CHAPTER V
“But,” went on the author of Christian idealism,—mind you, in the same breath in which He had paid to His followers the superb compliment, “Ye are the salt of the earth,”—“if the salt have lost its savor—”
And the story of Protestant home missions in rural America during the last two or three decades has in it the taste of this “lost savor.”
Let me lay bare before you,—with the shame of a churchman very much embarrassed, it must be confessed,—not so much the facts of this unsavory home-mission story, for the facts have been public property for some years, asan interpretation of the facts and an appraisal of the damage done to American churchdom.
For the benefit of him who does not understand the situation at all, a word is necessary. Here is the picture, and here are the essential features in the picture, whatever variations there may be in minor details.
Twice Too Many Churches
A community of rural folk of a definite population is spread out before you. Christian churches, usually from two to ten in number, are alive, if not all going concerns in the community. Whatever differences there may be in the membership rolls—and of course we shall expect many points of difference here—or in the number of services per week or per month, or in the presenceor absence of resident pastors, or in the organization of the churches into Sunday-schools, mission societies, clubs, social committees and the like—whatever the variations may be, I say, the number of persons in the community, counting every single soul, is far short of enough to man all of the churches, use any reputable standard of church organization you please to measure by.
Furthermore, in the type community in question, some or all of the churches are weak and ineffective, if not virtually down and out. Moreover,—and this is the central feature of the picture,—one church is, or several or all of these churches are, receiving subsidies in the form of money from the home-mission funds of the respective denominational state body or national body or both, the sum of money being justenough to keep the particular church competitively in the running in that community.
The essential fact in this situation may be stated thus: In a community where there is known to be a mass of persons (in commercial parlance, “volume of business”) sufficient to build and maintain only from one to five churches, there are actually found to be from two to ten; and the excess of churches over and above the number which the volume of business justifies is the direct result of the injection of home-mission money into the community.
Veiled Hate
It does not require a clever mind to know what will happen. When from two to ten kernels of corn are plantedin a piece of soil which has nutritive elements sufficient to bring only from one to five stalks to maturity, we know that a struggle for life is on which may doom one stalk, several stalks, or even all stalks. It is so with the competitive churches; but the corn simile fails to illustrate the case at the really tragic point. The subsidized churches, which make up the redundance, create in the community what is known by everybody there to be a case of veiled malignancy. Self-respecting persons either hold themselves aloof from formal religion there, or, conscience-stricken, stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain disgust they pick up and leave. And the community turns sour. The salt has lost its savor.
If you would sense the disaster of this competition, please read betweenthe lines of the following resolution, passed within the last year, by a minister’s association in a small rural community where six Protestant churches are breathing the air that is hardly enough for three!
“Whereas we are joined together as Christian ministers in the association of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, we hereby agree that the following principles shall guide and control us individually, and, so far as our proper influence can go, our several congregations in our mutual relationships....I. That we decline and discourage proselytizing in any form.II. While we recognize that every man is free to worship where and as hewills, yet we realize that shifting from one denomination to another save from absolute religious conviction is not edifying, but harmful. Wherefore, we will not encourage those who from pique or temporary dissatisfaction with ministers or people of their own local congregations wish to unite with ours.III. That we will not, save in exceptional cases, receive into our Sunday-schools as regular members thereof, children of families who are affiliated with other congregations of the town.IV. That whenever we come across new-comers to the town who are affiliated with, or declare preference for, some Christian body other than our own we will not (if the church of their choice be represented by a congregationhere) ask them to unite with our congregation or send their children to our Sunday-school until we have given to the minister or church officials of the church of their preference the name and address of such persons, and allowed reasonable opportunity for them to claim their own.”
“Whereas we are joined together as Christian ministers in the association of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, we hereby agree that the following principles shall guide and control us individually, and, so far as our proper influence can go, our several congregations in our mutual relationships....
I. That we decline and discourage proselytizing in any form.
II. While we recognize that every man is free to worship where and as hewills, yet we realize that shifting from one denomination to another save from absolute religious conviction is not edifying, but harmful. Wherefore, we will not encourage those who from pique or temporary dissatisfaction with ministers or people of their own local congregations wish to unite with ours.
III. That we will not, save in exceptional cases, receive into our Sunday-schools as regular members thereof, children of families who are affiliated with other congregations of the town.
IV. That whenever we come across new-comers to the town who are affiliated with, or declare preference for, some Christian body other than our own we will not (if the church of their choice be represented by a congregationhere) ask them to unite with our congregation or send their children to our Sunday-school until we have given to the minister or church officials of the church of their preference the name and address of such persons, and allowed reasonable opportunity for them to claim their own.”
It is clear on the face of it that the recognized principles of Christianity have failed to keep these churches sweet to one another; and resort is, therefore, had to a contract—a perfectly human document of agreement, such as governs sinners in mundane business—in hope that an-out-and-out bargain may accomplish what Christian love can not.
These ministers agreenotto proselytize,notto encourage lifting members from another church,nottoreceive children into the Sunday-school from families of another flock,notto pick up new-comers without advertising them and waiting a reasonable length of time for a claimant. This document of “nots”—of things not to be done—naïvely uncovers the teasing things that were done behind curtains.
Dispensing With Mission Aid
Before reading further, you will wish to know whether there is much of this sort of thing going on in rural America; whether, in fact, it is not fussing over trifles to beckon anybody to look at this thing.
The best authorities, after a long study on this subject, are quoted as estimating that the amount of Protestant home-mission money annually wasted in competitive religion inrural communities is at present $3,000,000; and if we may generalize from twenty-five thoroughly studied counties, widely separated, where there are 211 churches aided by home-mission money, of which 149 are disastrously competitive, “most of the home-mission aid which is now granted could be withdrawn without any danger whatsoever of leaving communities (rural) with inadequate facilities.”
The official report goes on to say, “Aside from any possible loss in denominational prestige, which a purely objective study such as this can not undertake to measure, on a careful examination of all the data at hand, it seems that 149 of the 211 aided churches in these counties might be dispensed with, to the general advantage of the religious life in their communitiesand to the greater glory of the Kingdom of God.”
This thing, look at it from any angle you please, is as rust on the wheat, a rot in the potato, a blight on the peach-tree, a boll-weevil in the cotton. God knows that the farmer already carries along enough of a handicap in community matters without being afflicted with this canker on his religion, as a discipline. It certainly looks like jumping on the man that’s down. But this sin against the farmer is not the worst of the wicked business.
Worse Than Wasted
What hurts most in this paradoxical practice is the prostitution of the most beautiful gift in all religion.
“Missions!”
The very word conjures up angelsof mercy. It brings to mind the last words of Christ to his disciples and to his followers of all time. And this mission money (it is not so pathetic that it sometimes is the widow’s mite or that it is sometimes earned in feebleness with many a pain) is the purest money handled by men. It is the visible sign of tears of longing for love to govern men. Missions are the church’s great romance. When out of the barrenness and weakness of my little life, I put into the hands of the church a gift for the whomsoever, in faith, I do it with a prayer that it will help bring peace to some soul, harmony to some family, blessing to some community which is beyond my power otherwise to help.
To think, then, that the tip of your prayer and mine, the sweetest thing wecan give, is poisoned, and shot into a rural community, there to hurt—Well the words are not so much wanting to express my indignation and yours, as the mind fails to comprehend how such tactless blunders can happen.
“Why do these church bodies do this wicked thing?” you enquire.
Let the words of a high church official I once knew convey to you not so much the real reason, as the state of mind out of which the thing grows!
“So long as there is a family of our faith in that village, that family shall have the sacraments of our faith ministered to it.”
He might just as well have added, “even though the heavens fall”; for what he did was to force a subsidy into a community to help a small faction of his particular church to survive whenthe majority of the people, even the majority of his own little church organization, had voted voluntarily to cut down the number of churches and eliminate the unnecessary one. The high church official just ripped open a community sore, when it had begun to heal. He poured gall in again after somebody had sweetened community life for a moment.
A New Religious Ethics Between Churches
The egotism of a particular church group; the flaunting individualism of a particular denominational combination of persons, whose personal egos are, religiously, to be subjected, but whose combined ego is to be exalted! Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and religion between church groups. Shallit not be discussed? Especially when it grinds the rural community to powder? Shall it be good Christianity for one Christian sect to crowd and shove just like a bully in a mob?
The day and generation is getting suspicious of pietists of all sorts who can tell sinners how to behave individually to one another; yes, who can even tell the labor group how to behave to the employer group and the employer group to the labor group, but who have no conception of what Christian principles apply as between one church group and another church group in the realm of religion, except to beat the other church group at all costs. If I were not heart and soul captured by the character, life, philosophy, and guidance of Jesus himself, if I were not thrilled by his words, and electrified byhis life and death, more and more the older I grow, I should be tempted to see in this cutthroat group egotism of competitive Christian church groups a decline of Christianity itself.
“They all do it” is a lame excuse for sinners; but for a church body, it is tragic. Think of a million people, more or less, possessing one shibboleth, trying to embody earnestly the Christ, while deliberately hamstringing another Christian church body which is doing the same thing!
But who is to blame? Whose sin is this prostitution of a holy thing?
Did you ever happen to know the officials at the head of a Protestant church body, either national or state? Did you ever know the persons who distribute home-mission money after it is once collected? Did you ever geta glimpse of the inside? Well, if so, then you know how intensely human this situation is. You know how complex are the forces that operate, how like politics are the powers behind the locked doors. You know then that when you try to track this sinner, you can’t find him. Nobody does the thing. Nobody does anything. Nobody is to blame. The Christian leaders are not leading on such matters. They are fighting the individual sins of the people.
What would America think of a great Christian leader who should come out and insist that Christian churches ought to love, respect, defer to other Christian churches? What a stir in Christendom it would make for a great man carrying his own church with him, let us say, to go up and down the landpreaching that membership in one Christian church should thereby make us members in all Christian churches; preaching that we should discount all the differences among Christian churches and love all Christian churches for their likenesses?
Look at this straw:
In Canada an outstanding movement is nearing completion to unite organically three great Protestant bodies, affecting more than three quarters of a million of church members. The daily press recently in explanation of the union, carried this item:
“The Union had its origin in the conviction that many separate churches of each denomination, especially in the rural districts, were handicapped in limited membership andwere unable to maintain properly separate buildings and ministers. It is therefore a part of a tendency in many other countries to submerge religious differences in an effort at wider and more effective service.”
This looks on the horizon like the peep of dawn of a new Christian day—and what a dawn for the rural community that would be!
But—lest we be too sanguine—that dawn has some climb to make yet. Has not the Home Mission Council of the Federal Council of Churches in America put into practice on the Western frontier for several years principles of denominational courtesy? Have not the phrases of their documents on “Overchurching,” “Underchurching,” and “Wasteful Competition” seeped very generally throughoutthe settled portions of the United States, as well as into the frontier? Have not the Foreign Mission Boards of the various denominations for years gained conspicuously the confidence of their laymen by the intelligent distribution of territory among the missions of different church bodies abroad? The fact is and must be reckoned with that all the words and phrases and ideas and logic on this subject, pro and con, have been bandied about until they are almost threadbare. The will to do, however, is still very stubborn in old, established communities.