EMPTY CHURCHES
_By the Same Author_
RURAL LIFE
RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS
EMPTY CHURCHES
_THE RURAL-URBAN DILEMMA_
BY
CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN
IN CHARGE OF THE DIVISION OF FARM POPULATION AND RURAL LIFE,
BUREAU OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS,
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.
[Illustration]
THE CENTURY CO.
_New York & London_
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
_In Memory of_
MY FATHER AND MOTHER
_Who Spent Their Lives
In Loving Ministration in
Country Parishes_
PREFACE
This little book invites you to read it at a single sitting. If read
later, a section at a time, in the light of the whole story, it will
give you a better account of itself. It is, I frankly acknowledge,
written out of emotion. It does not therefore, I fear, contain all the
words it implies--half the time falling into symbols and incidents to
force a meaning; half the time taking for granted that you do not care
to open or close every side gate along the way.
The view of a layman, as this easily betrays itself to be, may prove
something of a shock to the rank and file of the clergy; but it will
serve, at least, to show that a section of laymen take religion more
seriously after all than they do economics, which forms their daily
adventure. Deep in our hearts, many of us know that business is the
great masculine sport of the age; and in comparison, the rôle of
the priest and pastor and the function of the church lie in the far
different realm of the heroic. If I seem in this essay to expect too
much of the church and too much of the preacher, my only apology is my
inability to read into the Four Gospels, that stand on my desk along
with the other tools of life and work, a philosophy of ease or of
complacent _laissez faire_.
Although a confirmed lover of the country, the farm, the farmer and
his children, I am none the less a firm believer in the city--its
necessity, function, and destiny. Rural social welfare, as I see it,
is of utmost concern to the American city. This is why empty churches
along the countryside bring tragedy to city and country alike. This
is why ecclesiastical statesmen should go to the country and see
with their own eyes the havoc wrought upon the farmer’s family by
competitive religion among Protestants.
And this is all the little book sets out to do--to take everybody to
the rural communities with wide-open eyes, to see the empty churches,
the children without God, the farm tenants without religion, the
parsons on the run for the city, and the beginnings of a new type of
rural church.
I wish gratefully to acknowledge my indebtedness in this essay to
the staff of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, New
York City, upon whose authoritative statements I have much relied.
To the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, I desire to express
appreciation for their kindness in allowing me to reproduce here
materials which have appeared in “The Country Gentleman” during the
past year.
C. J. GALPIN.
March, 1925.
EMPTY CHURCHES
EMPTY CHURCHES
CHAPTER I
Recently, in a cross-roads country church, a minister of the Gospel,
underpaid, somewhat shabby, but eager and inspired, a man with a
message to give, stood before his congregation to present that message.
The flame of inspiration in his haggard young face flickered and died
as he looked down at the scanty congregation assembled before him to
hear the Word of God. At a glance he counted his handful of hearers.
Six.
Through a window on one side of the little church, he could see
two other meeting-houses nestling in the curve of the road. Through
a window on the other side, he looked out at a third--four country
churches of four Christian denominations, almost identical in doctrine,
there within two stone’s-throws of one another.
In three of these churches, including his own, he knew that the members
of the congregation might be counted upon the fingers of each pastor’s
two hands. The third church was closed that day; its flock could afford
only an occasional shepherd.
In all four of those churches put together, not one fair-sized
congregation. In all four, not one pastor paid a salary large enough to
enable him to live on his income as a minister. In all four, men and
women taxed by religion beyond their ability to pay, yet unable to
support their church without outside aid.
_Jealous Denominations_
The young minister thought with pain of other sections of the country
through which he had traveled all day without seeing one church of any
denomination. He knew that an appalling percentage of farm communities
throughout the United States were entirely without churches, that
thousands of children, hundreds of their elders, had never listened to
the preaching of the Gospel. Yet here there were four churches at the
country cross-roads!
That afternoon that young pastor wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain
and bitterness, but also in hope, in earnest desire to get the facts
before the nation:
I saw in the paper the other day some mention of the chief rural
problems of the United States. May I call your attention to what
ministers in every country district regard as the stiffest problem
known to them and to their people? I refer to the problem of the
competitive religion, which affects not only pastors, but the entire
rural population, financially and spiritually, as well. The spiritual
rivalry set in motion by well-meaning home-mission boards and zealous
and jealous denominations is undermining the present and the future
welfare of the country church by ignoring the law of supply and
demand. If you can suggest any solution for this great problem, we
shall all be grateful.
The case was in no way overstated by this young man. It is quite
true that there are few, if any, greater rural problems to-day than
the problem of the country church. It is undeniable that any honest
student of conditions in rural churches is confronted by staggering
and depressing statistics of overchurching and underattendance in some
sections, and of entire lack of attendance due to no churching at all
in others.
Any map that showed the present rural church distribution of the United
States would be alarmingly reminiscent of a map of a country with large
areas of sterile famine-land. Nine persons out of every hundred in
rural America can not get to church because there is no church for them
to attend. This means that one seventh of all the rural communities of
the United States are entirely without Protestant churches. Pathetic
reports of the spiritual hunger of these land dwellers, living in a
Christian nation yet entirely shut off from Christian organization of
every kind, come from these communities.
“No Protestant sermon has ever been preached in this locality,” is one
S O S sent out from a neighborhood of two hundred persons. “Not a child
in this district has ever attended Sunday-school,” deprecates another
community of approximately the same size. “This back-to-the-land
movement is fine, but why should loyal land dwellers have to condemn
their children to heathenry?” demands a distracted mother, in a remote
section of a Western State. “My children are growing up to be little
savages, as far as religion is concerned. They have never been inside a
church in their lives, and they don’t know what Sunday-school means.”
Only one fifth of the rural population goes to church.
Two fifths of the rural churches of the country are standing still or
losing ground.
A quarter of all rural churches have no Sunday-school.
One fifth of all rural churches are kept alive by home-mission aid. Of
these subsidized churches, a large number are in active competition
with churches of very similar doctrines.
Seven out of every ten rural churches have only a fraction of a pastor
apiece.
One third of all rural pastors receive so low a salary that they can
live only by working at some other occupation.
One half of the rural churches of the country make an annual gain in
membership of as much as 10 per cent.
In striking contrast to this churchless seventh of the country, are
the other six sevenths of rural America, many of them so overchurched
that they are crying out for relief from the burdens the churches
are laying upon them. There are ten times as many churches for every
thousand persons in some of the rural districts of the United States as
there are in New York City. Yet the percentage of attendance for every
thousand persons is slightly lower in these rural sections than it is
even in New York. Obviously, such a showing indicates a startling lack
of system in the distribution of rural churches, a woeful waste of the
religious potentialities of the country.
Recently, a thorough survey of the rural church problem of the United
States was made for the first time in the history of the country, under
the direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund de S. Brunner, of the Institute
of Social and Religious Research, of New York. Some of the statistics
obtained by them are presented in the foregoing paragraphs.
These facts, of course, offer a severe shock to those who have the
little white church of the countryside enshrined in memory along with
the little red school-house. We have fallen into the rut of taking it
for granted that our country churches not only keep pace with the best
religious life of the nation, but even stay a step or two in advance,
if not in theology, at least in interest in godly things and in piety.
We have come to think of country folk as the true church-goers of the
United States. To this sentimental point of view the facts stated offer
a true affront.
_Fewer Church-goers_
There are to-day approximately 101,000 rural churches in the United
States. A long time ago, when there were only a hundred such churches,
virtually the entire country population attended them. Some time
later, when there were a thousand churches of the kind, the average
of attendance was still exceedingly high. But of recent years the
percentage of rural church-goers has almost seemed to be in an inverse
ratio to the increase in churches. One out of every five is not a
showing that would have brought joy to the Puritan Fathers. What is the
reason for this precarious situation in the rural churches of our
nation? Does it indicate that our country population is made up of a
less God-fearing folk than in former years? Does it demonstrate that
religion is less near to the hearts of the farm workers of the United
States than is true of its city dwellers? Or are these conditions the
logical outgrowth of a faulty system, the inevitable result of a church
distribution spiritually and economically unsound?
More than one thing must be taken into consideration in any fair-minded
attempt to answer these questions. For instance, there is the fact that
during the past few years the number of tenant-farmers in the United
States has steadily increased, until now thirty-eight per cent. of the
farms are tenant operated, most often on the basis of the one-year
lease. Any fact that tends to make the farmer more or less a transient
in the community naturally deters him from forming social or religious
relationships.
Another reason frequently given for the low average of rural church
attendance is that so high a percentage--nearly 30 per cent.--of
the nation’s land workers are new Americans, the foreign-born, or
the children of the foreign-born. There are States, such as North
Dakota, where nearly every other farmer belongs to other than American
nativity, and whole sections of the country, as in the Middle West,
where foreigners are in excess of two-fifths of the population. It is
estimated that at the present time more than fifty per cent. of these
people are unministered to by any church, Catholic or Protestant. Where
anything like an earnest and comprehensive attempt has been made by
churches to be of aid to them, as among the Mexicans of California, it
has been marked by astonishing results. Then why have the churches done
practically nothing for the foreign-born in rural sections? If the new
American can make good on the land, is it too much to ask the church to
make good with the new American?
When I hear it said that no one is really interested in religion any
more, I cannot help thinking of an elderly Yankee farmer in the State
of Vermont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of our President, a man who
talks little about religion, but who for years has given virtually
all his leisure time, and a considerable slice of time not leisure at
all, to keeping alive the little white church near his farm at Plymouth
Notch. He hauls the wood from his own land that the congregation of
that little church may listen in comfort to the Word of God; he even, I
am told, does the janitor work himself, since the church has no funds
for a janitor. There is nothing especially remarkable in this. There
are thousands of such men all over our country, men to whom the church
is a thing to make sacrifices for, to keep alive at whatever cost.
But in many districts it really seems that the fewer churches a county
is able to afford, the more it is apt to have. Out of the 211 churches
financially aided by home-missions societies in several counties where
intensive studies were made by the Institute of Social and Religious
Research, I am told that it was found that 149 of these churches could
have been dispensed with without essential loss to anyone. All but
thirty-four were competitive.
_Untrained Country Preachers_
Another grave charge is made against the church to-day in our country
districts. Farmers feel that they are neglected by the ministers of
their churches.
It is also charged that many rural pastors lack both adequate training
and ability for their high calling. The real marvel is that so many of
these men are of the high type they are.
It has to be admitted that there is ground for the charge of
incompetency among some of the rural pastors of the United States.
These men, it is true, are most inadequately prepared for their work.
How are they to afford more training for a calling which will never
pay them any returns upon it? That these men can develop into able
preachers has been demonstrated by those who have had the opportunity
to complete their courses in the summer school for ministers,
inaugurated, I believe, by the Presbyterian Board and now conducted by
several denominations. But most of them do not have this chance.
It is competitive religion that is largely responsible for these two
dangerous factors in rural religious life--the non-resident pastor,
too occupied to be a true spiritual shepherd; and the incompetent
pastor, too incapable to be a leader of his people.
But Christianity will not vanish from our country districts. Nowhere
is there better soil for the seeds of true religion than in the sturdy
soul of rural America.
It is not so much _isms_ or _ologies_ that the rural population wants
as it is religious facilities for themselves and for their children.
Some time ago, when a study of fifteen Western States was made by the
Home Mission Council, it mentioned the following fact:
“The general feeling manifested by the returns shows little care for
denominationalism. What these people want is some one to present Bible
facts in an acceptable manner.”
_The Call Can Be Met_
This is as true to-day as it was when it was written ten years ago.
Sunday-schools for their children; an adequate number of churches, not
fewer than will meet their needs or more than they can support; usable
churches, open the year round, with able ministers in charge--these are
the things the population of our rural districts wants.
How are they to get them? By the installation of system into the
religious life of the country sections. There are enough churches in
the United States to-day, if they were distributed on the basis of
a real need rather than on the grounds of competitive religion, to
reach the remotest sections of our country. The money now expended
on nonproductive churches would purchase real vitality for essential
churches all through rural America.