“But,” went on the author of Christian idealism,--mind you, in the same
breath in which He had paid to His followers the superb compliment, “Ye
are the salt of the earth,”--“if the salt have lost its savor--”
And the story of Protestant home missions in rural America during the
last two or three decades has in it the taste of this “lost savor.”
Let me lay bare before you,--with the shame of a churchman very much
embarrassed, it must be confessed,--not so much the facts of this
unsavory home-mission story, for the facts have been public property
for some years, as an interpretation of the facts and an appraisal of
the damage done to American churchdom.
For the benefit of him who does not understand the situation at all,
a word is necessary. Here is the picture, and here are the essential
features in the picture, whatever variations there may be in minor
details.
_Twice Too Many Churches_
A community of rural folk of a definite population is spread out before
you. Christian churches, usually from two to ten in number, are alive,
if not all going concerns in the community. Whatever differences there
may be in the membership rolls--and of course we shall expect many
points of difference here--or in the number of services per week or per
month, or in the presence or absence of resident pastors, or in the
organization of the churches into Sunday-schools, mission societies,
clubs, social committees and the like--whatever the variations may be,
I say, the number of persons in the community, counting every single
soul, is far short of enough to man all of the churches, use any
reputable standard of church organization you please to measure by.
Furthermore, in the type community in question, some or all of the
churches are weak and ineffective, if not virtually down and out.
Moreover,--and this is the central feature of the picture,--one church
is, or several or all of these churches are, receiving subsidies
in the form of money from the home-mission funds of the respective
denominational state body or national body or both, the sum of money
being just enough to keep the particular church competitively in the
running in that community.
The essential fact in this situation may be stated thus: In a community
where there is known to be a mass of persons (in commercial parlance,
“volume of business”) sufficient to build and maintain only from
one to five churches, there are actually found to be from two to
ten; and the excess of churches over and above the number which the
volume of business justifies is the direct result of the injection of
home-mission money into the community.
_Veiled Hate_
It does not require a clever mind to know what will happen. When from
two to ten kernels of corn are planted in a piece of soil which has
nutritive elements sufficient to bring only from one to five stalks
to maturity, we know that a struggle for life is on which may doom
one stalk, several stalks, or even all stalks. It is so with the
competitive churches; but the corn simile fails to illustrate the case
at the really tragic point. The subsidized churches, which make up the
redundance, create in the community what is known by everybody there
to be a case of veiled malignancy. Self-respecting persons either hold
themselves aloof from formal religion there, or, conscience-stricken,
stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain disgust they pick up and
leave. And the community turns sour. The salt has lost its savor.
If you would sense the disaster of this competition, please read
between the lines of the following resolution, passed within the last
year, by a minister’s association in a small rural community where six
Protestant churches are breathing the air that is hardly enough for
three!
“Whereas we are joined together as Christian ministers in the
association of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, we hereby
agree that the following principles shall guide and control us
individually, and, so far as our proper influence can go, our several
congregations in our mutual relationships....
I. That we decline and discourage proselytizing in any form.
II. While we recognize that every man is free to worship where and
as he wills, yet we realize that shifting from one denomination to
another save from absolute religious conviction is not edifying, but
harmful. Wherefore, we will not encourage those who from pique or
temporary dissatisfaction with ministers or people of their own local
congregations wish to unite with ours.
III. That we will not, save in exceptional cases, receive into our
Sunday-schools as regular members thereof, children of families who
are affiliated with other congregations of the town.
IV. That whenever we come across new-comers to the town who are
affiliated with, or declare preference for, some Christian body other
than our own we will not (if the church of their choice be represented
by a congregation here) ask them to unite with our congregation or
send their children to our Sunday-school until we have given to the
minister or church officials of the church of their preference the
name and address of such persons, and allowed reasonable opportunity
for them to claim their own.”
It is clear on the face of it that the recognized principles of
Christianity have failed to keep these churches sweet to one another;
and resort is, therefore, had to a contract--a perfectly human document
of agreement, such as governs sinners in mundane business--in hope that
an-out-and-out bargain may accomplish what Christian love can not.
These ministers agree _not_ to proselytize, _not_ to encourage
lifting members from another church, _not_ to receive children into
the Sunday-school from families of another flock, _not_ to pick up
new-comers without advertising them and waiting a reasonable length
of time for a claimant. This document of “nots”--of things not to
be done--naïvely uncovers the teasing things that were done behind
curtains.
_Dispensing With Mission Aid_
Before reading further, you will wish to know whether there is much of
this sort of thing going on in rural America; whether, in fact, it is
not fussing over trifles to beckon anybody to look at this thing.
The best authorities, after a long study on this subject, are quoted as
estimating that the amount of Protestant home-mission money annually
wasted in competitive religion in rural communities is at present
$3,000,000; and if we may generalize from twenty-five thoroughly
studied counties, widely separated, where there are 211 churches aided
by home-mission money, of which 149 are disastrously competitive, “most
of the home-mission aid which is now granted could be withdrawn without
any danger whatsoever of leaving communities (rural) with inadequate
facilities.”
The official report goes on to say, “Aside from any possible loss in
denominational prestige, which a purely objective study such as this
can not undertake to measure, on a careful examination of all the data
at hand, it seems that 149 of the 211 aided churches in these counties
might be dispensed with, to the general advantage of the religious life
in their communities and to the greater glory of the Kingdom of God.”
This thing, look at it from any angle you please, is as rust on the
wheat, a rot in the potato, a blight on the peach-tree, a boll-weevil
in the cotton. God knows that the farmer already carries along enough
of a handicap in community matters without being afflicted with this
canker on his religion, as a discipline. It certainly looks like
jumping on the man that’s down. But this sin against the farmer is not
the worst of the wicked business.
_Worse Than Wasted_
What hurts most in this paradoxical practice is the prostitution of the
most beautiful gift in all religion.
“Missions!”
The very word conjures up angels of mercy. It brings to mind the last
words of Christ to his disciples and to his followers of all time. And
this mission money (it is not so pathetic that it sometimes is the
widow’s mite or that it is sometimes earned in feebleness with many a
pain) is the purest money handled by men. It is the visible sign of
tears of longing for love to govern men. Missions are the church’s
great romance. When out of the barrenness and weakness of my little
life, I put into the hands of the church a gift for the whomsoever,
in faith, I do it with a prayer that it will help bring peace to some
soul, harmony to some family, blessing to some community which is
beyond my power otherwise to help.
To think, then, that the tip of your prayer and mine, the sweetest
thing we can give, is poisoned, and shot into a rural community,
there to hurt--Well the words are not so much wanting to express
my indignation and yours, as the mind fails to comprehend how such
tactless blunders can happen.
“Why do these church bodies do this wicked thing?” you enquire.
Let the words of a high church official I once knew convey to you not
so much the real reason, as the state of mind out of which the thing
grows!
“So long as there is a family of our faith in that village, that family
shall have the sacraments of our faith ministered to it.”
He might just as well have added, “even though the heavens fall”; for
what he did was to force a subsidy into a community to help a small
faction of his particular church to survive when the majority of the
people, even the majority of his own little church organization, had
voted voluntarily to cut down the number of churches and eliminate the
unnecessary one. The high church official just ripped open a community
sore, when it had begun to heal. He poured gall in again after somebody
had sweetened community life for a moment.
_A New Religious Ethics Between Churches_
The egotism of a particular church group; the flaunting individualism
of a particular denominational combination of persons, whose personal
egos are, religiously, to be subjected, but whose combined ego is to be
exalted! Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and religion between church
groups. Shall it not be discussed? Especially when it grinds the rural
community to powder? Shall it be good Christianity for one Christian
sect to crowd and shove just like a bully in a mob?
The day and generation is getting suspicious of pietists of all sorts
who can tell sinners how to behave individually to one another; yes,
who can even tell the labor group how to behave to the employer group
and the employer group to the labor group, but who have no conception
of what Christian principles apply as between one church group and
another church group in the realm of religion, except to beat the other
church group at all costs. If I were not heart and soul captured by the
character, life, philosophy, and guidance of Jesus himself, if I were
not thrilled by his words, and electrified by his life and death, more
and more the older I grow, I should be tempted to see in this cutthroat
group egotism of competitive Christian church groups a decline of
Christianity itself.
“They all do it” is a lame excuse for sinners; but for a church body,
it is tragic. Think of a million people, more or less, possessing one
shibboleth, trying to embody earnestly the Christ, while deliberately
hamstringing another Christian church body which is doing the same
thing!
But who is to blame? Whose sin is this prostitution of a holy thing?
Did you ever happen to know the officials at the head of a Protestant
church body, either national or state? Did you ever know the persons
who distribute home-mission money after it is once collected? Did
you ever get a glimpse of the inside? Well, if so, then you know
how intensely human this situation is. You know how complex are the
forces that operate, how like politics are the powers behind the locked
doors. You know then that when you try to track this sinner, you can’t
find him. Nobody does the thing. Nobody does anything. Nobody is to
blame. The Christian leaders are not leading on such matters. They are
fighting the individual sins of the people.
What would America think of a great Christian leader who should come
out and insist that Christian churches ought to love, respect, defer to
other Christian churches? What a stir in Christendom it would make for
a great man carrying his own church with him, let us say, to go up and
down the land preaching that membership in one Christian church should
thereby make us members in all Christian churches; preaching that we
should discount all the differences among Christian churches and love
all Christian churches for their likenesses?
Look at this straw:
In Canada an outstanding movement is nearing completion to unite
organically three great Protestant bodies, affecting more than three
quarters of a million of church members. The daily press recently in
explanation of the union, carried this item:
“The Union had its origin in the conviction that many separate
churches of each denomination, especially in the rural districts, were
handicapped in limited membership and were unable to maintain properly
separate buildings and ministers. It is therefore a part of a tendency
in many other countries to submerge religious differences in an effort
at wider and more effective service.”
This looks on the horizon like the peep of dawn of a new Christian
day--and what a dawn for the rural community that would be!
But--lest we be too sanguine--that dawn has some climb to make yet.
Has not the Home Mission Council of the Federal Council of Churches
in America put into practice on the Western frontier for several
years principles of denominational courtesy? Have not the phrases of
their documents on “Overchurching,” “Underchurching,” and “Wasteful
Competition” seeped very generally throughout the settled portions
of the United States, as well as into the frontier? Have not the
Foreign Mission Boards of the various denominations for years gained
conspicuously the confidence of their laymen by the intelligent
distribution of territory among the missions of different church bodies
abroad? The fact is and must be reckoned with that all the words
and phrases and ideas and logic on this subject, pro and con, have
been bandied about until they are almost threadbare. The will to do,
however, is still very stubborn in old, established communities.