CHAPTER IV
“Hireling!” A sour epithet to hand a preacher; but the word is not mine. Look at it, if you will, in its original setting and judge for yourself:
“I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.... The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.”
So spake the Man of Sorrows, who, as he went about preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, spake as never manspake. And nineteen centuries of unbroken Christian usage look down upon “pastor and flock” as an almost perfect characterization of preacher and parish. Passing quickly through the gateway leading up to the porch of my tale, let me in a few words taken from “Town and Country Church in the United States,” set before you the pastor-and-flock-hard-luck story in rural America:
“The total number of communities within the town (town refers to places of 5,000 people or less) and country area is 73,230.”
“There are 33,808 communities, or 42 per cent. of the total number, that have churches, but do not have within them any resident pastors.”
“It would require 34,181 more ministersgiving their full time to the work of the ministry to provide one for each community, if they were evenly distributed.”
“The great advantage of the town over the village, and of both town and village over the country, in the matter of resident pastors, is a characteristic of all regions and of virtually all counties. Thus, while 78 out of every 100 town churches have resident pastors, and 60 out of every 100 village churches, only 17 out of every 100 country churches have them, and less than 5 out of every 100 country churches have full-time resident pastors.”
In a nutshell, this is the inglorious fact: 30,000 flocks in rural America have no shepherds. Thirty thousandrural flocks are open to the wolf—because (for it so appears) American preachers care not for country sheep.
Sentenced to Purgatory
An eminent rural-life leader a few weeks ago came back from a country-life conference of rural ministers, reporting that these ministers had a saying among them, “A country charge (pastorate) is a sentence to purgatory.”
This report sounds like a piece of clerical humor; grim, maybe, but harmless and meaning nothing. Would to God this were true! Then perhaps the picture of these 30,000 shepherdless flocks might turn out to be only a nightmare. I tried to shake the thing out of my mind; but immediately the long line of my ministerial acquaintancespassed unwillingly before me; and I solemnly affirm that, with a few princely exceptions, these men after being plunged into their ministry, coming up for air, as it were, faced toward the city parish as flowers turn toward the light; from the country, they struck out for the village; from the village, they struck out for the town; from the town, they struck out for the city; from the city, they struck out for the metropolis.
The Preacher’s Flight
The more I struggled to free myself from a conclusion on this matter, the deeper into conviction I sank. I recalled, much against my inclination, a bad half-hour several years ago at the headquarters of one of the great religious bodies of America. The occasionwas the meeting of the National Social Service Commission of that denomination. I had just finished reading a report, which expressed the idea that we might look forward to the day when country parishes would be put up in packages containing people enough supporting one church, so that churches in the country would be as powerful, ministers in the country would be as influential, as city churches, on the one hand, and city ministers on the other. A captain of city industry was a member of the commission. During my paper, hands in pockets, he paced the floor up and down—somewhat to my discomfiture as I recall. When I concluded reading, he broke out with:
“Bosh! All bosh! The country church will always be of little account.It gets culls for ministers—it always has; it always will. Just as I left the farm for the city to improve my lot, so every country minister who can will leave the country parish for the city parish to improve his lot.”
That I suffered a shock as if by lightning may easily be imagined. The steel-blue tone of this man did something to my heart; did something to my faith in human nature hard to define. This captain of industry—and I suspect that this is what did the damage—never seemed to question the legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. Representing, as he did, the leading laymen of his denomination, quietly accepting the exodus of country preachers as perfectly normal—because running true to the economics of good business instinct—he appalledme with his cynicism. And it took me many a month, I confess, to get back my belief in humankind. But it came back, and came back strong in the following manner:
Around the Glover’s Cot
By accident, one summer, I made a find; in one of the 30,000 pastorless parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; the cot standing on a stone-boat; the stone-boat lying close to a deep pool in the bend of a little river, in the shade of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, flat on his back, silently whipping the trout-pool with his fly. I came to believe in this helpless fisherman, and again all things good and beautiful seemed possible. I got the story from his sister, but can give only hints of it here.
As a boy on the farm he had made up his mind to get an education. At sixteen he was looking forward impatiently to beginning his courses of study, when one day in the woods a tree which the men folks were cutting down fell on him and broke his back. He never walked again, nor, in fact, ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on his back, all his hopes blighted, he asked for something to do with his hands. They gave him needle and thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. He made a pair of clumsy buckskin gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. He made pair after pair, better and still better. Then dozens of pairs, until his skill built up a small business. But his ambition mounted with success, and he asked whether he couldn’t study something.
“Can’t I study law?” he pleaded.
They got him law-books. He read law, he made buckskin gloves; he made gloves, he read law. He was admitted to the bar. He became justice-of-the-peace in his backwoods settlement. Men got to coming for miles to the glover’s cot to tell their troubles and look into his deep eyes, hear his counsel, and feel his glad hand. He was a real peacemaker under the guise of a lawyer. His ethics backed up to and rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. He bought land, hired it tilled, built himself a better house, and settled into the character of a country squire. He was of the little church flock, and the rest of the flock came to set great store by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, indomitable activity, and, withal, his straight reliance on God. In fact, thehelpless glover’s dwelling was the meeting-place for the flock about as often as the church building; for everybody said, “We get new strength to keep a-going when we meet around the cot.”
The Modern Wolf a Playful Cub?
See how I got back my faith? The prone fisherman on his stone-boat was a godsend to me. I saw that personal life is so rich that no one can be broken in body to the point where, in case he “layeth down his life for the sheep,” he will be making a mean gift. I half suspect that God raises up out of the ground, as it were, in many of these pastorless communities a proxy for the parson that, beholding the wolf, leaveth the sheep and fleeth to the city—a proxy, like the glover-lawyer, who is noquitter. And in some parishes where the preacher still sticks (his face set, however, toward the city) I fancy a man or a woman or a child can be found who is naïvely scaring off the wolf.
Norris Shepardson was such a man. Farmer, poet, refined spirit, he went about his work making everybody believe that a new day is fresh from God. Ambrose Brimmer, a member of the community, didn’t happen to be much of a churchman, and his Sunday haymaking teased the parson mightily. I remember well one perfect trout day, when Ambrose was showing me the holes in a stream strange to my rod, that we got to talking about preachers.
“I don’t care a damn if the parson does see me haying on Sunday,” said Ambrose; “but if I get a sight ofNorris Shepardson driving up the road, I skedaddle and hide, you bet! You know Norris Shepardson. Well, Norris Shepardson is a Christian and no quack.”
And Ambrose was right. Norris Shepardson was a Christian from his eyelashes to his finger-tips; and his sweet belief in you put you straightway under obligation to goodness when he cast a glance your way.
It is probably true that I have been something of a modern-life fan. But when I try to think of the Master’s parables of the shepherd, the sheep, and the wolf, and of the one sheep that was lost while the ninety and nine were safe in the fold, I confess that I am troubled about my modern-life philosophy.
Are modern sheep any the less inneed of a downright shepherd because they are modern?
Isn’t there a wolf any longer in times that are modern? Or may he perhaps be just a playful cub? Or possibly, by this time, a toothless, plain, doddering beastling?
Has the age of lofty heroism in religion—the age of sheer contempt of some of the traditional goods of life—clean passed away? And does economics furnish the better clue in modern days to those who are called of God to preach?
Do we need any 30,000 more preachers in the country trenches? Do we need any shock troops at all? Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in these days for all the picked soldiers in the war on the devil to fall back into comfortable winter quarters?
Side-stepping the Law of Hire
I try to find my answer to these troubling queries in a glance down the centuries. There are the barefoot Black Friars of Dominic and the Gray Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who took poverty for his bride) in the thirteenth century. They gloried in mean clothes, mean shelter, mean food, as they ministered out of their own poverty to the poor, the overlooked, the no-accounts (in cities, then, because the troop of comfortable parsons were fattening in the popular country districts).
There are the visionaries and enthusiasts: John Bunyan in the seventeenth century; John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth. In the very face of the plentiful, complacentclergy, they fought the wolf as if they had been apostles living in the first century.
There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in the early part of the nineteenth century, who protested, “I do not wish to labor in some comfortable pastoral charge where I can be at ease. I want a work to do which no one else wishes to do, and which will not be done unless I do it.”
Oberlin had just won his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Strasburg, at a time when Strasburg was a city of France. His “call” to pastoral duty came all of a sudden with the wind of a February evening rushing in at the door as a stranger stepped into the bare room. Struck with the poverty of the place, Pastor Stuber introduced himself.Beard’s translation from the French presents us with the picture:
“I have learned about you, Herr Oberlin. Your name has been mentioned to me as one who does not follow the beaten paths of ministerial candidates. You have studied surgery and medicine. You have a knowledge of botany and herbs. Is this not so?”
“In my leisure hours I have paid some attention to botany, to blood-letting, and the experiences of the anatomical room,” replied Oberlin.
“Will you be kind enough to explain to me what this little pan means that I see here by your lamp?” asked Stuber.
A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr Pastor. I take my dinner with myparents, and I bring away some bread which my mother gives me. At eight o’clock I put this little pan over my lamp, place my bread in it, with a little water and salt. Then I go on with my studies.”
“You are my man!” exclaimed Stuber, rising from his chair. “You live on the diet of Lacedæmon. Yes, you are my man. I see you do not understand me; but I have got my man, and I shall not let you go. I want you for the pastorship of Waldbach in the Ban-de-la-Roche. There a hundred poor and wretched families in want of the bread of life; four or five hundred to shepherd and to save, poor, wretched, friendless.”
Oberlin’s heart was in a tumult. This was just the field of labor he had wished. But what of the difficulties?
“The parish must be in a very cold region,” suggested Oberlin.
“My dear Oberlin, I do not wish to exaggerate anything. Six months of winter; at times the cold of the Baltic; sometimes a wind like ice comes down from the mountain-tops above; the sick and dying are to be visited in remote, wild, solitary places in the forests.”
“And the parishioners, are they well disposed?” inquired Oberlin.
“Not too much so, not too much. They are frightfully ignorant and untractable, and proud of their ignorance. It is an iron-headed people, a population of Cyclops.”
Oberlin was taking in the situation. He slowly lifted his large blue eyes and asked: “You say most of the parishioners are extremely poor? Are there resources to aid the poor?”
“The parishioners have nothing. Four districts even poorer than the mother parish are to be served. Not a single practicable road. Deep mud-holes among the cabins. The people, abandoned to indifference, have not the least concern to meliorate their condition.”
“Every one of your words has knocked at the door of my heart like the blows of a hammer,” said Oberlin. And it was settled that Oberlin would go to the mountains; and on March 30, 1767, in his twenty-seventh year, Oberlin arrived at Waldbach.
No single piece of literature equals the story of Jean Frederick Oberlin’s pastorate in the Ban-de-la-Roche as an interpretation of a country minister’s social, economic, and religious relationto his parish. Overture after overture came to him during the years to give up his laborious cares in the hills and take charge of a church where cultured life would bring with it superior advantages, greater recognized honor, and a satisfactory salary. His answer was the same to all:
“No, I will never leave this flock. God has confided this flock to me. Why should I abandon it?”
And in that out-of-the-way parish he played the shepherd and the man for nigh on to sixty years. Like the Venerable Bede in the eighth century, he died with the shepherd’s crook in his hand.
Preachers’ Alibis Pass Inspection
Now tell me, was Oberlin—remember he is only a hundred years away fromour time—temperamental and absurdly heroic? Was the nineteenth-century wolf any less tender with the nineteenth-century flock than the first-century wolf with the first-century flock? Is the modern “world-the-flesh-and-the-devil” just a bugaboo to frighten children? Is modern sin a whiter stain on the soul and more easily washed out than in any previous century? It would take a braver man than I am to champion modern life to such lengths.
These 30,000 runaway American preachers,—they all have good reasons for running. As alibis go, they are perfect—humanly speaking. I have often heard the recital: “Easier life for the wife,” “education for the children,” “an American standard of living,”“congenial parish,” “books,” “travel,” “art,” “greater opportunity for service.”
Just such reasons as bankers, clerks, teachers, merchants give for their economic movements—to better themselves, following the law of hire. And nobody protests; for nobody is in a position to protest, as the law of hire seems to regulate the life of all. The protest—the only great protest—comes everlastingly up from the first century:
“A certain scribe came, and said unto Him, Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”
The Plight of Him Who Stays
The preacher that sticks by the farm community takes pot-luck with the farmer himself; and the socio-economic plight of the farmer has had front-page head-lines since the time of President Theodore Roosevelt. To-day, in the time of President Calvin Coolidge, those head-lines have become bigger and blacker. The farmer’s dollar, meanwhile, has become small and weak. His taxes have risen overnight like a spring freshet. His debts stare him in the face. His children are forsaking him for the high wages and high life of the city. He cannot pay the wages of labor in competition with automobile factories.
The farmer’s social system in America has broken down under the strain ofnew forces. He needs the social help of men and women who will share his life, his privations, his hopes and fears. But they are to be men and women who see the farmer’s plight and, giving themselves to the task, struggle to organize a modern rural social system. It is fruitless here to recite the tale of an underpaid country clergy, with its sequel of a socially visionless, untrained set of honest parsons; fruitless to point out how denominational strife has cut down the preacher’s salary to less than a living wage. True, the country parson has his poverty, and needs not to take any extra “vow of poverty.” This sort of thing will go on and on until there is a right-about on the part of those preachers who flee the country as if it were the plague. Strong men of social vision, men whohave come to understand the farmer’s social and economic plight, must turn their back on the city, and take up labors for the country flock.
A New Type of Training School
But will there ever be such a right-about-face of virile, holy men until we have in America a new type of theological seminary for the training of country-bound ministers of Christ? I doubt it. The present schools of training are city-set, city-wise, city-satisfied; not but that a score or more of them give some “rural courses”; not but that a trickle of men has started already from them toward the country. You can better understand the case if I were to ask what hope there would have been for agricultural science, if total reliance had been placed upon thegreat city universities, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, to develop the practice of farming. Each of these universities has already made some notable contribution to agriculture in one form or another; but the great hope of agriculture lay in a farming college, and fortunately, the common sense of this country perceived this truth.
In like manner, the hope of the rural ministry, in my estimation, lies in a rural theological seminary under the eaves of one of our great colleges of agriculture—preferably a college of agriculture in close proximity to a great state university. Here is the farmer’s intellectual center. Here are gathered men and women of hope for farm life. Here are the men and women who have social vision for ruralsociety. In touch with these men and women, under the spell of the intelligent hope for the American farm and farmer, a school of religion can grow up which will train men to go into the country and help redeem it from its present social chaos. They can carve out community churches of distinction. They can create a line of such churches, wholly in rural territory, which will furnish steps of promotion for the most strenuous and ambitious pastors. Flight is not the cure of the plight of country parsons. The cure is rather intelligent consecration to the country flocks.