus just isn’t and hasn’t been part of the culture.
To describe the general attitude toward Christianity as apathetic would be a misstatement because most people just don’t even think about Christianity at all. One of the more interesting things we’ve experienced here in town is that it’s not that people openly reject Christianity like a lot of people do in Charlotte – Christianity is just kind of seen alongside the other ancient religions. And the idea of Christianity that is perhaps widely known isn’t Jesus-centered Christianity – it’s a form of religiosity married with conservative ethics and politics.
So, when people ask, “Why did you move to the middle of nowhere in Vermont?” the answer is easy: because the Bible calls us to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. In our case, Chester, Vermont is the end of the earth the Lord has called us to. We have no idea what the next few years look like, what kind of church we will plant, or where the Lord is leading us. All we know is that the Lord has called us here for a purpose, and that purpose is simple: to make His name known in a largely secluded area of the world that doesn’t know Jesus. We aren’t just rural church planters – we’re missionaries in an area we already speak the language.
