‘A Sacred Something’ – Religious Experience and the Rural Church

ABSTRACT This paper will seek to present and examine selected accounts from the RERC archive which have ‘rural’ at their heart. This will be done primarily by describing and analysing religious experiences that occur within a rural context or which have ‘rural’ as a key feature. Hand-in-hand with this analysis – and partly as a result of it – will be an application for the rural church to recognise the importance and significance of religious experience. Throughout, the related questions will be addressed: what is it about these experiences that should persuade the rural church to take them seriously and what form should any response(s) to them take? The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research.