mm m AM) / J^V' i ^^ ^s 1 mJmiM This book may be kept out TWO WEEKS only, and is subject to a fine of TWO CENTS a day thereafter. T» ,„;n u„ j.._ ___ the day indicated beloW DATE DUE CARD m m ih. « PAMPHLETS OH THE COUNTRY CHURCH Volume 3 6 3 o . "3 o & P V, Federal council of the churches of Christ in America. What every church should know about its community. General Association of Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, Advance reports of various committees, 1908 and 1909 McElfresh, F. The country Sunday school MclTutt, M. B« Modern methods in the country church MclTutt, M« B-« A post-graduate school with a purpose Massachusetts Federation of Churches, Quarterly bulletin. Pacts and factors, October 1910 "The part of the church in rural progress as discussed at the Amherst Conference , w Root, E, T. State federations Taf t , A, B. The mistress of the rural manse Taf t , A. B. The tent mission Taylor a G. Basis for social evangelism with rural applications Wells, G, P. An answer to the Hew England country church question, Wells, G« P. What our country churches need Wilson, W, H. The church and the transient Wilson, W. H. Conservation of boys Wilson, W. H. The country church Wilson, W, H, The country church program Wilson, W, H. Don't breathe on the thermometer Wilson, W. H. The farmers' church and the farmers' £2 college CO co Wilson, W, II, Getting the worker to church a. V) Wilson, W. H. The girl on the farm Wilson, W. H« How to manage a country life institute Wilson, W. II* "Marrying the land." Wilson, W. H. ¥o need to "be poor in the country Wilson, W. H. Synod's opportunity Wilson, W. H. What limits the rural Evangel ««>19414 The church and country life. Pamphlet issued by the Board of Home Missions of the Presby* terian Church* Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/revivalofinteres03wils THE COUNTRY CHURCH 71 The subject of the address of the third speaker, Rev. War- ren H. Wilson, Superintendent of the Department of Church and Country Life, of the Presbyterian Board, was the Re- vival of Interest in the Rural Church. THE REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN THE COUNTRY CHURCH There is no need to take time to sketch for this audience the revival of interest in country life and in rural institutions. Before the report of President Roosevelt's Country Life Com- mission was published the problem was sociological and was concerned mainly with New England. Since that time it has been an economic group of problems, because that Commis- sion insisted that the causes of rural changes are in the social economy. The way the farmer gets a living is undergoing reconstruction, and with it rural institutions are being rebuilt. There are those — I wonder if any are here present — who believe that the farmer will desert his home in the country and come to live in villages. Already the merchant has gone to the village, the better schools are in the villages, and it is hard to improve the country schools. It looks as if the farmer were abandoning the one-room rural school. The preachers throughout the United States generally live in the villages, and preach in the country where they do not live. I do not hold with those who think that the American farmer will ever be content to live in a village and farm the open country. But I call to your attention that there are those who so think, and it is a problem of profound import- ance to determine whether it is better for the farmer to be a villager or a land holder, living in the country. The country churches are affected, furthermore, by the increase in the number of those who are poor. By this I do not mean beggars, but people under economic pressure. The American poor man is he who does not own productive land or tools. These people are now represented in tenants and workingmen in the country. Four farmers out of ten in the United States are renters, who till the land that some one else owns. These men have no use for a church that is not a utility, and their presence in the country is closing hun- dreds of country churches in all the settled States. Another 72 THE COUNTRY CHURCH trouble with the country is that religion has been reduced to mere preaching. Country people have taken the evangelist at his word when he said: "All you need is the salvation of your soul." Now, I am a pastor of sixteen years' experi- ence. I believe in evangelism. I never let a year pass with- out a season of appeal to the individual to give his heart privately and publicly to the Lord. But evangelism that denies other religious experiences, evangelism that claims a monopoly, is destructive to church life in the country, for when the farmer is convinced that the horizon of salvation is bounded by his soul, and convinced that religion consists in his destination for Heaven, he is ready at once to sell his farm and pack his goods for Dakota or Texas. He has no obligations to the community ; and that is what ails the country church. We have not a religion that holds the people, but a religion, instead, that makes nomads of them. The trouble with the church in the country is not, however, mainly the fault of the preachers. Much more influential than the preacher are those economic types who express the exploitation of land. The renter, the retired farmer, and the landlord are figures of greater influence upon the country church than preachers, good or bad. There is nothing in homiletics and nothing in the doctrines of any of our churches that matches the influence of a vicious system of farm ten- antry. None of our pastors has yet attained to the power over a country population which the landlord possesses who owns the land and does not live on it; who exacts the rent, but does not care for the people. In no part of this country is the condition so withering as that in which retired farmers live who have sold their land and taken money instead. These men are becoming poorer, because the value of money is less, while the land they owned is of greater value all the time. Right here is the trouble with the country church. It is the economic condition that is reflected in its present state. I can name other factors in the rural problem which are reflected in the condition of the church. The farmer in America is not well trained for his task. The schools in the country are training him for every other task than farming. They hold before his children the ideal of professional work and the salaries of professional men. They do not inculcate the ideals of a working and productive population. The THE COUNTRY CHURCH 73 result is our farmers are to-day succeeding because we have a rising market, the values of land are increasing, and the farmer can borrow more money every five years. The prices of produce are going up and the farmer can get a somewhat better income than he formerly could for his stuff; so we have the condition referred to by Sir Horace Plunkett, under which a people can thrive with bad methods so long as there be a rising market. But I call you to witness this day that the church is a faithful institution, and the Lord has made it so reliable an index of the people's actual welfare that it is unaffected by prices, but is affected only by values. The values of land in the country are going down, even though the prices go up. The farmer in Illinois who told me that when his land was producing ninety bushels of corn per year it was worth seventy-five dollars per acre, and admitted that now, when it produces forty-eight bushels of corn per year it is worth one hundred and seventy-five dollars per acre, gave a clear illustration of this condition. In his neighborhood the churches in the country were steadily going down, with the falling productiveness of the land. I will name just three more conditions in the country briefly. The churches are hopelessly divided. To that I need merely refer. Young people are unsupplied with recreative life. Wherever people work, there they are auto- matically inclined to play ; but the open country is expulsive with reference to recreation. Villages and towns, therefore, provide an over-plus of moving picture shows and cheap theatres, while the country shows a poverty of recreation and of normal social life. Worst of all, the country is without leadership. Farmers deny that any one is their leader. They refuse to recognize the leadership of any other farmer. In fifty-three communities in Pennsylvania where our churches are, we discovered only one in which a farmer was recognized as the leader among farmers, and we discovered sixteen in which the people by unanimous voice declared that no one is their leader. The state of the churches in these com- munities showed clearly that leadership is wholly lacking among them. Now you have asked me what the Department of Church and Country Life is doing to solve these problems? First of all, we are making sociological surveys of communities 74 THE COUNTRY CHURCH and counties. We begin by surveying communities in which our churches are, making as careful a study of all the churches as of our own, and describing the schools with the same thoroughness as we devote to the churches. The more work of this sort we have done, the more thoroughly we have found it necessary to do the work. Using, therefore, the methods prepared in part by university professors, we are now studying counties, covering the whole population of the county, sending a trained man into every community, whether there is a church of our faith and order or not, and recording for each community and then for the county as a whole the conditions which prevail among all the people. The condi- tions studied are economic, social, educational and religious. We record every experience that has an effect upon religious life, and we regard religious life as the resultant and equilibrium of all these effects. The church is the register, in our philosophy, of all the vital conditions in that community and that territory. We are thus providing a body of knowl- edge of country life on which a new theory and a new method of church work can be based. We are doing this for all the churches, partly because it is impossible to do for ours alone, and partly because it is the new kind of evangelism that we believe to be worth while. I need not say that we have no purpose of extending our own denomination by this kind of work. Our purpose is solely reconstruction and strengthen- ing of the churches already in existence. This body of knowledge will be of value as a basis of speeches, articles, books and other publications to be used by our men in supervision of churches. Are you aware that we have only one standard that now prevails, and one pro- gramme that is general among all the Protestant churches? That programme is the conversion of the individual soul. That is the only programme the churches have. It must be the first factor in any programme for the country church or for any church, but to be reduced to this one principle alone is to have a weak and disappearing church policy. The Protestantism that consists of mere evangelism is a Protestantism that cannot stand between Mormonism and Catholicism. This survey work will be followed up by platform work and publicity, and by every effort to bring about a new THE COUNTRY CHURCH 75 state of mind among ministers and church officers, on a basis of the results obtained by the study of churches in the country, and the conditions surrounding them, but it can only be made effective through supervision in the churches of trained and intelligent men, who recognize the need of reconstruction, and who use the knowledge obtained by these methods of research. The results of the surveys are graphically presented in charts, through pictures and by diagrams, by banners, streamers, mottoes and in every way by which these results condensed and made luminous can be put into the mind of the common man. Ordinary people will not read — indeed, I refuse to read myself — a statistical table. Life is too short for most of us to spend on somebody's array of figures. One business of our survey men is to put up their results into such graphic form that the ordinary inattentive church member has ability to understand them. In this way we can accom- plish something in the change of church opinion in the future. The second great element in our solution of the problem and the second factor in the revival of the country church is a programme of action. We will learn a great deal more by doing something in the country church than we will by thinking about it. A minimum of philosophy and a maximum of sendee will bring us to a better day. Now, there are only two organizations that get on in the country without supervision. In rural waters there are only two types of craft that float universally and go forward. These two are churches and schools. The grange is a type of the third, which is very general, but the efforts of the rural Y. M. C. A. to launch a local association have so far been futile. In con- trast to the county Y. M. C. A., which would not last three months without supervision, the country church is an organ- ization which you find it very hard to kill. When it is weakest, then it is most tenacious. This is the clue to the programme of action. Our business is to revive and recon- struct the church that is on the ground, and for this purpose our Department has in every public meeting of any conse- quence brought those present to the recognition of a pro- gramme and to an agreement as to common action along definite lines, to which I will devote just a word. 76 THE COUNTRY CHURCH The Department has in every gathering of ministers and church officers engaged the men and women present in a covenant of action. We name this "The Country Church Programme." These ministers, and officers, and Godly women go home pledged to promote scientific agriculture, to undertake the reconstruction of country schools, to fed- erate the churches — at least to act in co-operation with other churches and with community organizations ; to organize the recreative life of the young people on the basis of the com- munity and under the leadership of the church, and last and most practical of all, to undertake the increase of the minister's salary to meet his present necessities. Of course, they do not attain uniform success in these enterprises, but the volume of correspondence in our office shows that this programme of action is having effect. It is focusing the activities of the country churches upon certain lines of work, and it is giving to the aggressive spirits in our churches certain verified and social principles on which to work. Every one of these principles mentioned can be brilliantly illus- trated in instances of churches which, under guidance of this Department have undertaken the reconstruction of their work on these lines. For instance, there is a swiftly growing spirit of federa- tion of the churches. It does not look at all toward church union. At least, if it does make that mistake, it promptly retreats, and recognizes that the path is one of co-operation, not of consolidation. The present stage of this federation spirit is a growing geniality between ministers and churches in the community, especially those most closely associated and most likely to compete with one another. Numerous instances of this could be given, and it is fair to say that where this principle of federation is clearly recognized the churches are rapidly proceeding toward the experience of it. I could name ministers who are definitely reconstructing their communities, using the agricultural knowledge of the State schools for effecting a complete change in the life of their people. Numerous instances are known to you. No doubt the ministers who are using the recreative principle to reconstruct an old church are coming to have a fine philosophy of recreation, and to see clearly that its relations to religion are not casual, but essential. In some instances THE COUNTRY CHURCH 77 a group of people in the church have accomplished even the reconstruction of the common schools. Though this is the slowest reform of all, it is at the same time the most vital. The Department stands behind this programme of action with continual attention, distributing of leaflets, publishing of articles, suggesting and devising as to methods and fur- nishing resources by which to push the campaign of action and keep it informed and encouraged. We use another method in supplying post-graduate study for our ministers. The Department has offered to the theological seminaries, and when most of them declined the offer, to certain of the great universities, to assemble a group of selected ministers on condition that the institution will provide certain definite courses of study. These courses of study are just the courses demanded in our theological semi- naries by the students who want to go into the ministry. In a very few seminaries only have they been provided, and in most seminaries the demand of the students has been met either with a flat refusal or by referring the students to the nearby university. Students in Union Seminary to the num- ber of seventy-five, about one-fourth of the student body, go to Columbia for such courses as this. These courses being provided in response to the request of our Department by such institutions as Auburn Seminary, University of Wisconsin, Summer School of the South, University of Missouri, Grove City College, the Department pays a portion of the traveling expenses of the ministers selected and thus assembles a group of earnest men for post- graduate study, much needed and much desired. These ministers are selected by reason of some definite promise in their work and some particular genius in which they are distinguished. The result has been most happy, and prob- ably no method used by our Department is of greater influence in arousing and enlisting ministers for work in the country — happy, enthusiastic, intelligent work — than this method of Summer school training for country ministers. This revival of interest in the country church has three characteristics which must be mentioned for completeness. The chief of them is this : It is a revival that declares that the church is rooted in the economic life of the people. The sources of religious institutions are obviously deep down in. 78 THE COUNTRY CHURCH the vital experience of the people. The ways of the people in getting a living are the most influential causes of church institutions. The church, on its part, is the best register of the vital welfare of the people. It is an almost infallible index of the well-being, stated in its best terms, of any broad popula- tion we may study. This is the opinion of such great human- ists as Sir Horace Plunkett. This is the philosophy of Roosevelt's Country Life Commission. Before that Com- mission's report, with which Sir Horace had much to do, the country life movement was purely social. It was concerned with the degeneracy of the people who had for the longest time had church privileges in America — namely, the New England country people. It showed that the church philos- ophy of New England had been defective. Its most general human concern was with education. The early philosophers in New England, as Hart, Hutchins, Hyde, Dyke and Josiah Strong, studied the social life of the people and declared that the church should be a social centre. This is true and it is a part of the philosophy of the new revival, but it is incomplete. Since 1908 the country life movement has been economic in its basis. At first very cautiously and with much objection, but gradually with increasing acceptance the churches through their leaders have recognized that the church that is to prosper in the country must promote the economic well-being of country people. This well-being is stated in the terms used by Dean Bailey, of Cornell, whose ideals and those of the other agricultural leaders are such as are only satisfied in religious communities in the country; that the church is the inspiring and organizing centre, the minister is the local statesman, and the people a worshipping, God-fearing, thrifty, industrious Christian folk. Funda- mental to such a community is a satisfactory economic sys- tem. If the church is going to prosper in the country, we now clearly see it must promote and demand such economic welfare. The reason why this economic welfare is religious is seen in its relation to the poor. The American poor are the marginal people of the community; the people who do not own productive land or tools. The prosperity in the country community is conditioned upon their prospering. If they THE COUNTRY CHURCH 79 prosper, the community as a whole will prosper, and the churches will be maintained. These marginal people are the boys and girls of the community, the renting farmers, the farm hands and other persons on the edge of country life. The church will prosper which binds them into the texture of the community and makes them a part of a lasting and satisfactory country life. Another feature essential to this revival is its use of pub- licity. The reconstruction of religious thinking is so vital and so thorough that it cannot be wrought through church avenues alone. It can only be accomplished by appeal to the general public. If it were left to the churches, they never would change their mind or mend their ways. Therefore, our Department has deliberately appealed to the public from the very first. This is not a preference for the public, but it is a recognition that the service w T e are trying to render is something larger than ecclesiastical service. We are not merely doing church work. We are attempting the service of society. We therefore appeal to society. The influence of this method of publicity has been very great, and has registered itself in church and in religious changes. If what I have just said is true, that the church will prosper when the people prosper, then it logically follows that we who are attempting to better the prosperity of the people should appeal to the people. This has been done through the use of the agricultural press to which our Department sends regular contributions. We take much time and use much strength in writing for other than Presbyterian publications. We cheerfully lend our workers to colleges, universities, agricultural institutions and for lectures and other presentations of the topic by which we may reach the general public ; and we welcome the opportunity to address public conventions and conferences of a non-religious, and not even of an educational character, so long as they furnish an opportunity by which we may reach the general public. The last thing I want to say is that this is recognized very frankly as a kind of evangelism. Our own church has de- clared in favor of social service, but our own church has not defined social service. We are therefore working in the service of society, and we are preaching that the country 80 THE COUNTRY CHURCH church, and for that matter every church, that has to do with productive workers, should serve human society. We are telling the good news that the farmer and workingman are God's ministers. They are more divinely appointed than preachers and evangelists are, because they are serving the fundamental and initial purposes of the Heavenly Father — namely, to feed and clothe His children and to minister to their comfort. This is not a form of words with our Depart- ment, but we try to make it plain and sincere, and I think that this impression has been made throughout the country. In this evangelism the converts are not shocked into an assurance as to their own eternal future, but they are gal- vanized into a new conception of the use of their lives for the community. We are working for social conversions. I wish I could tell you some of the stories of the changed hearts of men, but I pride myself more than anything else upon a certain limited number of men of exceptional quality who have gone into the Christian church anew, with faith in the church and a belief that there they can accomplish the work for the service of mankind and the glory of God, to which they have given themselves outside the church and in some neutral, secular way. The first baptism of the spirit gives a man hope of eternal life. If he has not this hope, we can do nothing with him. But the evangelism in which we work is to give him the vision of the Kingdom which to-day comes, in which the Master now rules, and in which the spirit of God worketh when and where and how He pleaseth, to the glory of the Father, in this present world. Adjournment of Evening Session at 9:45 P. M.