The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

8. A Loyal Country Ministry, Adequately Trained and Supported

This is one of the ultimate factors in our problem, perhaps the most difficult of all. Leadership is always of utmost importance in social problems. A splendid leader often brings real success out of serious difficulties. There are hundreds of such splendid leaders in country parsonages to-day, and they deserve all the high appreciation and cordial recognition they have won. But when we consider our 70,000 rural ministers as a body, we find three things to be true: They are miserably paid. They are usually untrained. Their pastorates are too short to be really successful. The churches are of course more to blame for this condition than the ministers.

We must have a permanently loyal country ministry for life. Making the country ministry simply the stepping stone to the city church has been a most unfortunate custom even up to the present day. The country ministry must be recognized as a specialized ministry, fully as honorable as the city ministry, demanding just as fine and strong a man, – possibly even more of a man, for many a minister has succeeded in the city after failing in the country. The country minister must somehow get a vision of his great task as a community builder, like Johann Friedrich Oberlin, that greatest of country pastors. He must find an all-absorbing life-mission claiming all his powers and demanding his consecration as thoroughly and enthusiastically as the call to the foreign mission field. Then let him go into it for life, determined to do his part, a whole man’s part, in redeeming country life and making it, what it normally is, the best life in all the world to live. Staying year after year in the same parish is the secret of success in the case of most of the conspicuously successful country pastors. Only thus can a man really become the parson of the village, a person of dominant influence in all the affairs of the people.

This ideal suggestion of long country pastorates meets with two objections. Laymen are saying, “How can you expect us to keep a minister after he has said all he knows?” And some of the ministers will say, “How can you expect us to stay, on less than a living wage?” At present both objections are perfectly valid. Too many ministers are untrained men, and therefore fail to succeed for more than a year or two. And certainly an underpaid minister cannot be blamed for taking his family where he can support them respectably.

As near as can be determined, about 20 % of rural ministers the country over (including all denominations) are educated men; though probably not over 10 % of them have had a full professional training.34 They are about as successful as any other professional man can be who lacks his special training for his life work. There is a great demand for trained ministers. The writer receives very many more requests from churches in a year than he can furnish with men. Yet the theological seminaries are training few men for the rural churches. Most of the graduates go either to the cities or the villages, where there is a living wage. Dr. Warren H. Wilson figures that a country minister with a wife and three children, in order to educate his family, keep a team and provide $100 annual payment for insurance for his old age, must have at least $1,400 salary. There are ministers who are able to do this on less, – but not very much less. There certainly ought to be a minimum wage of $800 and a parsonage, or $1,000 cash, for every minister. A church paying less than this is simply stealing from the minister’s family. Churches unable to pay this minimum living wage ought to unite with a neighboring church or close their doors, except for itinerant preaching.35

In several denominations the plan of maintaining a minimum salary for their ministers is being attempted. We have space for a single illustration. The East Ohio Conference, Cleveland District, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, under the direction of Rev. N. W. Stroup, as district superintendent, has succeeded in raising the minimum to $750. It was estimated in advance that $2,500 would have to be raised by the stronger churches in the district to accomplish this result; but in the very first year only $1,000 of this sum was actually required. As soon as the movement was made public, many of the weaker churches developed courage and grit enough to raise their own pastor’s salary to a respectable figure, and maintained their self-respect. Other churches are expected to do the same next year.

At the writer’s urgent suggestion, in a public address last fall, a Michigan church, paying its minister only $350 a year, raised the salary to $800 and secured a bright young college graduate as pastor. They now report that it is just as easy to finance the church on the present self-respecting basis as it was to run a cheap church last year!

9. A Liberal Financial Policy

This reminds us very forcibly that one factor essential to country church success is a liberal financial policy. In the smaller country churches we seldom find any business policy, and no plan at all for the future. The most common method is the annual subscription paper, with special subscriptions for repairs or emergencies. The motive is apparently strict economy rather than efficiency. It never pays to run a cheap church, for it cheapens the whole enterprise. More and more the weekly-payment pledge system is coming into use and with it a careful planning of the budget at the beginning of the year, guided by an earnest purpose to keep the church business-like, the minister promptly paid, the property well in repair and the enterprise spiritually successful. Often the new consecration of the pocket-book has been the first symptom of a thorough-going revival.

10. Adequate Equipment

A large proportion of country churches are simply one-room buildings. This explains many failures. In order to serve the community at all adequately, the church must have social rooms for a variety of neighborhood purposes, and it must make provision for its Sunday school. About four-fifths of the boys and girls in the Sunday schools of America live in the rural districts. They should be given good rooms. Without an effective building for social and educational purposes, – a parish house or at least a vestry, – the country church is seriously handicapped. With a good equipment the church often becomes the social center for the whole neighborhood.

11. A Masculine Lay Leadership Developed and Trained

It takes more than a minister to make a church successful. The King’s Business requires MEN. Women are usually active and loyal. The men are often just as loyal but less active because of lack of opportunity. The most enthusiastic meetings the writer has attended for months were in a rural county in Michigan, a county without a trolley. The meetings were held for three days under the auspices of the Men and Religion Forward Movement and all the forty-five Protestant churches of the county were represented by ministers and laymen. The laymen outnumbered the ministers about ten to one and they showed the keenest interest in the proposition to make the work of religion in their county a man’s job.

Those men caught the vision of service, and every month during the winter, meetings led by laymen were held in every school house of that county, carrying the five-fold message of the great Men and Religion Movement into every rural neighborhood; the messages of personal evangelism, of definite Bible study, of world-wide missions, of social service to better their community, and constructive personal work to save their boys. This is a program of religious work for MEN. Only men can do it; but men can do it, with a little training and wise leadership. The results no man can foretell. But it must result in great blessing for the men and for their communities, and new efficiency and appreciation for their country churches.

12. A Community Survey to Discover Resources and Community Needs

Without multiplying further these factors which make for efficiency, we mention but one more. Until recently country churches have been conducted on the principle that “human nature is the same everywhere,” and “one country village is like all the rest.” But scientific agriculture has suggested to us that we should make a scientific approach to our church problem as well as to our soil problem. Country communities are not all alike, – far from it. Social, economic, moral, educational, political, personal conditions vary greatly in different localities. Churches miss their aim unless they study minutely these conditions. There is in progress now a religious survey of the entire state of Ohio. Quite a number of counties in Pennsylvania, New York, Missouri, Indiana and elsewhere have been carefully studied for religious purposes. Valuable reports of these studies are available as guides for similar work elsewhere. The best of this work has been done by the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions under Dr. W. H. Wilson’s direction.

The general purpose of the survey hardly needs to be defended. It is simply the application to the work of the church of the modern social method of finding the facts in order to prevent wasted effort, in order to utilize all available resources and minister to all real human needs. It augurs well for the church of the future.

We have every reason to hope that with the progress of the great Country Life Movement the Country Church is coming to a new day of usefulness; with people living under modern conditions, with local prosperity and progressive farming, with their communities well socialized and cooperating, with a community-serving spirit in the church, guided by a broad vision of service and program of usefulness; with united Christian forces and decreasing sectarianism; with a loyal country ministry adequately trained, and sustained by a liberal financial policy; with an adequate equipment making the church a social center; with an enthusiastic masculine lay leadership developed and guided by a community survey to undertake the work which will best serve the needs of their people, the Kingdom of Heaven will surely come. It sounds like the millennium! Perhaps it will be, when it comes! But in many respects we can see it coming, as, one after another, these factors come to stay. May God speed the day of the broadly efficient country church. It will mean the redemption of the country.

IV. Some Worthy Allies of the Country Church

The Country Sunday school

Foremost among the allies of the country church is the Sunday school. There are few churches that lack this most important auxiliary, and there are tens of thousands of independent schools for Bible study located in the open country where there are no churches or preachers at all. Often the Sunday school, being non-sectarian, unites all the people of the community, and is an institution of large influence.

Three-fourths of the total Sunday schools of the country are in the rural sections (villages under 2,500 population). They are much more representative of the population than are the city schools. They are usually really community institutions. Men of local influence preside as superintendents and many adults attend as regularly as the children. While the preachers come and go, and are usually non-residents anyway, Sunday school officers and teachers remain in the community as the permanent religious leaders. Thus the Sunday school is dignified as not merely a child’s institution but one that includes men and women of all ages and ministers to the deepest needs of all.

The Sunday school in the country is far more important relatively than it is in the town. In fact the country people in many places think more of their Sunday school than they do of the church. The Sunday school meets every Sunday of the year. It is a layman’s institution. But church services are held only when they can get a preacher; which does not average oftener than every other Sunday. On the average Sunday throughout the year, in two denominations only in the South, there are 17,000 churches without preaching services. But their Sunday schools are doubtless in session regularly. Sometimes the Bible school superintendent does not attend the preaching service even when there is one. His Sunday school is his church.

A careful religious survey of three typical counties in Indiana by field investigators of the Presbyterian church revealed the fact that the Sunday school is far from being a child’s institution, there being nearly as many members over 21 as under 14. The total enrollment was found to be divided into almost equal thirds, children under 14, adults over 21, and youth between those ages. There were more men in the Sunday schools than in the churches. 40 % of the church membership were males; while of the Sunday-school membership over 14, 45 % were males. Two-fifths of the teachers in these country Sunday schools were discovered to be men, – a much larger proportion than in the cities.

Country Sunday-school Teaching

With a vast opportunity, the country Sunday school really succeeds only moderately. There is great room for improvement in its methods. Occasionally you will find a country school conducted on as modern lines as the best in the city; but usually they are fully as defective as the local public schools, and for similar reasons. The state Sunday-school associations are making real progress in standardizing the schools, introducing semi-graded lessons and something of the modern system. But the teachers are usually untrained, though well-meaning, and teach mostly by rote. Stereotyped question and printed answer are consistently recited by the younger classes, without stirring more than surface interest. The older classes often make the lesson merely a point of departure and soon take to the well-worn fields of theological discussion on trite themes of personal hobbies. Or if the teacher happens to be fluent and the class more patient than talkative, he makes the teaching purely homiletic, and, like the apostles of old, “takes a text and then goes everywhere preaching the gospel!”

About 90 % of churches in the open country have only one room. This means utter lack of adequate Sunday-school equipment, and often ten to twenty classes jostling elbows in the same room. There is seldom intentional disorder, but the noise is often very distracting, as all the teachers indulge in loud talking simultaneously in order to be heard.

The country Sunday school surely has a great future. It has the field and the loyalty of its people. It is gradually being rescued from the monotony of fruitless routine. The teaching is becoming less a matter of parrot-like reciting and weak moralizing and more a matter of definite instruction. The teachers are here and there being trained for their task, not only in a better knowledge of the Bible but of boy life and girlhood at different stages. Definite courses of study are more and more introduced, planned to run through a series of years, culminating in a graduation at about the age of seventeen, with annual examinations for promotion; making due allowance for graduate classes and teacher training groups. So thorough is the work, in some places practically the entire population of a rural community is connected with the Sunday school.

Bible Study in the Country

It is an unfortunate fact that most Sunday-school quarterlies and lesson studies are produced in the city; yet the Bible itself is a book of rural life, with the exception of some of the writings of Paul. No wonder country folks appreciate it. As Dr. Franklin McElfresh well says, “The Bible sprang from the agonies of a shepherd’s soul, from the triumph of a herdsman’s faith, and the glory of a fisherman’s love. Its religion keeps close to the ground, and interprets the daily life of sincere men who live near to nature. One of the great days in the history of religion and liberty is on record when a vine-dresser named Amos stood up before the king of Israel to speak the burden of his soul. ‘Prophet,’ said he; ‘I am no prophet, only a plain farmer, but I came by God’s call to tell you the truth.’ This was the day-dawn of Hebrew prophecy.

“The Bible can best be interpreted in the country. It sprang from a pastoral people. It is full of the figures of the soil and the flock and the field. Its richest images are from the plain face of nature and the homely life of humble cottages.” Country Sunday schools need a lesson literature which can interpret to them the wonderful messages of the Book of books in terms of rural life; but meanwhile they are doing their best to discover these messages of life themselves.

The Rural Young Men’s Christian Association

A most valuable ally of the country church, in many parts of the country, is the Rural Young Men’s Christian Association, or the County Work, as it is usually called, because it is organized on the county basis. It is serving the interests of the young men and boys of the village and open country in a most effective way. It is successfully supplementing the work of the country churches where they are making their worst failures, and it is often uniting rival churches in a common cause, to save the boys; which results in a new sympathy and an ultimately united religious community.

It is developing young manhood in body, mind and spirit, furnishing wholesome social activities and recreation, conducting clean athletics, encouraging clean sport and pure fun, stimulating true ambition and intelligent, constructive life plans for the discontented farm boy, cleaning him up morally and opening his eyes to see new religious ideals.

Through well-directed groups for Bible study and through quiet personal work, the country boys are led to the discovery that religion is “a man’s job” and that it is essential to a well-rounded life; and they come to a frank and normal religious experience which profoundly changes their outlook on life and gives them a new life efficiency.

This Association work is no experiment. For years it has been widely successful in many states and is promoted by the State and International Committees on scientifically sound principles, based on a close study of rural sociology and tried out by years of patient endeavor by well-trained men who are specialists in their field. It is one of the most promising just now of all the various lines of Young Men’s Christian Association work; and it is certainly as much needed as any branch of their work in the cities.

Working Principles

The County Work aims to save the country boy and develop him for Christian citizenship, not by the use of costly equipment, but by personality, trained, consecrated leadership; not by institutions but by friendship; not by highly-paid local secretaries, but by enlisting and training volunteer service; not by patronage and coddling but by arousing and directing the boy’s own active interests; always remembering that by the grace of God the redemptive forces in each community must be the resident forces.

It is good policy to make the county the geographical unit of this effective work. The county is the social unit politically, industrially, commercially; it should also be the unit of religious endeavor, particularly in rural sections. A county-wide campaign for righteousness under the direction of a trained Association Secretary, usually a college trained man and an expert in rural life, is a great thing for any county. Every rural county in the land ought to be organized speedily to get the benefit of this business-like modern plan of Christian service. The difficulty is to discover, enlist and train the necessary leaders.

A Campaign of Rural Leadership

It is doubtful if there is any organization working for the betterment of rural life which has a better chance to serve the interests of the whole countryside to-day than the Rural Young Men’s Christian Association. It represents a united Christendom, being representative of all the churches and their right arm in social service. In a county where there may be twenty-nine varieties of churches, few of them strong enough for any aggressive work, and most of them mutually jealous and suspicious, the Rural Association Secretary comes in as a neutral, is soon welcome in churches of every name and gradually gains great influence. He is possibly a better trained man than most pastors in the county, and as he quietly develops his work they discover that he is a man who knows rural life, keeps abreast of the best agricultural science, is an expert in rural sociology and in the psychology of adolescence. He rapidly gathers the facts about the history and the present needs of the different townships in the county and constructs a policy for developing a finer local life, not only among the boys but the entire community.

If he stays long enough in the place, and is a man of the right sort, he speedily grows into a position of recognized leadership, gaining the confidence of the working farmers as a man of good sense, and of the professional men because he understands scientifically the underlying needs of the locality. Quite likely he is able to bring the ministers together in a county ministerial union of which he is apt to be made secretary or executive; and in some places he is able to federate most of the churches of many sects into a working federation for the religious and moral welfare of the county. Because he is a neutral, not working for the aggrandizement of any special church, though vitally interested in all and consecrated to the larger interests of the whole Kingdom of God, this man has the best possible leverage on the country church situation. He can advise weak churches about their difficulties; and when two or more local churches ought to be gradually united, he can often tactfully and successfully bring them together, as no other individual or group of individuals could possibly do. He can with the grace of God develop the spirit of cooperation among the people without which any hasty or mechanical plan for union of diverse churches would be but a temporary experiment.

Under the direction of his County Committee, which includes some fifteen to twenty of the most influential Christian men of the county, this Association Secretary is often able to set scores of local leaders at work and train them for the special service to which they are best adapted; thus utilizing local leadership which has been largely going to waste through modest self-depreciation.

Gradually the office of the rural secretary becomes a sort of clearing house for all the popular interests and organizations in the county, – churches, schools, granges, farmers’ institutes, boards of trade, medical societies, Sunday schools, boys’ clubs of every sort, athletic clubs, civic associations and village improvement societies. Thus these various agencies are brought together for cooperative service of the countryside, learning to work together harmoniously with modern methods of efficiency.36

The County Work of the Young Women’s Christian Association

So successful has been the work of the Rural Young Men’s Christian Association, it has encouraged the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association to begin Christian work among women and girls in the country villages. There is unquestionably a wide field and a great usefulness for this branch of the Young Women’s Association work. It ought to be rapidly promoted and doubtless will be as fast as consecrated young women can be trained for it and their challenge met by people of wealth to consecrate their money for this purpose. Efficiency would be gained by working in practical union with the rural Young Men’s Christian Associations.

The Primacy of the Church in the Country

In all these activities it must be borne in mind that the Young Men’s and the Young Women’s Christian Associations are but auxiliaries of the church. The secretary is frankly a servant of the church, of all the churches. The main reason for emphasizing these agencies for rural redemption is the present divided condition of religious forces in the country. Where the churches are well united and cooperative; or better, where the community has but one church, a strong, influential organization, there is no valid reason why the church itself may not rightly assume the position of leadership in all matters of community welfare. Community building is the great work of the church after all; developing and strengthening the vital issues of life in order that the community may become an efficient part of the great Kingdom of God. As rural Christendom becomes better united and better socialized, the church will come to its own again, as in the old days when it was the only outstanding institution in the community and rightly assumed the effective leadership in all matters vitally affecting the welfare of the people.