CHAPTER I
Recently, in a cross-roads country church, a minister of the Gospel, underpaid, somewhat shabby, but eager and inspired, a man with a message to give, stood before his congregation to present that message. The flame of inspiration in his haggard young face flickered and died as he looked down at the scanty congregation assembled before him to hear the Word of God. At a glance he counted his handful of hearers. Six.
Through a window on one side ofthe little church, he could see two other meeting-houses nestling in the curve of the road. Through a window on the other side, he looked out at a third—four country churches of four Christian denominations, almost identical in doctrine, there within two stone’s-throws of one another.
In three of these churches, including his own, he knew that the members of the congregation might be counted upon the fingers of each pastor’s two hands. The third church was closed that day; its flock could afford only an occasional shepherd.
In all four of those churches put together, not one fair-sized congregation. In all four, not one pastor paid a salary large enough to enable him to live on his income as a minister. In all four, men and women taxed by religion beyondtheir ability to pay, yet unable to support their church without outside aid.
Jealous Denominations
The young minister thought with pain of other sections of the country through which he had traveled all day without seeing one church of any denomination. He knew that an appalling percentage of farm communities throughout the United States were entirely without churches, that thousands of children, hundreds of their elders, had never listened to the preaching of the Gospel. Yet here there were four churches at the country cross-roads!
That afternoon that young pastor wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain and bitterness, but also in hope, in earnest desire to get the facts before the nation:
I saw in the paper the other day some mention of the chief rural problems of the United States. May I call your attention to what ministers in every country district regard as the stiffest problem known to them and to their people? I refer to the problem of the competitive religion, which affects not only pastors, but the entire rural population, financially and spiritually, as well. The spiritual rivalry set in motion by well-meaning home-mission boards and zealous and jealous denominations is undermining the present and the future welfare of the country church by ignoring the law of supply and demand. If you can suggest any solution for this great problem, we shall all be grateful.
I saw in the paper the other day some mention of the chief rural problems of the United States. May I call your attention to what ministers in every country district regard as the stiffest problem known to them and to their people? I refer to the problem of the competitive religion, which affects not only pastors, but the entire rural population, financially and spiritually, as well. The spiritual rivalry set in motion by well-meaning home-mission boards and zealous and jealous denominations is undermining the present and the future welfare of the country church by ignoring the law of supply and demand. If you can suggest any solution for this great problem, we shall all be grateful.
The case was in no way overstated by this young man. It is quite true that there are few, if any, greater rural problems to-day than the problem of the country church. It is undeniablethat any honest student of conditions in rural churches is confronted by staggering and depressing statistics of overchurching and underattendance in some sections, and of entire lack of attendance due to no churching at all in others.
Any map that showed the present rural church distribution of the United States would be alarmingly reminiscent of a map of a country with large areas of sterile famine-land. Nine persons out of every hundred in rural America can not get to church because there is no church for them to attend. This means that one seventh of all the rural communities of the United States are entirely without Protestant churches. Pathetic reports of the spiritual hunger of these land dwellers, living in a Christian nationyet entirely shut off from Christian organization of every kind, come from these communities.
“No Protestant sermon has ever been preached in this locality,” is one S O S sent out from a neighborhood of two hundred persons. “Not a child in this district has ever attended Sunday-school,” deprecates another community of approximately the same size. “This back-to-the-land movement is fine, but why should loyal land dwellers have to condemn their children to heathenry?” demands a distracted mother, in a remote section of a Western State. “My children are growing up to be little savages, as far as religion is concerned. They have never been inside a church in their lives, and they don’t know what Sunday-school means.”
Only one fifth of the rural population goes to church.
Two-fifths of the rural churches of the country are standing still or losing ground.
A quarter of all rural churches have no Sunday-school.
One fifth of all rural churches are kept alive by home-mission aid. Of these subsidized churches, a large number are in active competition with churches of very similar doctrines.
Seven out of every ten rural churches have only a fraction of a pastor apiece.
One third of all rural pastors receive so low a salary that they can live only by working at some other occupation.
One half of the rural churches of the country make an annual gain in membership of as much as 10 per cent.
In striking contrast to this churchless seventh of the country, are the other six sevenths of rural America, many of them so overchurched that they are crying out for relief from the burdens the churches are laying upon them. There are ten times as many churches for every thousand persons in some of the rural districts of the United States as there are in New York City. Yet the percentage of attendance for every thousand persons is slightly lower in these rural sections than it is even in New York. Obviously, such a showing indicates a startling lack of system in the distribution of rural churches, a woeful waste of the religious potentialities of the country.
Recently, a thorough survey of therural church problem of the United States was made for the first time in the history of the country, under the direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund de S. Brunner, of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, of New York. Some of the statistics obtained by them are presented in the foregoing paragraphs.
These facts, of course, offer a severe shock to those who have the little white church of the countryside enshrined in memory along with the little red school-house. We have fallen into the rut of taking it for granted that our country churches not only keep pace with the best religious life of the nation, but even stay a step or two in advance, if not in theology, at least in interest in godly things and in piety. We have come tothink of country folk as the true church-goers of the United States. To this sentimental point of view the facts stated offer a true affront.
Fewer Church-goers
There are to-day approximately 101,000 rural churches in the United States. A long time ago, when there were only a hundred such churches, virtually the entire country population attended them. Some time later, when there were a thousand churches of the kind, the average of attendance was still exceedingly high. But of recent years the percentage of rural church-goers has almost seemed to be in an inverse ratio to the increase in churches. One out of every five is not a showing that would have brought joy to the Puritan Fathers. What is the reasonfor this precarious situation in the rural churches of our nation? Does it indicate that our country population is made up of a less God-fearing folk than in former years? Does it demonstrate that religion is less near to the hearts of the farm workers of the United States than is true of its city dwellers? Or are these conditions the logical outgrowth of a faulty system, the inevitable result of a church distribution spiritually and economically unsound?
More than one thing must be taken into consideration in any fair-minded attempt to answer these questions. For instance, there is the fact that during the past few years the number of tenant-farmers in the United States has steadily increased, until now thirty-eight per cent. of the farms aretenant operated, most often on the basis of the one-year lease. Any fact that tends to make the farmer more or less a transient in the community naturally deters him from forming social or religious relationships.
Another reason frequently given for the low average of rural church attendance is that so high a percentage—nearly 30 per cent.—of the nation’s land workers are new Americans, the foreign-born, or the children of the foreign-born. There are States, such as North Dakota, where nearly every other farmer belongs to other than American nativity, and whole sections of the country, as in the Middle West, where foreigners are in excess of two fifths of the population. It is estimated that at the present time morethan fifty per cent. of these people are unministered to by any church, Catholic or Protestant. Where anything like an earnest and comprehensive attempt has been made by churches to be of aid to them, as among the Mexicans of California, it has been marked by astonishing results. Then why have the churches done practically nothing for the foreign-born in rural sections? If the new American can make good on the land, is it too much to ask the church to make good with the new American?
When I hear it said that no one is really interested in religion any more, I cannot help thinking of an elderly Yankee farmer in the State of Vermont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of our President, a man who talks littleabout religion, but who for years has given virtually all his leisure time, and a considerable slice of time not leisure at all, to keeping alive the little white church near his farm at Plymouth Notch. He hauls the wood from his own land that the congregation of that little church may listen in comfort to the Word of God; he even, I am told, does the janitor work himself, since the church has no funds for a janitor. There is nothing especially remarkable in this. There are thousands of such men all over our country, men to whom the church is a thing to make sacrifices for, to keep alive at whatever cost.
But in many districts it really seems that the fewer churches a county is able to afford, the more it is apt to have. Out of the 211 churches financiallyaided by home-missions societies in several counties where intensive studies were made by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, I am told that it was found that 149 of these churches could have been dispensed with without essential loss to anyone. All but thirty-four were competitive.
Untrained Country Preachers
Another grave charge is made against the church to-day in our country districts. Farmers feel that they are neglected by the ministers of their churches.
It is also charged that many rural pastors lack both adequate training and ability for their high calling. The real marvel is that so many of these men are of the high type they are.
It has to be admitted that there is ground for the charge of incompetency among some of the rural pastors of the United States. These men, it is true, are most inadequately prepared for their work. How are they to afford more training for a calling which will never pay them any returns upon it? That these men can develop into able preachers has been demonstrated by those who have had the opportunity to complete their courses in the summer school for ministers, inaugurated, I believe, by the Presbyterian Board and now conducted by several denominations. But most of them do not have this chance.
It is competitive religion that is largely responsible for these two dangerous factors in rural religious life—thenon-resident pastor, too occupied to be a true spiritual shepherd; and the incompetent pastor, too incapable to be a leader of his people.
But Christianity will not vanish from our country districts. Nowhere is there better soil for the seeds of true religion than in the sturdy soul of rural America.
It is not so muchismsorologiesthat the rural population wants as it is religious facilities for themselves and for their children. Some time ago, when a study of fifteen Western States was made by the Home Mission Council, it mentioned the following fact:
“The general feeling manifested by the returns shows little care for denominationalism. What these people wantis some one to present Bible facts in an acceptable manner.”
The Call Can Be Met
This is as true to-day as it was when it was written ten years ago. Sunday-schools for their children; an adequate number of churches, not fewer than will meet their needs or more than they can support; usable churches, open the year round, with able ministers in charge—these are the things the population of our rural districts wants.
How are they to get them? By the installation of system into the religious life of the country sections. There are enough churches in the United States to-day, if they were distributed on the basis of a real need rather than on the grounds of competitive religion, to reach the remotest sections of ourcountry. The money now expended on nonproductive churches would purchase real vitality for essential churches all through rural America.