The Challenge of the Country Part 20

3. _Community Socialization_

Prosperous and happy rural communities have outgrown the selfish independence of the pioneer past and have learned how to live together effectively in a socially cooperative way. But a great many rural places are still scourged by grudges and feuds and other evidences of individualism gone to seed. This accounts also for many small churches, the result of church quarrels. Country churches cannot succeed until the people learn how to live together peaceably and effectively, to cooperate in many details of the community life, to utilize the various social means for community welfare. To be sure the church can greatly help in this socializing process. It can lead in making the local life cooperative, educationally, agriculturally, socially, morally; and, if it succeeds, the church will be the first to reap the rewards of a finer comrades.h.i.+p.

4. _A Community-Serving Spirit_

Many a country church is dying from sheer selfishness. The same of course is true in the city. Many people doubtless think the church exists for the benefit of its members only. If this were true, the church would be simply a club. Selfishness is slow suicide for an individual. It is equally so for a church. A self-serving spirit in a church is contrary to the spirit of Jesus and it kills the church life. It is a bad thing for a church to have the reputation for working constantly just to keep its head above water, struggling to keep alive, just to go through the motions of religious activity, yet making no progress. Many a church is dying simply for lack of a good reason for being. Can you not hear the voice of the Master saying, "The church that would save its life shall lose it; but the church that is willing to lose its life, for my sake, the same shall save it"?

Let the church adjust its program to a larger radius. Let it be a _community-wide_ program. If there are other churches, it will of course not invade the homes of families under their care. But aside from this, it will plan its work to reach out to all neglected individuals as well as to serve all social and moral interests of the community as a whole. Let its motto be "We seek not yours but you." The church will not be able to save the community until it proves its willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the community.

5. _A Broad Vision of Service and Program of Usefulness_

This next factor making for efficiency is very closely related to the last. _A useful country church will not die._ A church that is really serving its community in vital ways will so win the appreciation of the people that they will support it because they love it. Some churches and ministers seem too proud to include in their program anything but preaching, praying, hymn-singing, with an occasional funeral, wedding and baked-bean supper to break the monotony. In a social age like this, with multiplying human needs, such a church is on the way to death. The church must recognize its responsibility, as its Master recognized it, to meet all the human needs of its people. Many country communities with meager social equipment, often with manifold human needs absolutely unmet, demand the broadest kind of brotherly service on the part of the church, for their mutual good. The church need not do everything itself as an inst.i.tution. Its great work will ever be the work of inspiration. But where there are serious gaps in the social structure, the church must somehow fill the gaps. It must do the work or get it done.

It rejoices us to find churches all along the country-side to-day that have welcomed this great opportunity for broad usefulness, and have gained a new vitality and an increasing success by facing all the needs of the community and broadening their vision and program of service accordingly.

6. _United Christian Forces in the Community_

We are confronted now by one of the most serious factors in our problem.

The pitiable sub-division of rural Christendom into petty little struggling, competing churches makes religion a laughing-stock and a failure. We are saddened by it. By and by we shall get so ashamed of it that we will stop it! Many men of leaders.h.i.+p and influence are working on the problem and we can see improvement in many directions.

Wasteful sectarianism is a sin in the city; but it is a crime in the country. It is a city luxury which may be justified perhaps where there is a wealth of people; but it is as out of place among the farms as sheet asphalt pavements or pink satin dancing pumps. Sectarianism is not religion. It is merely selfishness in religion. A sincere country Christian will be willing to sacrifice his sectarian preference, as a city luxury which the country cannot afford.

The great Puritan movement against conformity to an established church settled forever the great principle that any company of earnest Christians have a right to form a church _when conditions justify it_. But we have seen in this country, as nowhere else in the world, the absurd extremes of this great liberty. Sects have been formed to maintain the wickedness of b.u.t.tons and the piety of hooks and eyes; and for many another tenet almost as petty. Churches of "Come-Outers," "Heavenly Recruits" and "The Hephzibah Faith" appeal to the fancy of theological epicures. Colonies of "Zionites" and "The Holy Ghost and Us Society" have been established, mainly for the exploiting of some shrewd fanatic and his pious fraud.

With 188 sects now in America, we have come to the point when sensible people have a right to insist that an unnecessary church is a curse to a community. Its influence is sadly divisive. Its maintenance is a needless tax. It embodies, not true piety, but pharisaic selfishness. The community has a right to keep it out for self-protection. The social consciousness has now developed enough to teach us that the right of individuals to form endless churches must be curtailed, for the general welfare, exactly as other individual rights, such as carrying pistols, public expectoration, working young children, and riding bicycles on city sidewalks, have to be surrendered in a social age. Thus social cooperation is displacing individualism and religious cranks should not be immune to the law of progress. To insist upon individual rights to form a new sect or to burden an overchurched community with a needless church is a grave social injustice and a sin against the Kingdom of G.o.d.

A small village in South Dakota applied the referendum to the question whether they should have a Methodist or a Congregational church. The plan was proposed by the village Board of Trade. It was entered into by the whole community as a sensible proposition and the losers accepted the verdict, under pressure of public opinion. The village has but one church to-day. When denominational leaders agree to force no church upon such a community as this, and to help support no church with home missionary funds where it is neither needed nor wanted, the cause of religion in small communities will be greatly advanced. Fortunately some of the larger churches are frankly accepting this principle and are working with a large measure of comity and denominational reciprocity.

_The New Christian Statesmans.h.i.+p_

For many years the leading churches in Maine have had an "Interdenominational Comity Commission" which has kept out unnecessary churches, and has reduced the number in overchurched communities by a sort of denominational reciprocity. Other states in New England and the West have adopted the plan, and now the Home Mission Council has recently organized on a national scale, in the interest of all Protestant churches.

The Interdenominational Commission of North Dakota includes the Baptist, Congregational, Methodist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches of the state. This simple statement of their working agreement is an excellent one:

(1) No community in which the concurring denominations have a claim should be entered by any other denomination through its official agencies without conference with the denominations having such claim.

(2) A feeble church should be revived if possible rather than a new one established to become its rival.

(3) The preference of a community should always be regarded in determining what denomination should occupy the field.

Such a plan wins our respect. We may have faith that the next few years will see much progress in reducing the disgrace of unholy compet.i.tion between Christian churches that ought to be working together.

May denominational reciprocity soon relieve our country communities of their unnecessary churches which are simply a burdensome tax and a hindrance. Local churches often would unite if the outside subsidy were withdrawn which prolongs their separate existence. Church union is a question, not of mechanics, but of biology. It is a matter of _life_. It is useless to unite churches forcibly which have not been _growing together_. They would fall apart next week! But they are doubly certain to grow together if encouraged from their denominational headquarters.

And by and by, through the new Christian statesmans.h.i.+p of denominational reciprocity, we shall have a Baptist village, and a Methodist village, and a Congregational village, all contiguous, and with united Christian forces in each community. It will be a great boon to the Kingdom of G.o.d,--and it will not even disturb the equilibrium of the denominational year books!

Blessed is the rural community that has but one church. But where there are several, let them work together as closely as possible, presenting a united front against the forces of evil in an aggressive campaign for righteousness. Local church federations, and towns.h.i.+p or county ministers'

unions greatly help to develop a spirit of unity and really good results.

A local federation of men's church brotherhoods, uniting all the churchmen of a towns.h.i.+p, is a splendid thing. It affects the whole church and community life. It speedily puts friendliness in the place of suspicion, and enthusiastic cooperation in place of jealous rivalry.

7. _A Broad Christian Gospel, in Place of Sectarian Preaching_

One of the signs of a decadent church is excessive emphasis upon sectarian trifles. When adult Sunday school cla.s.ses have not studied the lesson for the day they fall back on denominational hobbies! A holy zeal for righteousness costs something. The selfish zeal for one's sect is cheap.

There is little of this now in the cities; but the country is scourged by petty sectarian teaching both in the pulpit and in the Sunday school; and the country is very tired of it. Ordinary mortals are simply bored by it and will no longer come to hear it.

People are still hungry for the real gospel. The great affirmations of religion: The priceless value of human life, the reality of G.o.d our loving Father, the immortality of the soul, the law of the harvest, the gospel of a Saviour, et cetera, still challenge the attention and win the hearts of men. Let us emphasize the great Christian fundamentals on which most Christian people heartily agree. Let us add to these high teachings of universal Christianity the simple social teachings of Jesus, his every day practical teachings for human life in mutual relations, and we shall have a winning message for the sensible minds and hearts of country people.

8. _A Loyal Country Ministry, Adequately Trained and Supported_

This is one of the ultimate factors in our problem, perhaps the most difficult of all. Leaders.h.i.+p is always of utmost importance in social problems. A splendid leader often brings real success out of serious difficulties. There are hundreds of such splendid leaders in country parsonages to-day, and they deserve all the high appreciation and cordial recognition they have won. But when we consider our 70,000 rural ministers as a body, we find three things to be true: They are miserably paid. They are usually untrained. Their pastorates are too short to be really successful. The churches are of course more to blame for this condition than the ministers.

We must have a permanently loyal country ministry for life. Making the country ministry simply the stepping stone to the city church has been a most unfortunate custom even up to the present day. The country ministry must be recognized as a specialized ministry, fully as honorable as the city ministry, demanding just as fine and strong a man,--possibly even more of a man, for many a minister has succeeded in the city after failing in the country. The country minister must somehow get a vision of his great task as a community builder, like Johann Friedrich Oberlin, that greatest of country pastors. He must find an all-absorbing life-mission claiming all his powers and demanding his consecration as thoroughly and enthusiastically as the call to the foreign mission field. Then let him _go into it for life_, determined to do his part, a whole man's part, in redeeming country life and making it, what it normally is, the best life in all the world to live. Staying year after year in the same parish is the secret of success in the case of most of the conspicuously successful country pastors. Only thus can a man really become the parson of the village, a person of dominant influence in all the affairs of the people.

This ideal suggestion of long country pastorates meets with two objections. Laymen are saying, "How can you expect us to keep a minister after he has said all he knows?" And some of the ministers will say, "How can you expect us to stay, on less than a living wage?" At present both objections are perfectly valid. Too many ministers are untrained men, and therefore fail to succeed for more than a year or two. And certainly an underpaid minister cannot be blamed for taking his family where he can support them respectably.

As near as can be determined, about 20% of rural ministers the country over (including all denominations) are educated men; though probably not over 10% of them have had a full professional training.[34] They are about as successful as any other professional man can be who lacks his special training for his life work. There is a great demand for _trained_ ministers. The writer receives very many more requests from churches in a year than he can furnish with men. Yet the theological seminaries are training few men for the rural churches. Most of the graduates go either to the cities or the villages, where there is a living wage. Dr. Warren H.

Wilson figures that a country minister with a wife and three children, in order to educate his family, keep a team and provide $100 annual payment for insurance for his old age, must have at least $1,400 salary. There are ministers who are able to do this on less,--but not very much less. There certainly ought to be a _minimum_ wage of $800 and a parsonage, or $1,000 cash, for every minister. A church paying less than this is simply stealing from the minister's family. Churches unable to pay this minimum living wage ought to unite with a neighboring church or close their doors, except for itinerant preaching.[35]

In several denominations the plan of maintaining a minimum salary for their ministers is being attempted. We have s.p.a.ce for a single ill.u.s.tration. The East Ohio Conference, Cleveland District, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, under the direction of Rev. N. W. Stroup, as district superintendent, has succeeded in raising the minimum to $750. It was estimated in advance that $2,500 would have to be raised by the stronger churches in the district to accomplish this result; but in the very first year only $1,000 of this sum was actually required. As soon as the movement was made public, many of the weaker churches developed courage and grit enough to raise their own pastor's salary to a respectable figure, and maintained their self-respect. Other churches are expected to do the same next year.

At the writer's urgent suggestion, in a public address last fall, a Michigan church, paying its minister only $350 a year, raised the salary to $800 and secured a bright young college graduate as pastor. They now report that it is just as easy to finance the church on the present self-respecting basis as it was to run a cheap church last year!

9. _A Liberal Financial Policy_

This reminds us very forcibly that one factor essential to country church success is a liberal financial policy. In the smaller country churches we seldom find any business policy, and no plan at all for the future. The most common method is the annual subscription paper, with special subscriptions for repairs or emergencies. The motive is apparently strict economy rather than efficiency. It never pays to run a cheap church, for it cheapens the whole enterprise. More and more the weekly-payment pledge system is coming into use and with it a careful planning of the budget at the beginning of the year, guided by an earnest purpose to keep the church business-like, the minister promptly paid, the property well in repair and the enterprise spiritually successful. Often the new consecration of the pocket-book has been the first symptom of a thorough-going revival.

10. _Adequate Equipment_

A large proportion of country churches are simply one-room buildings. This explains many failures. In order to serve the community at all adequately, the church must have social rooms for a variety of neighborhood purposes, and it must make provision for its Sunday school. About four-fifths of the boys and girls in the Sunday schools of America live in the rural districts. They should be given good rooms. Without an effective building for social and educational purposes,--a parish house or at least a vestry,--the country church is seriously handicapped. With a good equipment the church often becomes the social center for the whole neighborhood.

11. _A Masculine Lay Leaders.h.i.+p Developed and Trained_

It takes more than a minister to make a church successful. The King's Business requires MEN. Women are usually active and loyal. The men are often just as _loyal_ but less active because of lack of opportunity. The most enthusiastic meetings the writer has attended for months were in a rural county in Michigan, a county without a trolley. The meetings were held for three days under the auspices of the Men and Religion Forward Movement and all the forty-five Protestant churches of the county were represented by ministers and laymen. The laymen outnumbered the ministers about ten to one and they showed the keenest interest in the proposition to make the work of religion in their county a man's job.

Those men caught the vision of service, and every month during the winter, meetings led by laymen were held in every school house of that county, carrying the five-fold message of the great Men and Religion Movement into every rural neighborhood; the messages of personal evangelism, of definite Bible study, of world-wide missions, of social service to better their community, and constructive personal work to save their boys. This is a program of religious work for MEN. Only men can do it; but men _can_ do it, with a little training and wise leaders.h.i.+p. The results no man can foretell. But it must result in great blessing for the men and for their communities, and new efficiency and appreciation for their country churches.

12. _A Community Survey to Discover Resources and Community Needs_

Without multiplying further these factors which make for efficiency, we mention but one more. Until recently country churches have been conducted on the principle that "human nature is the same everywhere," and "one country village is like all the rest." But scientific agriculture has suggested to us that we should make a scientific approach to our church problem as well as to our soil problem. Country communities are _not_ all alike,--far from it. Social, economic, moral, educational, political, personal conditions vary greatly in different localities. Churches miss their aim unless they study minutely these conditions. There is in progress now a religious survey of the entire state of Ohio. Quite a number of counties in Pennsylvania, New York, Missouri, Indiana and elsewhere have been carefully studied for religious purposes. Valuable reports of these studies are available as guides for similar work elsewhere. The best of this work has been done by the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions under Dr. W. H. Wilson's direction.