By Violet Hassler, Staff Writer
In nearly 50 years of being a pastor, Bud Ruggia has preached to a congregation 2,500 strong, one of just a dozen and many in between.
There are good days at a small, country church — “everybody in the church knows everyone else” — and there are bad days — “everybody in the church knows everyone else.”
“You can’t hide,” Ruggia said, chuckling. Turning serious, he said the purpose of a small-town church has been a topic of interest and a focus for his sermons at United Church of Christ of Drummond.
“It is one of the things I’ve been struggling with over the years,” he said. And, he believes after four years at his current church he and his congregation have found answers.
“I’ve come to the conclusion ... a country church is a repository of values,” Ruggia said, and those values are needed sorely in today’s world.
Ruggia has turned those values into a theme for his church in the past four years. He believes people are looking for honesty, generosity, freedom, selflessness, integrity — the list goes on — and they are finding those traits in a small church.
These are lessons Potter Com-munity Church pastor Sam Jerome learned firsthand when his church was destroyed last year by a tornado. Not only did his congregation of about 15 members pull together to rebuild but they embraced church communities from as nearby as Orlando, which is about seven miles from the church that sits out in the countryside, to as far as Mississippi.
“Our generation has handed us a strong tradition,” Jerome said, “and we want to see it extend to the next generation.”
That being said, it is not always easy. Ruggia said he has watched one community church in Drum-mond struggle to stay open, and it is a reminder of how stressful membership in a small church can become.
But the benefits outweigh the hardships, and the relationships spun in a tight-knit church rival family.
“I love it,” Ruggia said. “I love pastoring a small, country church.”
He calls his church in Drummond a 15-minute church, as some come from Enid, about a 15-minute drive. He said what families choose to do in those 15 minutes often goes back to the values message he tries to impart to his congregation.
While larger churches have their cells within the church, at a small church there is only one cell. The attitude of “we’re all in this together” doesn’t exist in big cities, but it does in small towns, in small churches.
“I served big churches, little churches and mid-sized churches,” he said.
Nothing can come close to the atmosphere of a country church in a country town, where they all meet, even with other small church members, to praise God.
“We’re all in it together in a little town like this,” he said. “That’s fun.”
