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 WHAT OUR COUNTRY 
 CHURCHES NEED 
 
540 Methodist Review [July 
 
 s 
 
 Art. III.— WHAT OUR COUNTRY CHURCHES NEED 1 
 
 I. Before it can be said that our country churches need any- 
 thing it must be shown that society needs the country churches. 
 Some people think there is no place for country churches. They 
 are said to be out of date. They have done their work. Like 
 worn out carriages or dilapidated buildings, they are not worth 
 the space they occupy. The sooner they are disposed of the better. 
 Some expert students of social problems hold just this opinion. 
 Edward Pearson Pressey says that the churches are hopeless and 
 helpless. He thinks that if there is any place for the country 
 church it must be greatly supplemented by an idealistic system 
 of industrial and domestic education as represented by his New 
 Clairvaux, or arts and crafts school at Montague, Massachusetts. 
 This is a Utopian combination of home, factory, farm, an ideal 
 town organization, and a school of trades and sciences. Rollin 
 Lynde Hartt seems to believe that the usual form of the church 
 may well be displaced by the country social settlement with reli- 
 gious features. Such a settlement would be a combination of 
 farm, factory, hotel, cooperative store, library, and a bureau of 
 social research and instruction. Something like his idea is 
 embodied in the Church Settlement Association of New Hamp- 
 shire, at Elmwood, near Concord. The theories of Pressey and 
 Hartt certainly have great suggestive and educative value. But 
 while Pressey's is as unpractical — even his experimental enter- 
 prise — as would be the effort to raise America's wheat crop in 
 New England greenhouses, there are only two difficulties with 
 Hartt's idea. In the first place, it absolutely cannot be realized, 
 and, in the second place, we already have what is better. One 
 might as well expect to plant and grow prosperous cities, like the 
 forty best in the United States, in Sahara Desert as to make a 
 success of extensive social settlements in decadent country towns 
 which, for the most part, ought never to have been anything but 
 
 1 A discussion based upon a study of the country church problem made by the author 
 under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, Department of Economics 
 and Sociology to which acknowledgment is made for the use of data. 
 
1907] What Our Country Churches Need 541 
 
 productive timber orchards. On the other hand, in towns that 
 ought to live the usual agencies of church, school, grange, club, 
 town library, and the various recreational and commercial or 
 industrial organizations, all in normal interaction, are doing more 
 to make rural society large, beautiful, and worthily human than 
 could be possible for any scheme not of the people's own choosing. 
 Social evolution, as a method of interpreting social facts, cannot 
 do everything, but it ought to teach one that radical theories cannot 
 cause the sun to rise at midnight. Jewell D wight Hillis, of 
 Brooklyn, and many others believe that the rural institutional 
 cathedral church ought to, and will in time, take the place of our 
 country churches in their ordinary form. This would seem a 
 consummation devoutly to be wished. Perhaps this will actually 
 mark the program of the development of the largest and most 
 potent stream of organized rural Christianity. In regard to the 
 spiritual nature and work of the church it would have the advan- 
 tage of keeping the emphasis in the right place. The personal 
 factor would not be betrayed, for there would seem to be great 
 practical wisdom in having a senior preacher for expert leader- 
 ship and his assistant pastors and deaconesses for more direct 
 personal service to the remotest country neighborhood and home. 
 Such suggestions and experiments are of great worth to rural 
 religious work and life. They are a timely rebuke to some dead 
 rural churches. But with the rapid increase in our communities 
 of the Grange, the Young Men's Christian Association, the fra- 
 ternal lodges and literary clubs, farmers' institutes, and village 
 improvement societies, to say nothing of the work of improved 
 schools and numerous town libraries and the influence of the rural 
 telephone and trolley, free mail delivery, and the increased circula- 
 tion of the daily press, I believe that the country church is less 
 and less called upon to do organized social work. When rural 
 society becomes well adjusted to the responsibilities of the new 
 industrial type of life even modest country institutional churches 
 will not be very common. The successful country church today 
 is the one that knows how to be a consistent church, true to its 
 Christian professions, realizing its essential moral mission to the 
 whole of society, minding its own spiritual and ethical affairs first 
 
542 Methodist Review [July 
 
 of all, and then strong enough and sensible enough to cooperate) 
 for the church is a social institution, with other social institutions 
 that stand for any aspect whatever, however secular, of the king- 
 dom of God among men. Whatever form or name it may take, 
 the country church of the future will be more and more specialized 
 as it becomes more and more alive to the spiritual and ethical 
 enlightenment and leadership of the complete mass of rural society. 
 But what a few students and writers say or reflect against the 
 church is of slight importance. What should give us deeper con- 
 cern is the attitude of the people as a whole. Too many people 
 in most of our towns by their habits of not attending church are 
 saying that the church is no good. They do not contribute of their 
 means toward the support of the church. Their indifference 
 deprives them of the weekly blessing of changing their clothes. 
 They need moral quickening as much as though they lived in the 
 wilds of Africa. In too many cases distance from the church or 
 the low moral standards of church people in the common walks of 
 life are no restraint to lives of open immorality and shame. It 
 would be a relief if the lukewarmness of some might be awakened 
 to even ribald opposition. One of the best helpers in church work 
 I ever knew was an uncomfortable skeptic who would hail people 
 on the street to curse and ridicule union revival services then in 
 progress. Some people who grind their unhappy lives away for 
 the almighty dollar, if their minds were not as small as their 
 souls, might well be asked, "What would real estate be worth in 
 Sodom ?" The graft of professional mendicants upon the charities 
 of city rescue missions is not so exasperating as to have well-to-do 
 country people, as is often the case, demand Christian burial for 
 the members of their families at the expense of time, patient care, 
 and sometimes travel to distant places on the part of faithful 
 ministers, who would be harshly criticised if they did not show 
 the general culture and special training worth valuable years in the 
 schools and thousands of money, and yet these ungrateful, mis- 
 placed souls help the church or parson directly or indirectly by 
 never a cent. But all this is a matter of cultivation, of civiliza- 
 tion, in which the church should be the leader. She should not 
 complain because there is something yet for her to do. If what 
 
1907] What Our Country Churches Need 543 
 
 a few social workers say is a rebuke to dead churches, the inaction 
 of multitudes of perverse minds should be a Macedonian cry to 
 every church that knows the first principles of Christian living. 
 
 But what about the multitudes of ministers, and other once 
 faithful and intelligent workers in the churches, who have become 
 discouraged, losing faith in the churches? It is very easy for 
 young men of scholarly inclinations, who must of necessity drink 
 deeply at the fountains of history, science, philosophy, and the- 
 ology in lives of strenuous devotion to books and theories, to allow 
 knowledge to crowd experience from its proper place, devotion to 
 the truth of theology to leave no room for the service of love, the 
 religion of idealism to dethrone the happy fruition of the redemp- 
 tion of an infinite Christ. This is a suggestion of the way in 
 which some students and preachers may have lost grip upon them- 
 selves, so that the trellis of thought stands cold and alone without 
 the beauty of the living vine. of joyous, throbbing reality. For- 
 getting the gospel of Paul and Luther, Chalmers and Wesley, 
 Kingsley and Spurgeon, they have preached theories, or a philoso- 
 phy that cannot regenerate, in the place of a gospel that inter^ 
 prets life as love, makes manhood complete, and society a para- 
 dise. It is no wonder that when preachers and people forsake 
 personal Christian service, and have more concern for "salvation 
 by statistics" than for regeneration through a personal Christ, 
 they have the opportunity of reading and listening to poetic essays 
 in congregations more and more wooden with empty benches. Is 
 it any wonder that such men — and they are laymen as well as 
 clergymen — lose faith in and leave the churches they have thus 
 devitalized? Philosophy and science are not to be despised in 
 the service of the church, but they must be crowned by the golden 
 fruits of faith. But there is a more practical side to this matter. 
 It comes to us as the supreme practical challenge of the church 
 in this age. Whenever a preacher says, "I am tempted to leave 
 the ministry, because I seem unable to do the work of a minister," 
 it makes a person both angry and ambitious. He is angry that 
 the theological seminaries do not teach sociology as well as the- 
 ology, about men and the world as well as about God and heaven. 
 But nothing is more strikingly true, and as pathetic as true, than 
 
544 Methodist Review [July 
 
 that our theological faculties cannot teach what nobody knows. 
 And then one is fired with ambition to know the problem in a 
 large, true way, as no one yet can really profess to have gained such 
 knowledge. Theology cannot presume to teach us all that is essen- 
 tial to be known about the church, which is so largely a human 
 organization. Sociology cannot formulate all of our knowledge 
 concerning the church, the largest concerns of which are realized 
 only in the skies. Social evolution is necessary as a method of 
 study — though it is limited, for neither men nor churches can be 
 measured by a knowledge of their environment. So each dis- 
 couraged worker must follow his best light, and work and wait, 
 with zeal and patience, through the dawning hours of the truer 
 interpretation. If the need of the country churches is to be 
 measured by the possibilities that lie in them, then that need is 
 very great. More than one half of the total population of the 
 United States will have their religious and moral instruction and 
 leadership directly or indirectly from the country churches or they 
 must remain destitute. Aside from this fact it must not be for- 
 gotten that the ethical quality of modern city life depends to a 
 very large extent upon the quality of manhood and womanhood 
 our country parishes are producing. It is true that both the cream 
 and the scum of the country go to the city. Our country 
 churches feed the city churches, and at the same time our rural 
 weaklings and degenerates fill the city saloons, and replenish the 
 slums, and greatly enhance the urban problem of the submerged 
 tenth. I believe there is no other institution that actually has, 
 in spite of its faults and misfortunes, so great a potentiality, and 
 thus mission and responsibility, in maintaining the moral integrity 
 of the American people as the country church. 
 
 II. In the next place it is useless to talk about what our coun- 
 try churches need to make them entirely efficient if it can be 
 shown that they have no needs and are not deficient in results. 
 If a person is in perfect health and is doing his full amount of 
 work, he certainly needs no physician. There are many people 
 and preachers who think that if church attendance remains con- 
 stant and there are no losses in church membership, the churches 
 are all right. Perhaps some will be so fair as to set their standard 
 
1907] What Our Country Churches Need 545 
 
 at maintaining a constant relation between church membership and 
 the population of the town. Viewed from this standpoint there 
 are indeed many churches that are not failing in their hold upon 
 the people. But the question is, Are they making positive gains ? 
 To be satisfied with being equal to the past is lazy nonsense in 
 such a progressive age as ours. And then the church is not made 
 responsible for a select part of society, but for the whole of it. 
 
 Let us look somewhat carefully at both sides of this question 
 of the progress of the church. On the side of progress let us be 
 encouraged that one presiding elder has recently said in regard 
 to New England Methodism : "Let me state as a profound con- 
 viction that our times are not worse than former times." But 
 should we not be profoundly stirred because they are not much 
 better than former times ? Indeed there are some indications of 
 healthy increase. The Rev. W. F. English, Ph.D., of Connecti- 
 cut, has recently said: "While naturally and inevitably some 
 churches have lost in members and opportunity for service, the 
 church membership in relation to population has gained, a more 
 intensive spiritual culture has been promoted, and a new country 
 church has been developed by the very stress of circumstances," 
 After a somewhat extensive comparative study of figures and of 
 expert opinions I am convinced that the social problem of the 
 church today in New England is not so great as at any previous 
 time in fifty years. In making this statement the statistics of 
 church membership and attendance are considered as the chief 
 measure of the problem. In spite of these encouraging things 
 there is an immense danger of a too easy optimism. There are 
 still as many tasks as rewards for the rural churches. Let those 
 listen to the following remarks who think we are ready for a 
 millennial jubilee. The Rev. C. E. Hayward says in Institutional 
 Work for the Country Church: "But few country churches can 
 be said to be in a flourishing condition ; the majority are hardly 
 holding their own, some are losing ground, all are struggling 
 heroically for life, but the tide is against them ; something must 
 be done. In fact, some country churches have a constituency so 
 heterogeneous that it becomes practically a mission field." The 
 Rev. Henry Fairbanks, Ph.D., has said of rural conditions, after 
 
 36 
 
546 Methodist Review [July 
 
 a very extensive first-hand investigation: "The danger of relapse 
 into barbarism in these districts is not due to immigration. Those 
 now growing up in the mountain towns will go out to be leaders 
 of men, and it is a fact of fearful import that the gospel is not 
 reaching them. A majority of our people are never at church. 
 Of those living two miles or more from church, only about one 
 third attend church. In the rural districts of New England and 
 New York, from which the strongest men in the cities and West 
 are coming, more than half of the people are not only unreached 
 but are absolutely unapproached by any direct Christian efforts." 
 President Hyde, of Bowdoin College, said a few years since in 
 an article entitled "Impending Paganism in New England" : 
 "New England today is confronted with the danger that the coun- 
 try village will be the first to lapse from vital Christianity ; . . . 
 that rusticity will again become synonymous with godlessness and 
 superstition." In the summer of 1905 I found that in one New 
 England state, in fifteen average rural towns, having a total of 
 twenty-five churches, the average church attendance was only 13.7 
 per cent of the town population. Less than one seventh of the 
 people were regularly at church ! The average church attendance 
 in four urban towns, one of them being the state capital, was 33 
 per cent of the total population. These figures certainly are not 
 encouraging. I think we are ready to grant that the country 
 needs the churches, they being the sole means, directly or 
 indirectly, in the moral and religious quickening and cultivation 
 of the people. Neither will we deny that the churches themselves 
 need to be greatly reenforced before they will be able to perform 
 their whole mission — that of spiritualizing rural society. 
 
 III. Now we are ready to ask the question, What do the 
 country churches so need that, if this were supplied, they would 
 be able to fulfill their complete mission ? By this question we 
 mean to inquire for the one primary need of the churches. The 
 first answer that will usually be given to this question is that 
 more money is the great need of the rural churches. The mem- 
 bers of all churches need their societies to be free from debt, or 
 else they need to pay larger salaries to better preachers. In Ver- 
 mont five sevenths of the demand for church union and federation 
 
1907] What Our Country Churches Need 547 
 
 arises from economic necessity. In one district in New England 
 I found eighteen out of twenty average rural clergymen positively 
 limited in their usefulness by inadequate financial support. The 
 need of money is emphasized when faithful people cannot pay as 
 much as they wish toward the church, and too often those who are 
 abundantly able to give are without the inclination. But the 
 financial need of country churches is not primary, however neces- 
 sary. It is possible that churches with the most money may 
 be the least helpful to society. Poor churches and people alike 
 may be the richest in faith, good works, and noble characters. 
 The mission of the church being what it is, and human nature 
 being as it is, the usefulness of the church is sure not to increase 
 in proportion to the increase of its money. Large endowments 
 for country churches are not advisable. Francis Minton has said 
 of the rural endowments of England : "Evidence appears to lead 
 to the conclusion that endowments are a mistake. The endow- 
 ment artificially keeps the institution alive, when, if left to the 
 natural environment, it would die. Better that it should die in 
 the natural course than to outlive its usefulness." It matters not 
 how destitute and in distress our churches and ministers may be, 
 money is at best only an incidental necessity and not a primary 
 requirement. There is something else, which, if it is supplied, 
 the money problem will be solved. A great many people believe 
 that the primary need of country churches is an improved clergy. 
 Some have said: "Give us an adequate clergy and our churches 
 will be all right ; otherwise not." I will agree with the "other- 
 wise not," but we cannot put the full responsibility of successful 
 churches upon the shoulders of the ministers, especially when 90 
 per cent of them do not have enough upon which to live. Someone 
 has said that the great need of the churches is no ministers at all, 
 at least until the churches can learn that some ministers are first 
 men, then ministers. A Catholic woman once told her little girl, 
 speaking of a certain pastor : "He is not a man, he's a minister." 
 If a mistaken churchism had not been responsible for the remark, 
 it would have been an insult. The hardest thing that the ministry 
 as a class has to endure is that they are treated artificially, as 
 though they were trying to do a work that is aside from normal 
 
648 Methodist Review [July 
 
 human needs. Bishop Hendrix is doubtless right in saying that 
 "the honor of the temple has never survived the honor of the 
 priest." The first responsibility of spiritual and social leadership 
 in the church rests with the clergymen. But where are the minis- 
 ters to come from ? There is as yet no patent process for the 
 manufacture of ministers to order and warranted to suit. Minis- 
 ters grow, like other men, in the homes of the people. The 
 church, after all, is the father of its clergy. It is doubtless true 
 that the ministry is the chief channel through which the funda- 
 mental need of the country churches is to be supplied. "But 
 we cannot have churches without people," someone is sure to say. 
 This statement is not so trite as it may at first seem. There are 
 several causes which are right; and even beneficial in their larger 
 influence, even though their first effect is to rob the churches of 
 their people. For instance, the centralization of industry has 
 drawn the people from the smaller to the larger towns, and aban- 
 doned towns certainly cannot have full churches. The freedom 
 in Protestantism of the private interpretation of revelation has 
 led to the rise of the denominations, and where churches multiply 
 faster than the people the process of division is inevitable. But 
 in the main the trouble is not that there are not enough people 
 for the churches in rural communities, for, as a rule, half of the 
 rural people are even now outside of the churches. There is 
 another side to this matter. Since it is the work of the church 
 to give the religious character to all the members of rural society, 
 and to spiritualize all social forces, it is possible for the social 
 problem of the church to be very great even though all the people 
 were regular church attendants. Quantity is not always the 
 measure of quality. Although there can be no church without 
 people, there is something which the church, as a nucleus of peo- 
 ple, may have in order that to draw and hold and help will be the 
 rule and not the exception. There are various specialized forms 
 of social, educational, and religious enterprise that are sometimes 
 advocated as sufficient, each in itself, for the solution of all church 
 problems. For instance, one specialist may stand for evangelism, 
 as though this alone would bring all churches to Christian com- 
 pleteness without the use of other forms of enterprise. Another 
 
1907] What Our wintry Churches Need 549 
 
 may think that church federation is the one thing needful. The 
 third believes in the so-called institutional activities as sufficient 
 to unite earth and heaven. Each of these alone may have been 
 seen to realize in some church the highest ends this side of heaven, 
 but such could happen only when the other needs of the church 
 were already provided. The specialist has his place so long as 
 he does not become a monopolist; then life is too large for his 
 cistern, and he becomes a relic. 
 
 After all, the one simple primary need of the church today 
 is hardly a need on the part of the church at all. The church, 
 though it has a mission, is no mendicant. The need is on the 
 part of the people, especially those who are outside of the churches, 
 that they wake up to a proper sense of values. If a half, or more, 
 of the rural population are not themselves a part of the church, it 
 is because they are like the woman who grumbles because the 
 schools do not educate her children when she keeps them at work 
 all of every day in her own back yard. It is the old fallacy of 
 the blind man's complaining because the sun does not shine. The 
 man who calls the church "a graft on society for the support of 
 the ministry" is an impudent vagabond, too mean to eat the feast 
 of his life when it is already set before him. He forgets that 
 the church is the only voluntary institution which deals in the 
 richest values of two worlds. He is too busy with the muck rake 
 to enjoy the beautiful flowers that he expects will grow where he 
 has planted no seed. But they are already fragrant in his neigh- 
 bor's garden. He has not waked up to a proper sense of values. 
 When one truly becomes alive to the correct sense of values he 
 just then begins to appreciate what the church really is. "Values" 
 is just the word we want. The church is a fellowship of men in 
 the use and enjoyment of religious and ethical values. In this 
 economic age we ought to be able to understand the church when 
 it is thus defined. Economics treats of the adjustment of life to 
 the wherewithal of life. The economics of the church treats of 
 the wherewithal of the spiritual life in the terms of moral and 
 religious values, the only eternal commodities that have a price. 
 When we pay for the church with time and cash, if we appreciate 
 what we are doing, we are only investing in one set of values in 
 
550 Methodist Review [July 
 
 the same way as, at the real estate market, the playhouse or the 
 university, we invest in other sets of values. How hard and yet 
 how easy is the task of appreciation! Now we can relate the 
 things which seem to the things which are ; things partial to the 
 one whole. The church does not primarily need money, but the 
 people need appreciation, or the proper sense of values. There 
 need be no trouble because the minister lives at the expense of the 
 people when it is seen that he is their servant. He creates their 
 highest joys by interpreting the values that abide. The people 
 will not be divorced from the church when they can realize that 
 it is the mediator of the highest powers of character. The people 
 need the church infinitely more than the church needs the people. 
 Our willful sinning keeps us from the throne room of the King. 
 This is as true negatively as positively. It as naturally faces the 
 problem as the ideal. The great problem is that the church too 
 often is not the church — a problem in reality. If there was an 
 appreciation and appropriation of the values for which the true 
 church stands the study of the genius loci of so-called churches 
 would not so often reveal that they were mere social clubs, stand- 
 ing for anything and everything but spiritual excellence in the 
 lives of men. The problem of leadership would be solved. Men 
 would seek their guides from among their own number in the 
 choice spirits that are tuned by nature, by training, and by grace 
 to catch the music of the world of which the present is only an 
 echo. Sectarian ambition, though not necessarily denominational 
 organization, would soon give place to the true spirit of brother- 
 hood in service. And that service would be so free, so helpful 
 and whole-hearted that the machinery of the church would soon 
 fade into the established habits of mankind in the arts of mutual 
 love. The world is nearly as responsible for such an awakening 
 as can be the militant church. The dissatisfied classes ought to 
 learn by experience that they have followed the wrong god long 
 enough.