This week I marked my 36th anniversary writing for daily newspapers. My hope is that this struggling newspaper industry can sustain me for four more years, and I can retire about this time on my 40th anniversary in 2012. Meanwhile, I continue to admire strong work done on many fronts in the name of  journalism and information.

One of those noble efforts is “Portraits,” the monthly magazine of Arizona Southern Baptists, who offices are at 2240 N. Hayden Road, Suite 100, Scottsdale. It is a cleanly edited, inviting publication that literally celebrates the work and mission of Baptists across the state. The June edition carries the theme “Ministry beyond the big city,” showcasing ministries in the small communities of Arizona and faith in rural life.

“Rural churches are not second-class citizens in God’s economy,” asserts Steve Bass, the state convention’s executive director. He shares an intimate story about how he had just completed graduate studies in the early 1980s and took a pastorate in Beaver, Okla., on the heels of almost leaving the ministry. He has felt devastated when another church had rejected his candidacy “I was hurt and wondered if I had missed the call of God in my life,” Bass writes. “I gave everything I had that weekend, only to be told I was not God’s man for that church.”

Yet, he took a chance on tiny Beaver, with one grocery store, a Ford dealership, two banks, three doctors, a small hospital and four churches. And what he found was a church predisposed to loving and respecting its pastor “no matter his age.” Bass further found it a place where the deacons were loving and were men who followed the lead of the pastor. Those deacons even gathered together enough money to get him a car (from the town’s lone dealership).

Bass called Beaver “a place where everyone in town thought I was their pastor,” including the town drunk and those not darkening church doors. What Bass underscores is that “I needed Beaver more than they needed me.” The town itself changed his life, the pastor said. “I am convinced I am serving God and his church today because of that rural church.” The experience prompts Bass to say rural churches “produce some of God’s choicest servants.”

American has thousands of rural churches struggling to stay alive. Their dwindling memberships, remoteness and small budgets can make them unattractive to pastors seeking callings, especially young pastors with families to support.

However, more than a few veterans pastors today can look back on taking the chance, getting the experience, even waiting things out in small churches where there was worn linoleum in the fellowship hall, tawdry parsonages, breezes carrying the scent of livestock feed lots, plenty of potlucks, problems fielding a church softball team and lots of empty pews on Sunday mornings.

But the experiences give character to formative years in ministry, priceless stories for sermons for the rest of one’s life and plenty of affirmation coming from folks who often love the dickens out of them,  even when their stays are brief.