A new day for the country church

Preface

Tuts little book is in part the result of experiences as a Pastor of Town and Country Churches. A sense of failure, as a young pastor, to lead the Churches to do all that they might have done, more than any sense of success with these Churches, has led to this writing. If I were again a pastor of a country church, I would honestly try to realize as many of the ideas, plans, and suggestions herein as were found practicable on that particular field.

Experience in codperating with Country Churches as a Secretary of Social Service and Rural Community Work with a Home Mission Society, and studies made while Professor of Sociology in a College in a distinctly agricultural State, have given opportunity for wider acquaintance with the Country Life Movement and the Country Church.

While teaching in Institutes and Schools for Pastors, the need of a manual to cover a short and intensive course became very apparent. This book seeks to meet that need, but it also includes materials intended to awaken interest in the Country Church on the part of the general reader and student.

It is my hope that the note of pessimism so often heard in connection with this subject of Country Life and the Country Church, the “sob-stuff’’ of newspaper and address, may give place to a new note of optimism and a social faith in meliorism. The Country Church

v vi PREFACE is going to share in social progress. Better, the Country Chureh will continue to contribute to social progress.

Some pastors may complain that to put into actual practice all the suggestions herein contained is impossible. Granted! But one thing is certain: The members of a Country Church can be led into very many more activities in the name of the Church than is usual—activities which take the place of those they are certain to engage in under other auspices, often less worthy. No church or community is so satisfying to those connected with it as one which fairly exhausts the people’s possible time and energies in satisfying tasks.

Let pastors keep the church busy, and many problems, moral and spiritual, will not need to be solved—they will be left behind.

I am indebted for suggestions and materials to many men who came earlier, and who have worked longer or more exclusively, in this field of interest. Such personal associations as I have had with men like Dr. Warren H. Wilson, Dr. E. de S. Brunner, Dr. H. N. Morse, and more recently with Rev. R. H. Ruff, of the Board of Missions of the M. E. Church, South, have served to stimulate and intensify my interest in the Country Church.

I have tried to keep acquaintance with the literature in the field and rejoice at every evidence of growing scientific interest in the social and religious aspects of the Country Life Movement.

UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND, VA., New Year’s Day, 1925.

Contents

CHAPTER I PAGE A New Day For THE CouNTRY CHURCH ..... . 1 CHAPTER ITI A New Day FoR THE COUNTRY CHURCH (Continued) . . . 10 CHAPTER III THE MINISTER OF THE COUNTRY CHURCH ..... . 23 ‘CHAPTER IV THE MINISTER OF THE COUNTRY CHURCH (Continued) . . 40 CHAPTER V EVANGELISM AND THE COUNTRY CHURCH . .. .. . . 49 ~~ CHAPTER VI EVANGELISM AND THE COUNTRY CHURCH (Continued) . . . 60 CHAPTER VII i OBJECTIVES AND PROGRAM OF THE COUNTRY CHURCH . . . 76 et

CHAPTER VIII OBJECTIVES AND PROGRAM OF THE COUNTRY CHURCH (Con-

ADMINISTRATION, ORGANIZATION, AND FINANCE OF THE COUN- .

CHAPTER I A New Day For tHe Rurat Cuurcu

“And it was evening, and it was morning—day one.” —First Chapter of Genesis.

“Until the day break and the shadows flee away.” —Song of Solomon.

Tuis title sounds a note of hopefulness in a situation which for the most part has been regarded as distressingly discouraging. Like the city slum, and the downtown sections of the big cities, the Country Church is regarded by many as a well-nigh lost home mission field. It is a problem of social conditions, economic change, and readjustment, but it is principally a problem of a lopsided Christianity and a narrow-visioned ecclesiastical policy. In so far as the plight of the Country Church is the result of short-sighted, inadequate leadership, program, and methods, it can measurably be corrected. Christianity has recovered itself in numerous situations in the course of Church history. It must now set itself the task of recovering and rehabilitating itself in rural America.

There is no reason to be hopeless and pessimistic concerning the Country Church. Wherever people make their living, rear families, and lwe out their lwes Christianity, properly interpreted and administered by a serving church, has been and will be a vital factor and a saving force. People do live in the country, in hamlets and villages; they till the soil and produce food and raw materials for industry, and hence to these people the Country Church must deliver the message of Christianity, and for and with them perform its constructive ministry. People make their living and live their life on the land, and the Church must be there with them, performing its blessed function and realizing its beneficent objectives.

What really are the functions of a Country Church —of any church in the life of a people? The functions of a normal church in the life of a community are at least five: *

1. It is the organ of their common worship. No definition of the concept worship ‘could be complete without the idea involved in the word ‘‘common”—or community of worship. Worship to be complete requires comradeship, togetherness, a sharing and expressing together of “like precious faith.” It is well enough to talk about an isolated individual sitting alone in his home or roaming the fields and woodlands and worshiping thus, but any fairly complete insight into human nature reveals the fact that the finest appreciations, inspirations, and helps of life are found in the social context—in the sense that they are mediated to us in the interplay of personality on personality. ‘The

* Suggested by William Adams Brown in ‘‘The Religion of Democracy.’?

A NEW DAY FOR THE RURAL CHURCH 3

Book of Common Prayer” presents an idea bottomed on eternal reality. The individual has no support for faith in a living God in a changing world, save in the witness God has given of Himself in our common humanity.

If the church—the collective religious expression of a people’s aspirations—were abolished in any area of the world, it would be restored and rebuilt or civilization and human progress would perish. The church is not a luxury of civilization—it is a necessity in the expanding moral and spiritual horizon of humanity. The only question to be really faced is: Is the Church as it now exists and seeks to function livingly geared into the total life of the people? Is it adjusted to their economic, intellectual, and moral life?

We are bound to confess that in many local situations in the country the church is belated, is badly led, is giving opportunity for the expression of certain lower elements of human nature; but we at once affirm that this need not be so, and, please God, we are in the process of finding ways by which the Country Church may grip the inner, deeper, profounder phases of human nature and through its worship, led by a godly minister and helpers, bind the hearts of the people back to God. The church has been—imperfectly to be sure —the organ of the people’s common worship in the country. It is that now in multitudes of places. It is bent on ascertaining how more perfectly to be that organ of the life of man expressed in company with others, which gives recognition to ideals, to truth, to duty, to beauty—to God.

Worship is made up of praise which is good opinion vocally expressed. How needful it is to praise Him who is higher, holier, and more loving than we. How satisfying it is to sing our praise and thus express our high opinion together of the God of the fields and flowers, the harvest, the home; of life here and hereafter ; and mingle our voices in mutually confirming faith thus expressed. Analyze a single rural hymn, “The Church in the Wildwood.” What potent memories are awakened! What eternal hopes spring anew in the heart as the thrill and throb of the hopes of the multitudes of others play over our life when we sing this song together! It is the church in the wildwood— mother’s church, neighbors’ church, the community’s church, where we were put in possession of our share of God. Take our great rural national hymn, “America.” It begins with “My country, ’tis of thee,” but proceeds to the socialized conception, “Our fathers’ God, to Thee,” “Great God, our King.”

It is to be deplored that the Country Church has not always been able to bring together all the people of the countryside and bind their hearts together and lift them up to God in hymns of praise.

Worship is made up of prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven. . . . Give us this day our daily bread... . Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive. .. . Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us.”

Yes, we need the church as the organ of our common worship. No institution or activity can permanently set the church aside or take the place it fills in normal, growing, happy human life. Our task is to have the church of the country consider all related conditions and interests and give guidance to the church that it may function properly in worship.

2. The church is the school in which the people are

A NEW DAY FOR THE RURAL CHURCH 5 instructed in the meaning of their religion. In the early centuries of Christianity the Epistles of the New Testament, the Didaché or the Teachings of the Twelve, and the lessons of the Catechumenate were used to inform and instruct the new convert in the elements of his religion—its bearing on thought, life, and conduct.

In the pioneer days of American Christianity, the pulpit and Bible-reading at family altars (an institution which the church greatly encouraged) were practically the only methods of instructing the people. In Country Churches the sermons were long and full of Scripture. We sometimes wonder if we could endure such methods of indoctrinization now. Perhaps we would not; but it is a fact that a great many church leaders and workers in town and city churches spend as many or more hours in the various meetings and activities of the church—Sunday school, morning worship, young people’s organizations—as our fathers spent in hearing sermons or in Bible-readings.

The defect of the early Country Church on the side of constructive effort was its failure to put habit on the side of Christian faith and practice, by arranging for eareful instruction of the young. In the liturgical churches—e. g., the Lutheran Church—this defect was never so marked, and before Sunday schools and organized classes came into being, the pastor’s confirmation class or training class prepared the youth for intelligent entrance upon the fuller opportunities and duties of their religion. It is to be noted that the Country Churches of the Lutheran and other liturgical denominations, which have taken care to instruct the young, have not as a rule gone into a state of decline.

The Country Church through lack of equipment, untrained leadership, and inadequate financial resources has slumped and fallen far behind in many places because the people have not been properly instructed in the meaning of their religion. A new day is dawning, however, and Sunday school, organized class, trained teachers, and sound pedagogical methods are rapidly replacing the laissez favre practice of the old-time Country Church of all denominations.

3. In the life of the people the church is the wmstrument of their moral discipline. Through the Christian centuries, the Church has called men to repentance and has voiced the claims of God on conscience and life. Matured men have winced at the disapproval and censure of the Church, and in penance have sought amendment of life to confirm to the will of the Church. In certain periods the fear of excommunication, with its consequent social ostracism and shutting away from cherished privileges, has acted as a deterrent to hold men. back from anti-social conduct or has brought them back in contrition for some socially hurtful wrongdoing.

Protestantism and the Evangelical faith have not proceeded as a rule on the basis of securing moral discipline through fear of excommunication. Larger freedom has brought needed change in method. Bishops and pastors cannot do in our free democratic communities what Calvin sought to do in Geneva, as he compelled church attendance and enforced certain standards of morals on the ungodly and rebellious. Nevertheless, Evangelical Churches have disciplined the morals of our communities and have often been a vitalizing conscience for approved high types of conduct.

It is at this point perhaps that the Country Church is in greatest difficulty and its influence languishes.

A NEW DAY FOR THE RURAL CHURCH 7

Not that the Country Church has not been and is still a strong moral force. It could be said that the prohibition movement is an achievement of the Country Churches of America. The church has helped shape and direct public opinion. It has banished drunkenness from its membership and is well on the way toward making a sober nation—not by excommunication, but by quickening the public conscience.

Many local churches in the country have through fear or truculence on the part of their leadership become divided in moral sentiment and have tolerated many forms of iniquity on the part of members which have been a reproach and a weakness to the Church. Many over-zealous ministers, with too narrow sympathies and appreciation of how normal life is lived, have raised false issues with young people and have failed to discipline properly the recreational and play life, and have lost the loyalty and sympathy of many high-minded people.

Yet the Church can never cease to be a challenge to wickedness in the community, and a disciplinarian of the life of its own people by teaching standards of life and conduct which are noble and worthy. To be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves,” is the need. In fact, as wise as seven serpents, and to think of the dove as a belligerent species, has often been the need of the country minister and church in some morally complicated situation.

4, The Church is the agency through which the people combine for common service. It would seem that in our emphasis on preaching as a “service” and singing and prayer as “services,” we have lost the art of real service in the Country Church. “Behold how these Christians love one another’ was the observation of early opponents to the spread of the new religion of Christianity. The Church had no better apologetic than the good it was doing to all men, especially to those of the household of faith. Caring for the sick and needy, various philanthropies and charities, gave outlet to the wonderful dynamic released by the spirit of Christ in the Church.

In the pioneer days of rural America practically all neighborly service was the by-product of the teaching of the Church, and even to-day in surveys of community activities in all parts of the country it has been revealed that seventy-five per cent of all those who serve on committees and commissions doing public service without remuneration are members of Evangelical Churches. But we will discuss this more at length in the chapter dealing with the program of the Country Church, and will set forth its principle and practice in discussing the minister of the Country Church.

A Roman Catholic priest of the open country, catching the spirit of the new day in rural America and sensing the need for sound principles of procedure in making the Church effective, said that there are three things which he stresses: “recreation, codperation, and catechetical instruction.” Ah, there you have it! A hand on the young people to help and guide, public welfare through working together, and knowledge of the implications of our faith. The Church is our agency through which we combine for common service.

5. The Church is the means through which the tenets of our religion are propagated. This means Evangelism and Missions. These two which God has joined together should never be put asunder. The

A NEW DAY FOR THE RURAL CHURCH 9

Country Church in America inherited a tradition of Evangelism from the early itinerant preachers of Methodism and the aggressive propaganda of the Baptists. Its early development followed upon the wonderful influence of the Evangelical Revival and the rise of modern missions. The Church in America was born in a revival and was early taught to help send the Gospel to the “uttermost part.”

In the story of the leavening of the nation, which is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Christianity, we see the Churches of the Eastern seaboard sending out new members and evangelistic preachers to carry the gospel to the regions beyond. There was a prophetic dread on the part of our early American Church fathers of having a godless civilization planted west of the Alleghanies. Home Missions was the answer. And America is so largely Christian because these early Country Churches had religion to spare. The urge in the heart of a genuine disciple of Christ finds outlet and opportunity for expression in seeking the lost and in combining to bring the gospel to those who know not Christ.

This spirit of Evangelism often found vent in high emotionalism, and sometimes under the insistence of an untrained but powerful leadership, overemphasized a single type of experience. The new day for the Country Church is dawning because sound principles of evangelism and truly scientific missions are utilizing this fine fervor and feeling, generated by the love of Christ in the hearts of believers.

CHAPTER II A New Day ror THE Country Cuurcnu (Continued)

Wuat, briefly, has been the history of the Church in rural America ?

The story is one of lights and shades, of achievements and defeats. Our discussion of the present plight of the Country Church will reproduce in broad outline the generalizations which some of those most thoroughly acquainted with the field have made.

The Country Church in America has gone through three stages, and has reached a fourth stage, or is now lingering behind in one of the three early stages having failed to reach the fourth stage.

The following are the four stages:

1. The first stage ts that of pioneer struggle seeking a foothold m the life of a new settlement. It is remarkable with what unanimity new settlements in America, as if under the wise guidance of some unseen spiritual administrator, almost immediately founded the Church and the school, twin institutions of the higher life and culture.

The struggle for a place in the sun made by settlers and homesteaders has been reflected in their heroic struggle together to build a church. One could hardly distinguish or discriminate as to the strength of the motives leading to better social life or those leading to doing the will of God, in the sacrifices the early settlers made to organize a Church and build a place of wor- . ship. The social motive they would doubtless disclaim, , for those were days in America most certainly of pro- | nounced individualism. The Church building was not an elegant or ornate affair—simply a “meeting-house,” a place to meet God and to meet one another, and in their own thought principally the former. The pioneer farmer was solitary. In the nature of the case, it was so, and the controlling idea and policy of the surveys of land, and of homesteading, are largely to blame. That the American farmer has ever been slow to combine with his fellows and slow to learn the value of codperation is not to be attributed to any bias of human nature in the farmer as such, except that the selective process in settling America may have made it easier for the solitary minded to settle on the land, and the socially minded to found the towns and cities.

However, the pioneer Church stressed individualism and individual salvation, and seldom if ever rose to a complete sense of the Church as a social institution. Of course the by-products of that age of well-nigh absolute individualism in religion—of high-wrought evangelism when the idea was to get the soul saved— were many and important. Rigid and austere morals, together with diligence in work, were the implications of the preaching and teaching of the Church of the pioneer day. The tradition of those days is still upon us, and one of the hardest things to do in these days is to establish the idea of the Church as a social institution, intimately bound up with the economic, educational, and social welfare of the community, dependent upon factors operating in these fields, and in turn affecting these areas of life and interest.

The pioneer days have left us many Churches substantially unchanged. There are Country Churches in Virginia and the Carolinas, for example, where the social economy is largely rural, which have had a continued, flourishing history of a century and a half. Indigenous to the life of fairly homogeneous populations, some of these Churches have maintained a ministry remarkably unchanged in emphasis, through the decades. They have slowly adopted some ideas and methods introduced by general workers, whose suggestions came out of the experience of town and city Churches of a later date. The same permanence and slow changing methods is seen in the history of Churches of the Middle West which have remained dominantly agricultural in interest and outlook.

Some Mission Boards and general agencies of Church extension have followed with financial assistance and oversight the founding of Churches in newer communities throughout the century and a half of our life as a nation. Even to-day occasional pioneer communities are appearing in hitherto unsettled or sparsely settled areas of the Great West, and manifest the same struggle of the Church to secure a foothold. Recently it was the writer’s privilege to visit a neighborhood in the open country of North Dakota, where a little group of his fellow religionists were eager to secure a Church building, having only recently organized their Church of some twenty members in a settlement then only six years old and twenty-five miles away from the railroad. The Home Mission Board was engaging to assist financially in providing this building, and the willingness on the part of the people to sacrifice out of their meager economic margins to have a Church were all but pathetic. Here was a pioneer church, contemporary with our day, reproducing many of the features of the early pioneer days of the now old settled States, with of course the modifying influences of some of the experiences in Church life, which lie between then and now.

2. The period of growth and prosperity. With the subduing of the land and the exploiting of the soil in many cases, came a measure of economic prosperity to the sons of the pioneers. A new Church building reflecting the added prosperity took the place of the first building.

This second Church building marked as a rule the coming of the farm family church. It was customary for entire families to attend and sit in the family pew and a great part of the simple social life of the community centered in and around the church. It was a period of a high degree of community homogeneity and practical equality. Of course certain farmers came to be large landowners and wealthier than the rest, but little class cleavage was manifested, and such is the case even now in vast areas of rural America. Neighborliness and exchange of work between farmsteads was the rule, and this period marks the golden epoch in American agricultural life. In some parts of the country and among the Scandinavians and German immigrants of the Northwest this type of church is by far most frequently found, save as overchurching and city drift have depleted memberships and prevented or removed church prosperity. The program of the Country Church of this stage or period was nearly always one preaching service a Sunday, with a feeble attempt at a Bible School—no prayer-meeting, or, if in a village, a small prayer or midweek service, little or no attention to work with and for age and sex groups. An annual series of revival services or protracted meeting which was the usual method of recruiting and an occasional social, constituted the entire program of the church, apart from the every Sunday or less frequent preaching service.

Yet this church, which played an important part in the life of the people, and pastoral visitation, which was expected and for the most part welcomed, constituted the major contacts of the religious leader with his people.

When cliques or social cleavage through groups of families, providing for their social life apart from the community, arose, the cleavage often registered in the life of the church, or in the community, as a divisive influence. The church could seldom overcome such disrupting influences and multitudes of additional churches originated in some split or division between families of a community, and community-mindedness was a rare phenomenon of the farmer of this stage, and for that matter is all too little a force and factor in any part of the country even now.

Some outstanding preachers and revivalists developed under the conditions just described, and a good preacher and a tolerable pastor or home-to-home visitor, or a tolerable preacher and a good pastoral visitant, were the qualifications for success on the part of the minister. Seldom did the pastor dream of organizing his forces beyond the simplest sort of organization for purposes of administering the communion and passing upon the qualifications of a prospective new member, or one who was under the displeasure or threatened discipline of the Church.

8. The period of struggle agamst rural folk depletion or rural tardiness and backwardness. Of course many a farmers’ church has been lost through debt or bad financing in a period of unstable prices, when debts incurred, for a more pretentious building than interest and zeal to pay could be found, brought a burden too great. Many rural communities have never developed normally. Isolated and far from profitable markets, keen competition arose with farming lands opened up, in the newly settled West, and kept them from ever getting far removed from the privations and inadequate institutional life of the pioneer days. Always struggling to maintain a church, the loss of building by decay or accident of fire meant a crushing burden, often the collapse of the entire enterprise.

Older communities, with fairly well developed and prosperous agricultural life in the East, have been depleted through removal of the earlier stock by migration westward, and often large and once prosperous churches have been allowed to fall into disrepair and disuse, or bitter struggle to get out from under debts has led to utter discouragement and even abandonment of the church. All over New England a half century ago, and even more recently in many parts of New York and Ohio, migration and removal have left churches which were formerly strong and flourishing in a hopeless and struggling condition. City drift has had its effect .as well.

Typical cases can be cited. In a certain community in Vermont in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century a Baptist church flourished with three or four hundred members. A Methodist Church only less strong but self-sustaining shared the community

(township) with the Baptist Church. According to the records the population of the township was just twice as large in 1845 as in 1920. Three-fourths of a century had passed and the population had been reduced to half the number, and it would not be far from the truth to say that the quality of life and energy of those remaining is reduced in proportion. Lacking in initiative and capacity, this area has suffered by folk depletion until leadership is scarce; the following is suspicious and unwilling. Both of these churches were in run-down condition in 1920 and had only a name to live. The writer was present with the officials of the Baptist and Methodist denominations when, by vote of the people of both depleted and struggling churches and agreement of denominational authorities, the M. E. Church withdrew from the community and turned the religious work over to the Baptists. The reverse of this process had been carried through a week before in another community, the Baptist Church, nearly dead, voluntarily closing the work and withdrawing to give place to the Methodist Church. Thus “reciprocal exchange” has been resorted to as an attempted solution of the condition which rural depletion has brought about. Whatever method may ultimately be found to meet the situation, the fact is evident in many older sections of the country, of rural decay and consequent decadence of many Country Churches.

4. The period of the survival of the fittest and rural readjustment. We are in this period in much of the older section of the country, and the mortality of Country Churches has caused great consternation and alarm, so much so that some less well-informed ecclesiastics are in a veritable panic, seeking what they call a solution of the Country Church Problem. There are dead and dying churches by the score all over the country. There are Country Churches of distinction doing a marvelous work, and in between the two extremes of churches— those which have outlived their usefulness and have only a name to live and the outstanding churches which have found a way of assured success and acceptable service— are myriads of churches which need redirection, readqustment, and rehabilitation, and can be brought to a higher level of service and greater stability and promise.