Hinton Rural Life Center Records

Hinton Rural Life Center is named in memory of Georgia Businessman, Harold Hopkins Hinton. Mr. Hinton and his wife Alice had started building a hunting lodge on the hill above their summer home in the North Carolina mountains in 1956 but his unexpected death brought the project to a standstill. The land was sold to Walter and Velma Moore, who donated the partially finished lodge and four acres of land to the Clay County Methodist Church in 1957.  With the help of Alice Hinton and others, the building was completed, furnished, and began its life as a “rural life center under the auspices of the Methodist Church to serve the people of the southeast.”  By the early 1960s, the Center had become incorporated as a non-profit corporation and eventually became the property of the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church. In 1964, the Hinton Rural Life Center was able to hire its first full-time director, Reverend Harold W. McSwain. He came to the Center from his graduate work at Emory University, where he had been exploring a then relatively new concept of ministry, the parish-staff model, which addressed itself to the revitalization of the small-membership church.  The parish-staff approach sought to build a more effective ministry by introducing cooperative processes to existing administrative / service / religious structures.  Proponents of this concept believed that small churches, particularly those in rural areas, would in this way gain access to information, resources, and personnel otherwise unavailable to them.  Harold McSwain continued to be active in his work, both at the Hinton Center and throughout the Southeastern Jurisdiction.  As a leader in this movement, he and Center staff, developed leadership training materials, authored numerous publications, conducted conferences and seminars at the Center, and the established volunteer and youth programs.  From its inception, Hinton Rural Life Center was also a religious retreat center, offering facilities for families and other groups. At the same time the Center was working to develop viable structures for cooperative ministry, it also began to examine the role of the Methodist Church and other churches in the lives of the Appalachian peoples.  Center staff became involved in such groups as the Appalachian Development Committee of the United Methodist Church and the commission on Religion on Appalachia.  Particularly during the McSwain years, the Center sought to mesh its ideas about cooperative ministries with ideas concerning the need for Appalachian community and special interest groups to combine forces in order to meet common needs.  In addition, the Center attempted to communicate to churches that the social and economic needs of Appalachia could also be considered a part of their ministry. The Center’s work was mainly continued by Reverend Doyce Gunter who succeeded Harold McSwain in 1973.  However by 1974, its statement of purpose reflected less specific reference to serving Appalachia, defining its mission in more general terms:               The purpose of Hinton Rural Life Center is to create a conscience and conviction concerning our responsibility to man and to God for the conservation, development, and right use of the total resources of life. The primary objective shall be brought about by the promotion of religious, educational, economic, and cultural projects in the field of urban and rural church work and in community activities which have to do with their religious, educational, economic, and cultural development.  In implementing this purpose, Hinton Rural Life Center is to provide facilities, staff, and other tools through which leadership may be discovered, developed, and deployed; and through which programming can be more effectively and efficiently planned, carried out, and evaluated within and for the local churches, particularly in the rural areas. (By-Laws, 1965 / Hinton Center Newsletter, December 17, 1974.) Throughout the remainder of the1970s and into the 1980s, the Center has continued to define itself as a center for spiritual renewal, and a place where research / resource materials can be found or developed.  The Center has continued to provide consulting services, to coordinate its internal programs with the needs of local churches, to sponsor youth renewal and volunteer work groups, and to define cooperative ministry as a major concern of the Center.