Recovering Abundance

Book excerpt: Recovering Abundance: Twelve Practices for Small-Town Leaders invites readers to live a new story--to join a movement of renewal for small towns and rural communities. Andy Stanton-Henry provides twelve civic-spiritual practices, rooted in Jesus's miracle among the multitude, that rural and small-town leaders can use to renew their congregations and communities. Each chapter explores how one practice was demonstrated in the story, has been embodied in small-town and rural leaders and communities, and can be applied today. Through these twelve practices, Stanton-Henry helps readers tune in to an alternative story, one he discovered in his own rural Ohio community. Yes, he saw the commonly lamented decline and devastation that have brought suffering to rural Americans and that seem to foster resentment and despair. However, as he dug deeper into the stories of his neighbors, he began to notice that small towns and rural regions are working. They are working to build inclusive, thriving, local economies, to weave a welcoming social fabric in their region, to cocreate a positive future--following the practices he explores in this book. Recovering Abundance is a new story about the agency and creativity of what Stanton-Henry calls "ordinary leaders," not a story about scarcity and deprivation but one of abundance and generosity.