The rural church movement

Front matter

Class BVG^ S, p cs a

Book

Copyrights?

CHAPTER II The Rural-Mindedness of the Prophets and of

Jesus 33

Other Social Movements with a Scriptural Background 33

The Rural Survey Outlined by Moses 36

The Rural Survey and Program of Jesus 39

Illustrations of the Rural-Mindedness of the Prophets

and of Jesus 42

The Rural-Mindedness of the Prophets 43

The Rural-Mindedness of Jesus 46

CHAPTER III The Spiritual Conquest of the Germanic Peoples a

Rural Achievement 49

The Pre-Reformation Period 50

The Lutheran Reformation 56

The Modern Rural Movement in Germany 59

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV page

The Rural Church and the Pioneer Period in

America 61

The Character of the Pioneer Period 62

The Character and Function of the Pioneer Preacher

and the Pioneer Church 63

Application of Pioneer Principles to Present Needs . . 66

The Basis of Appeal 68

The Church Harmonized with Known Conditions .... 69

CHAPTER V The Period o^ Rural Church Decline 71

Typical Facts of the Church's Decline 72

The Causes of Decline in the Rural Church 76

Deductions from these Facts and Causes 80

CHAPTER VI Awakening of Interest in the Country Church. ... 83

Economic Facts the Dynamic of the Movement 85

Leaders of the Rural Life Movement 86

The National Social Consciousness Awakened to the Importance of Conservation of the Religious Resources of Country Life 89

Specific Surveys of Rural Regions 92

Other Factors in the Rural Awakening 94

CHAPTER VII The Social Center Parish Plan 97

The Plan 99

Its Value as a Socializing Agency 103

How the Plan Can Be Worked 105

CHAPTER VIII The Social Function of the Rural Sunday School. 108

The Social Conditions Affecting the Sunday School. . 109

Other Social Conditions Affecting the Sunday School. 113

The Social and Political Value of the Sunday School. 116

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IX page

Some Practical Things a Rural Bible Class Can Do. . 123

Organize itself as a real working force; survey the community; study economic facts; look after public schools; study problem of public health; study the liquor traffic; study the normal factors of success; study wholesome play and recreation; make the Bible a more real book; note and provide against plant pests and soul pests; become a force in teaching patriotism.

Preface

The writer believes there is no field for life investment in the real issues of the kingdom of God on earth so promising of results to the man who wants to deal in "big futures" as that of the church in the open country, because it contains one half the population of our great country; and, without intending a reflection upon any other part of the national household, he thinks, the better half. Believing the problem of spiritual leadership to be the most important factor in the country-life problem, I have treated the subject of the open country's call for such in the front of the work; and as the home missions activities of the churches are also vitally involved, I have placed emphasis upon a suggested home missions policy at the close of the work.

The idea of putting the other chapters in the logical order of a more or less historical treatment of the country church as a movement was first suggested to me

PREFACE

by Mr. Albert E. Roberts, international secretary of the County Work Department of the Young Men's Christian Association, who asked me to give a course of lectures at the Silver Bay Summer School for Leadership last summer. The splendid reaction of the men at Silver Bay, of a favorable character, and a like response of the class in Rural Leadership at Drew during the winter, and the encouragement of men like Mr. Henry Israel, editor of Rural Manhood, and of Professor Harold W. Foght, chief of field service in rural education, United States Bureau of Education, and also the many inquiries which come to my desk from young ministers in the open country, have been the deciding factors in giving this volume to the public when there are already so many good things written on the subject of the country church.

My main purpose has been to select out of the history of the movement those outstanding facts and methods that have been of value and apply them to the conditions in rural life the church is now facing, showing those to be adapted to 10

PREFACE

new plans, and those, because no longer useful, to be discarded.

The author is not unmindful of the splendid successes being won by men in some of the country churches, the record of which has appeared in the leading periodicals of the religious press. It is with the hope that the entire Rural Church movement will become so thoroughly organized on an intelligent cooperative basis in social sympathy, that all the legitimate church enterprises in the open country may be likewise successful, that these chapters are written and published in usable form both as a text for the class and as a volume for the general reader.

Edwin L. Earp.

Madison, New Jersey.

Chapter I The Open Country's Call For Spiritual Leadership 1

The report of the Commission on Country Life appointed by President Roosevelt during the last year of his administration lifted the vast rural domain of the United States like a new continent into the consciousness of the American people. Growing out of the disclosures of this commission and the findings of other leaders in rural life through surveys in different regions, we have begun to talk and act in a constructive way concerning the reclaiming of soils, reforestation of denuded areas, prevention of floods, and utilization of wasted water power, and also regaining for this vast resource field its priority of leadership. In the open country has been developed in the past the splendid heroic individuality that has produced the religious, moral, economic, and political

1 Compare my article in The Bible Magazine for April, 1914.

leadership of all the ages, while at the same time it is here we discover to-day the greatest national waste of resources natural, human, and spiritual. In other words, we discover among other pressing needs of country life that of leadership; and no call of the open country in this regard is more urgent than that of spiritual leadership to make our new rural civilization Christian. And, furthermore, I do not believe there is a more important field open to trained men and women to-day than that of leadership in our vast rural domain which in more than a material sense is the resource field of the nation's life. There is no part of our national domain, not excepting the congested quarters of our great cities, that needs better trained spiritual leaders than that of the open country.

As space permits we will treat of (1) The Open Country, (2) The Call for Leadership, (3) The Kind of Leadership Required, (4) Factors that Make Such Leaders, (5) Life Investment in the Open Country.

The Open Country

Since we are dealing with people, and not merely with land, we consider that part of the population as distinctly rural which is grouped in villages or towns not to exceed twenty-five hundred in number, and that part of the national domain where farmers and other country folk live in houses more or less isolated from each other and where distances must be traveled to reach the school, the church, and the store.

In the United States the open country includes over one half of the population, and in only six of the forty-eight States was there a decrease in rural population during the last decade covered by the thirteenth census, while eight increased in rural population over 50 per cent; six from 30 to 50; two from 20 to 30; ten from 10 to 20 per cent; and only sixteen increased less than 10 per cent. The value of farm property for the same period increased over 100^ per cent, and aggregates more than forty billions of dollars.

The open country not only includes this vast population and aggregate of 15 wealth, but also includes all kinds of climate and many varieties of soil and degrees of fertility. One must travel far to get the proper perspective of the vast reaches of the open country as well as the great contrasts of land area and soil fertility. For example, there is quite a contrast between the washed-out mountain country of Virginia and East Tennessee, where a traveler in questioning a native by the roadside, leaning against a remnant of a worm-fence, as to why he didn't speak louder, got the reply, "The land is so poor down here a fellow can't raise his voice," and the rich prairie land of central Kansas, where it is said a settler from New England couldn't raise pumpkins because the vines grew so fast they wore the blossoms off before the young pumpkins could get a fair start.

The Call for Leadership

This call reaches us from many angles of need. To illustrate: Why are we discussing so much in these days the problem of the rural church? Because in many sections of our country we find the rural field one of the most difficult mission fields of the world to cultivate because it is a lost home field. When one returns to his home country in the rural sections of the Eastern and Southern States and in some sections of the Middle West, what does he discover? He finds the splendid old circuit system broken up and the fires of religious fervor gone out upon many abandoned church and family altars; and the message of the minister in many instances is as ineffective to meet the exigencies of the situation as is the mummery of an Indian medicine man to cure a case of appendicitis.

Why is this so? Because of population change through population movement, while there has been little, if any, change in methods of church work in these sections to meet the changing needs of these rural communities. I could illustrate by giving incidents gathered from surveys made in Maryland, Tennessee, Indiana, and Missouri, recently published, also from observations made by social experts in New England and New Jersey, and the Southern coast and Gulf States. But I prefer to 17 give a few facts discovered in a casual way by an investigator while visiting a year or so ago a fairly prosperous farming section of one of our Eastern States:

A farmer had committed suicide, isolation and lack of income and worrying over small debts he was then unable to pay being the causes.

Another farmer in debt, his wife demented, and his farm advertised to be sold for taxes.

A farmer's wife, with family of five — two grown sons, two grown daughters, and a little girl of eight; a hard-working husband with little initiative for new things; this woman bitter in soul, though patient and loyal, because at the age when burdens should have been lightened, she was compelled to drudge harder than ever with the cooking, housecleaning, washing, and dairy work. Oldest daughter teaching school and sending no part of her income to help lighten her mother's burden.

Fifteen boys from twelve to twenty years of age playing craps in the light of a lantern on the porch of the village store and post office, while there was a vacant hall over the store not in use, though offered by the owner free to the public; and a church on the hill open only an hour or so on Sunday afternoon, when it didn't rain too hard.

Another farmer's wife told a distressing story about her pastor: how he came to their home so intoxicated that he could with difficulty say grace at the table, and after supper went to bed, taking her husband's overcoat with him by mistake, while in the pocket of his coat left in the hallway they discovered a flask of whisky. And she confessed they didn't know how to get rid of the minister, for there was no one willing to take the lead in informing the bishop.

In the entire community this social expert found no organization or movement or association of any kind to help either of these distressing cases. Yet similar facts could be duplicated in many rural communities throughout the open country.

What can we do about it? Show them

a better way by developing among them

leaders in community building. The open

country's call is for leadership to meet the needs which constitute the call for Christian men and women to invest life in these fields of social service.

I have not time to emphasize the call from the viewpoint of the increasing death rate in rural life as compared with cities; the need for training in sanitation and hygiene and eugenics in rural life, as well as in city life.

The Kind of Leadership Required

It goes without argument that the leadership required in the open country must be essentially rural-minded. If we hope to socialize these isolated population groups in the country districts, it must be done by a native socialized leadership. In certain cases, however, a young man or woman brought up in the city, if trained in rural economics and sociology, and possessing tact, will succeed in winning the confidence of the people of the country quite as well as one raised in the open country. What is essential is a proper training and a right spirit. We mean by a leader not merely the man who is ahead of those who are following, for that may 20 be true and yet the group be getting nowhere, or may be headed for no definite goal, but we mean, rather, a man who has experience and vision so that he can see the needs of the people and show them a better way. He must be also a man of practical skill and untiring zeal stimulated by a constructive imagination and the dynamic sense of human worth; one who actually gets people to do something for their own betterment as well as for the uplift of the whole community.

It is, of course, necessary to keep in mind the different vocations in which rural leadership is especially needed: as, for example, in the church, in the school, the rural Sunday school, the Young Men's Christian Association, and the Young Women's Christian Association, which is doing such splendid work of leadership among the girls and young women in the open country; also leadership in the Grange, farmers' clubs, agricultural leagues, farm bureaus, and all other forms of organized life now taking shape in the open country for the cooperative action of the whole community for the welfare of the people as 21 a whole, as well as for the individual in special need.

Young men and women who feel specially called to Christian service in the open country must be definitely trained in schools that have placed special emphasis upon rural science, or in colleges of agriculture whose curricula have been broadened to include courses in rural sociology and religious social engineering, and they must be urged to volunteer for service in the rural field as in other fields of missionary enterprise.

In case they go to the theological schools for graduate study, adequate provision must be made for courses that will train them for the country church as a lifework rather than away from the open country, as has been the case too often hitherto. The commission referred to above in the summary of its report has well said: "Most of the new leaders must be farmers who can find a satisfying business career on the farm, but who will throw themselves into the service of upbuilding the community. A new race of teachers is also to appear in the country. A new rural clergy is to be trained. These leaders will see the great underlying problem of country life, and together they will work, each in his own field, for the one goal of a new and permanent rural civilization. . . . It is to be hoped that many young men and women, fresh from our schools and institutions of learning, and quick with ambition and trained intelligence, will feel a new and strong call to service." 1

Factors that Make Such Leaders

When we analyze the character of any great spiritual leader in the modern Rural Life movement, we find the factors that make him such a leader few and simple, and that they were evident in each stage of his development as a real leader. They may be stated and explained as follows:

1. A Chance to Express the Adolescent Impulse to Achieve. I have in mind now a young man from one of the Southern States who is acknowledged to be a leader in modern rural life work who started his career at the age of sixteen by being given a chance to teach a Sunday school

J See Report published by Sturgia & Walton Company, pp. 30, 31.

class in a country church where a majority of the pupils were older than he; later he was given the superintendency of the Sunday school at the age of seventeen; at the age of twenty-one he went to a preparatory school; at the age of twenty-eight he graduated from college. He would never have developed leadership in any good cause had he not been given a chance in early adolescence to do something. Even at twelve he did a man's work, plowing his six rows of corn in turn like the rest.

Functional psychology confirms this point of view with respect to leadership. As a matter of fact, our educational system hitherto in the rural schools, in the colleges, and in the theological seminaries has educated men away from the rural field, not purposely but as a matter of mental adjustment. When we used to go on a " 'possum hunt" in my boyhood days, as I remember, the leader was always a young man who had been on a " 'possum hunt" before, and by actual experience knew how to lead. So for every department of organized endeavor of rural betterment to-day there must be given young men in the country a chance to express this adolescent impulse to achieve, and it must be given deliberately in every case, whether by Sunday school, church, Grange, farmers' club, or county Young Men's Christian Association.

2. Ability to Sense and Perceive Human Needs. A second factor to be emphasized in this discussion is the ability to know the needs of the community in a sympathetic and intelligent way.

A real leader in rural life can make a social survey of his community without even giving evidence to the observer that he is engaged in such a complex undertaking. He can readily see the lack of cooperation, the results of isolation and suspicious individualism, the product of generations of such isolation, or lack of community solidarity. He can readily see the economic basis of many of these human ills, and trace the social and spiritual evils to their most important cause.

He can not only sense the needs, but, if he be a leader, he will see through them to their causes, and thus be able to 25 intelligently direct to available resources for their treatment and cure.

3. A Constructive Imagination. A real leader has also the power to construct a plan by which men can work toward achievement. He is able to build up a community structure in the minds of the people before they have actually achieved results. Take, for example, a successful country minister who has upon his study walls a map of his parish, with the problems and needs all charted — this man has taken the first constructive step in showing his people how they can get together. So must the leader in rural life to-day arouse the imagination of the farmer to see the relative greatness of our rural domain, and its tremendous significance as a resource field for the supply of the populous cities of the world. Thus will be given dignity to the toil of men and women in the open country.

4. Engineering Skill in Avoiding Friction. Still another factor is that skill which enables a man to keep at work with various groups that, because of individualism and class consciousness, are often in conflict instead of cooperation. In other words, it is the skill to get team work. I remember once, when a boy on the farm, seeing a great steam thresher drawn by four horses stuck in the mud on a hill, and I admired the skill with which another farmer hitched on his team and pulled the thresher out and up the hill by getting the eight span to pull steadily together without jerks, and without geeing and hawing.

The rural leader should have the skill to unite for community work the church, the school, the Grange, and all other organizations when some great occasion demands that they all pull together for the benefit of the community.

5. A Persistent Purpose to Win in a Good Cause. The last and not the least factor is persistent purpose. Leadership cannot really count unless it gets the people somewhere. I recall a little country church near a village surrounded by a fairly prosperous farming district that had closed its doors for a year because of the lack of interest by the people in paying the salary of an inefficient pastor. 27

One young man, a farmer, and the village shoemaker got together and determined to hold a Sunday school in that church building even if only a dozen people could be persuaded to cooperate. And as a result of persistent effort and masterful purpose, carried out for a period of two years, that whole community was revolutionized and nearly a hundred adults were converted and made members of the church.

So with all forms of community leadership: to succeed there must be added to all the other requisite factors this indomitable purpose to carry to successful issue the cause we have undertaken.

The time to pull and push hardest is when the load is nearest the top of the hill. This is the supreme test of successful leadership, to get your team to pull the load over every "break" in the hill of human uplift. These, then, are the most important factors in the make-up of a real leader in the open country.

How to develop such leadership is being solved to-day in a measure too little known to the public in general, by the colleges of agriculture, the theological seminaries, the County Work Department of the Young Men's Christian Association and, in some States, by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Public Education.

Some of the leading Sunday school publications contain departments of country life; and home missions boards of the leading denominations are following the lead of the Presbyterian Board in organizing bureaus of country life as a part of home missionary enterprise.

There is one other agency by which very quick results could be secured in the matter of discovery and training of such leadership, and that is through Bible study classes in the Christian Associations of our colleges and universities. There is a splendid chance in the scriptural background for such a study. Take as one course "The Rural Training of the Prophets," and as another "The Rural- Mindedness of Jesus"; or still another mission study course in "The Conquest of the Germanic Races a Rural Achievement"; or still another, "The Lutheran 29

Reformation in Relation to Country Life"; or "The Pioneer Period of Protestantism in America." Such subjects for Bible and mission study would give new zest to Association work in many of our schools, and at the same time would be performing a useful service in developing leaders to answer the open country's call.

Life Investment in the Open Country

If ever we are to master the great cities for Jesus Christ, we must do it first by mastering the open country and the rural towns, whence flow the streams of population to the cities and back to the suburbs to form the basis for the greater cities. When Napoleon returned from Elba the country folk and the small towns rallied to his leadership, and when he reached the gates of Paris they had to open to him, for his following was invincible. I heard a distinguished Bishop say a few years ago, after a residence of some years in New York city, "If the churches ever hope to retain their religious fervor in the cities, they must take care of the country churches, for they feed the city churches with workers with religious fervor."

The central parish plan to replace the old circuit system is opening unusual opportunities for Christian social service in which young men and women of our colleges should excel. Here will be centered the consolidated school with its socialized curriculum, which will include the training of splendid moral, religious, and political leadership of the future. Also here will be centered the voluntary economic, social, and political associations of rural life. And from a study of the problems of organized charity among the poor mountain whites, the Negroes, and foreigners in the open country, here will be another fruitful field for life investment of consecrated Christian manhood and womanhood.

The modern farmer has learned the necessity for bookkeeping and advertising. Here will be another opening for secretarial work for young men and women. And, unless I misinterpret the signs of the times, here also in the open country there will be an opportunity of grave 31 responsibility for leadership by college women when they have won the political battles for the use of the ballot. Too long have the best of the daughters of the open country heeded the call of the city, attracted by its lure, leaving mothers and younger sisters overburdened by their tasks; but in the dawn of a new day for the nation's good they are hearing in the college halls during decision days for life investment the still small voice of the Spirit calling to Christian service, and, for some of the best of them, it is the open country's call for leadership that will help make this land of ours a better place for all of us to live in.

Chapter II The Rural-mindedness Of The Prophets And Of Jesus

All the great leaders in the Rural Life movement to-day are practically agreed that the country church is the most important factor in the adequate solution of the problem of the betterment of rural civilization. Theodore Roosevelt, Liberty H. Bailey, Kenyon L. Butterfield, Sir Horace Plunkett, Gifford Pinchot, and Albert E. Roberts, as well as many other writers and lecturers upon the subject, are all in accord on this point of emphasis in the modern rural situation.

Other Social Movements with a Scriptural Background

The social service movement had a scriptural background, as the writings of Benjamin Kidd, Francis Peabody, Walter Rauschenbusch, Shailer Mathews, Washington Gladden, and many other writers will show at first reading. 33

The social settlement and city evangelization movements likewise made their appeal to the Scriptures in citing the example of Jesus "dwelling among us" in his ministry of personality, and also in pointing to the scriptural references to "the City of God," "the New Jerusalem," and other like references to the cities. As a result the whole missionary movement, for a generation or two, was directed to the cities rather than to the rural populations of the world's mission fields.

It is therefore fitting that in the beginning of a work upon the Country Church movement of our times we should give it a scriptural basis, not that we hope to find the solution of our problems worked out for us there — which is an error to assume for the solution of any specific social or economic problem — but, rather, that we may discover the fact that we are dealing with a real dynamic problem of human history, and that we have scriptural sanction for the emphasis we are now placing upon the rural life problem.

Again, we do this deliberately for the 34 reason that country folk are extremely conservative with reference to the sanction of any movement unless it has attached to it the value of scriptural sanction. Therefore if we can show a real basis in the Bible for the modern methods of rural improvement, we will the more easily win the consent of the country folk to our program, which is, after all, the nub of the whole Rural Life movement in so far as securing the cooperation of the country people is concerned.

So rich are the materials for such a purpose, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, that it will be impossible in one chapter to do more than select a few references that will indicate the mine of material we have to work out for Bible study courses on the rural-mindedness of the writers of the Bible. We will, therefore, treat only three points under the general topic of the chapter: (1) The Rural Survey Outlined by Moses; (2) The Rural Survey and Program of Jesus; (3) Illustrations of the Rural-Mindedness of the Prophets and of Jesus.

The Rural Survey Outlined by Moses (Num. 13. 17-20)

In the first place we are to note the kind of men chosen to conduct the survey: "And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men, that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a prince among them" (verses 1, 2). We notice that he selected men, one from each group (tribe), and every man was to be a prince among his fellows.

The church of to-day will not win back its lost rural domain, nor win new fields of rural conquest, by sending to this field, as is too frequently the case, superannuated preachers, unprepared novices, or flunkers in preparatory schools or theological seminaries, or those who couldn't hold a city appointment. It will win only when it places in this field men who know and love the open country, and every man a prince among his fellows — the choice men who know their problem and delight in hard work.