CHAPTER VI
“What is the difference between a state university and an ordinary university?”
A rather silly question, perhaps; but the answer that came back, lightning-like, gave me the jolt of my life, and incidentally picked out in my mind the pattern for the community church. Here is the occasion and what took place:
A reception for the distinguished regents of the University of Wisconsin at the home of the president. In due time I found myself approaching that awful reception line, terrifying, indeed, to me, a new-comer. Suddenly I became aware that I was shaking hands with the president, whose newness to the job of presiding over a university had not entirely worn off.
It was up to me to say something, and so, after the manner of a pedagogue, I blurted out a question:
“Mr. President, will you tell me the difference between a state university and an ordinary university?”
President Van Hise didn’t hesitate an instant with his answer.
“I cannot speak for all state universities,” said he, “but this university is run not for the students who happen to be here, but for the persons who may never see the university—even to the last man, woman, and child in the last community of the State.”
I had become unconscious of the reception line, for I was startled with an idea foreign to my bringing up, and I must make sure that I perfectly understood.
“Mr. President,” I interrupted, “doyou mean to say that the University of Wisconsin is not proud of turning out highly developed personalities?”
“Only as carriers,” President Van Hise quickly replied, in his characteristic jerky manner; “carriers of ideas and attitudes even to the isolated community and to the unpromising man. The students who are here are here, as it were, by accident. But the university is run for Wisconsin’s people at work.”
I passed on down the line, and eventually out into a world strange to me, where being a “carrier” of intellectual goods to the “isolated community” and to the “last man” was an academic commonplace.
Fourteen years of that day-by-day commonplace, however, never rubbed off the beauty of its bloom for me; for here was a university running at leastneck and neck with church Christians in love for,—or duty to, if you prefer it so,—the Gospel’s whomsoever.
Having seen with my own eyes these last communities of a State quickened into intellectual fervor through the devotion of university men and women, do you think I do not know what would happen to the spiritual life of these out-of-the-way communities if the supreme love of devoted church men and women were brought to bear upon them?
A Forecast Founded on Fact
I will venture to forecast some of the things that would happen. Every rural community would have a community church—a church for the whomsoever, even to the last man, woman, and child in that community. Iftopographically possible, every such church community would stretch the bounds of its parish to include a thousand souls all told. In communities of two thousand souls, there would be two churches—two only, and both community churches. In communities of three thousand souls, there would be three community churches, and three churches only, every church, a community church; and no more churches than one to one thousand of the community population; for it takes one thousand of the population to maintain an effectual modern church; and every church is to be a Christian community church as a safeguard against paganism. But why am I so foolish as to foretell what would happen when I can tell what is happening?
There are to-day, we are told bythose who keep informed on the matter, a thousand community churches in the United States, of which the greater part are in rural territory. In fact, it is reported that new community churches are being organized at the rate, at present, of six a month. To say that there is a community church movement well-started is no exaggeration. Some States such as Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, California, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, are outstanding in the movement.
Of course, the community church is not yet standardized, but it is shaping up. To affirm that there are three types, as some say, or five, as others put it, is more or less arbitrary. Still, for the sake of the man who understands better by types, I may say that some community churches like to beknown as having arrived at the community ideal by “federation” of two or more denominational churches, the new church preserving connection with a national church body.
Other community churches pride themselves on being “union” churches, each having originated from the organic union of two or more churches, or having been established as a “union” church in a community possessing no church, but containing families of various denominational connections in the past. The union church once formed usually stands alone, without any denominational affiliation.
Then there is the regular “denominational” church, which either just happens to be or has come purposely to be the only church in the community; and which makes the boast of existing forthe whole community rather than for its particular denominational group.
And there are other varieties, which could indeed be dignified into types, if we were pushed to it. The important thing, however, is that out of a general unrest and dissatisfaction with churches that aim to keep breeding up within themselves a highly pedigreed group of personalities which possess decidedly exclusive, if not aristocratic, characteristics, have arisen overnight, as it were, churches which admit to the inner circle all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic ideal of acting in the realm of religion for the last man, woman, and child in the community.
Churches for the Whomsoever
Here we have before our very eyes, then, a kind of a church which is run,as President Van Hise said his university was run, not for a select few within its walls, but for the whomsoever within its own territory; a church that views every single member as a “carrier” of the goods of life to the last man, rather than as a precious mechanism in which should be lodged all the mysteries of a peculiar cult.
Look over some of the stories of these churches which are confessedly trying to find their way to a new expression of social religion designed to prevent the wastes of competitive Christianity.
Here are the high points in an Idaho community church: Rural, in a town of 600 souls. Presbyterian by connection, but with members formerly of sixteen different denominations. Membership, 400. Plant worth $50,000,with eighteen separate class-rooms for Sunday-school use. A community house, with gymnasium. Rest room for women and girls. A week-day church school using one hour a week of school time. In summer, a daily vacation Bible school. A Boy Scout troop. A Campfire Girls’ organization. Potato growers and fruit men freely using the community hall. High moral standards reflecting the unity of the people.
Take another community church of farmers in Iowa, in the open country: An architecturally commanding building, providing, like a well-organized school-house, many separate rooms for religious instruction. The church has deliberately packed into its conception of “community church” the idea that, assuming Christianity to have contactwith every phase of living, the church has responsibility for providing the auspices under which all social activities of the community take place. What more natural, then, than that the Fourth of July celebration should be around the most beautiful spot in the community, the church? Farmers’ Institute in the church? Young people having a place for good times at the church? A church committee looking after the matter of bringing good families on to farms that are for sale or rent in the community?
Take a certain community church in Indiana. Here is the story of an honest struggle on the part of four church pedigrees to burn their bridges behind them, and, pooling their resources, to start in anew. The peculiar traditions of each cult, however, cling desperatelyto each group, until, after trying in vain to carry these psychological contradictions along in an artificial unity, in a moment of supreme devotion to the good of their community, they strip off their trade-marks, forget their shibboleths, and step forward into religious freedom.
The community-church movement is not going to create, I surmise, new sects, leaving a residuum of several more denominations. Rather it is a real step towards the organic union of kindred church bodies on the one hand, and so a reduction of sects; and on the other hand, a step towards democratizing every church and making it a real community church.
The Rural Dilemma and the Way Out
It will require only another thousandof these brave, venturesome community churches to turn every select-bodied denomination to looking itself over. This self-criticism will lead the great Protestant church bodies, let us hope, to a church conscience in regard to destructive church competition. Then it will be an easy step to coming to terms with one another in any locality, so as to give the community a chance to have a community church.
The community church, if we can have any faith in mankind, is sure to come along strong. If high officials become obstructionists, they will be swept away; for the people, when they once clearly see, will have their way in churches and religion as in the long run they do in government and politics.
The sooner the great Protestant bodies confess their sins of competitionand put their houses in order, the sooner the new day will come for the remote community and the last man.
Some of us know what it is to be a devotee of a great church sect. The absolute rightness of our cult has been no more questionable than our own existence. When our sect was in parallel columns with any other religious sect, we did not, could not yield right of way.
But when we are all consciously confronted with the problem of working out the religious life of 30,000,000 of isolated farm people, we wake up to the fact that we occupy a position where cult pride, cult individualism, and cult exclusiveness break down. Then we find ourselves in a dilemma; we must leave the farmers to rot, a thing which is unquestionably abhorrentto our cult; or we must modify our cult, a thing which on the surface seems a sacrilege to do.
But there is a way out of every dilemma; generally, however at the cost of a bit of human pride. The community church shows the various noble church cults one way out of the rural church dilemma.
Read these bold words from a group of fifty young Methodist rural workers penned to bishops:
“To the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church: We the undersigned members of the Methodist Episcopal Church appeal to you to give prayerful consideration to the following suggestions:
1. That the bishops, district superintendents, and other administrative officers of our denomination cordiallycoöperate with the leaders of other denominations in an effort to so organize rural church geographical units that not more than one Protestant church to every one thousand population shall prevail as a standard.
2. That service to the community rather than to the denomination be the basis on which ministers shall be trained, appointed, and promoted.
3. That the Methodist Episcopal Church take the lead in the give-and-take method with other denominations, even to the extent of encouraging the discontinuance of small, struggling, competing Methodist churches in the interest of rural Christian service to the communities involved.
4. That zeal for service to the entirecommunity and a sympathetic consideration for those whose background and training are non-Methodist shall characterize the efforts of the Methodist Episcopal Church wherever it alone occupies a rural field.
5. That the conference membership of a Methodist Episcopal minister shall not be jeopardized by appointment as pastor of a federated or undenominational church where such a church is required for the largest service to the community.”
Theological students and college students are not to be outdone by their elders in bravery. Read the following document for circulation among the officials of the various church bodies—a document which sounds like the “first call” for the rural community church:
“We the rural college student delegates at the American Country Life Association Student Conference believe that the minister who serves in a church which has no right to exist loses respect for his profession and can not do outstanding work; we believe that our denominational boards which appropriate money we give to keep churches going in overchurched communities and which send leadership into such communities are only making people feel that the ideals of Christianity are no higher than those of pagan religions. We would apply the principles and teachings of Jesus Christ. Therefore we recommend:
1. That students preparing to enter the rural ministry refuse to serve charges in overchurched communities.
2. That we, as rural students, do all in our power in our communities and in places of leadership that we may attain to prevent denominational church boards from pouring money and leadership into communities, which is to be used to perpetuate denominational strife that is destroying the religious life of our communities.
3. That we pledge ourselves to endeavor to substitute the principles and teachings of Jesus Christ for narrow denominational creeds and doctrines. In view of this, we shall try to obtain an atmosphere and physical equipment of rural churches, as well as church services themselves, that shall be designed to meet the physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs of the people who worship there, regardless of their denominations.”
The press carries the story that down in Georgia five hundred farmers last season dedicated an acre of land apiece, with all it grew, to the Lord. These pieces of land are spoken of generally in Georgia as the “Lord’s Acres,” and the “Lord’s Acre Plan” is hailed as a hundred per cent. way to finance the country church.
The story goes on to say:
“Farmers in the South are firmly convinced that the Lord’s Acre yields better crops than surrounding land, and that the entire farm of the one giving the acre is more productive than those of his neighbors.”
The Community Church as a Democracy
The community church strikes me as a Lord’s Acre in rural Christendombearing a crop dedicated to God. And, if I read the returns aright, the comparative yield justifies the belief. It is a church of the people—a democracy in very truth. Any subtle influence that would tend to wash in upon this democracy and wear it down to a dominating set of people or to a group of negligible folk or to a loose aggregation of nondescripts must be walled off with reinforced concrete.
A single type of religious temperament will not govern the range and character of the community church. A constant sort of ideals that appeals only to the seraphic souls or to other minds only in moments of exalted pitch will, by a natural process of elimination, soon reduce the church to a temperamental sect. No, the church is made up of all temperaments: the matter-of-fact,active, and practical; the poetic, sentimental, imaginative; the strenuous; the easy-going; the enthusiastic; the petty; the anxious; the generous, self-denying; the jolly, optimistic; the gloomy, conservative; the militant, crusading; the important; the retiring. Their interests, too—the interests of the whole church are as broad and various as human nature.
A cross-section of Christianity will reveal a ten-thousand fold variegation of human streak and human color wherever religion has filtered into actual life. This meeting-ground of all the higher interests of the community will, therefore, be home for each interest. As no single type of temperament should repulse the others and shrink the church, so no single activity of the church should monopolize the focus ofattention. The mission interest, the Bible interest, the educational interest, the interests social, musical, ceremonial, disciplinary, the evangelistic interest, the civic and industrial interest, the financial interest, the idealistic interest, both personal and social—all these and the rest will have good footing in the community church.
A church which should undertake to be a democracy in fact would find that there is only one way of “maintaining interest” enough actually to keep bringing the people together. This way is sounding God’s summons to keep going the redemption of its community at every point. The summons to definite undertakings to improve community life is like the summons to a pioneer homesteader to make a home fit for his family. He gears his hands to ax andsaw, to plow and hammer, and he knows that he can change the wilderness.
Besides stereotyped church procedure, a steady look at living conditions in the community, with the determined expectation of changing these conditions for the better; a look for the moral clues to whole wretched situations; a look to disentangle from the chaotic mass single, great, unmistakeable moral issues—these steady looks, under God’s summons, must be given anew in every generation to the kaleidoscopic facts of human life.
The church that shall go into the business of becoming self-conscious and of realizing its democracy will hear God’s summons to community redemption and begin to re-scale the map of church importance and usefulness in the community on heroic lines.