SOME CONVICTIONS OUT OF WHICH THE VISION CAME
A conviction is a great thing. It is the egg out of which all great enterprises are hatched. Almost everything that is worth while was once wrapped up in a conviction. Abraham had a conviction that he ought to obey God’s leading. He took his journey to the “land that he knew not of,” and we have as the result the Hebrew race, and all that has come out of it for the world.
The vision of which I am telling the story was at first only a conviction. There were a few things of which I had become certain. Just how the conviction seized me I hardly know, but I like to think that it came from the same source from which Abraham’s conviction came, and that thought has made me confident in following this guiding gleam.
1. I became convinced that the real object of the Church is to serve the people, and that its claim for support should rest upon the same ground upon which every other institution bases its claim for support—that it gives value received. That has not always been the idea of church people. They have considered the Church as a divine institution, and that because of its divine origin and sacred character it can properly demand respect and support. There was a time in the not very distant past when the ministers of the Church, as its representatives, might demand reverence and respect because of the position they occupied. There was much of reverence and regard for “the cloth.” But those days are past. Now the Church is valued only for what it does. If it does nothing, it need no longer look for respectful recognition. If it makes no contribution to the community whose value can be seen and appreciated, it cannot expect support or favorable regard. People do not care very much for clerical dignity in these days. They are not asking what place a man occupies, or what kind of clothes he wears, but what he does for the community. Is he rendering valuable service? They are quite ready to pay for service that is of real worth, but for dignity and traditionary sanctity they have slight regard.
There are some who seem to think that the Church makes good by building itself up—that if it becomes strong as an institution, if it flourishes in its outward aspects, it justifies its existence. They are well satisfied if it increases in numbers, if it erects splendid and beautiful buildings, if it contributes substantially to the glory of the denomination to which it belongs, whether it really serves the people or not. But it can never answer the ends of its existence by simply building itself up as an institution. There have been periods in the history of the Church when it was very strong as an organization, but very weak as an element of helpfulness in the lives of the people. Fine buildings and stately ritual and high social standing can never satisfy the great Founder of the Church. Jesus said, “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He sent his Church on the same errand. Unless it is doing the thing for which it was sent it has no justification for its existence. It is here to serve, to help the people. In-so-far as it actually does serve it may claim and expect love, recognition, and support—but no further. This became one of my strong convictions.
2. I also became convinced that the Church, if it makes good must serve all the people. The impression has sometimes prevailed that the Church is for good people, for those who are respectable. It has been thought of, and sometimes it has thought of itself, as under obligations to minister to the religious people of the community, or to those who can be induced to become religious. There is a large class of people who are not religiously inclined and who have no affiliation with the Church, and who, perhaps, are not likely to have, for whom it has not been thought to be responsible. In almost every parish, or within reach of it, there are numbers of people who are not touched by the Church, and who are not considered to be material for the Church to work upon. Some are outside of its influence because they live so far away that they cannot easily be reached. Some because of their character and standing in society are considered beyond its pale. What would be the effect if a company of women from the street should come into one of our beautiful and respectable churches for a few Sunday mornings? How would they be received? Would the ushers show them comfortable seats? Would they be welcome in the pews of the good people who have come together to worship God? And yet, the great Head of the Church came “to seek and to save that which was lost.” He did not shun such people or banish them from his presence. He was “a friend of publicans and sinners,” and brought down upon himself serious criticism because he did not discriminate more carefully in the matter of his associates. The Church should have the spirit of the Master, and, wherever there is a man, woman, or child, there is one in whom the Church should be interested, and whom it should seek to serve, whatever may be his character, his condition, or his standing socially. It became one of my strong convictions that the Church has a definite mission to every person within the possible range of its influence, and out of that conviction came the vision.
3. It also became plain that if the Church would fulfil its mission it must serve all the interests of the people. I was brought up with the idea that its mission was largely, if not exclusively, spiritual. Its chief and almost only concern was the soul of the individual man. It was thought that a man has a soul, and that that soul was in peril. His soul must be saved—that was the important thing. It was of small consequence that the man himself went to the dogs, if only his soul was saved. The man was forgotten in anxiety for his soul. We were the victims of a false psychology; as if a man and his soul could be separated—as if there could be any such thing as simply saving the soul of a man! We have come to see that a man, though composed of many parts, is a unit. He is not put together mechanically, so that one part may be taken and treated and the other parts ignored. He is not built in separate compartments, his soul in one, and his body in another. Christianity is not dealing with souls alone. It is dealing with men, and we are becoming interested in all that makes a man a man. The conviction became strong that the Church should have something to say and something to do with everything that goes to make up the life of the man; that it should make itself felt as an influence in his business, his education, his recreation, his home life, as well as in his so-called religious exercises; that it should be a force with him on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday as well as on Sunday. In other words, the line that has been supposed to separate the sacred from the secular must be obliterated, and every common thing must become sacred. It was seen that everything that has a rightful place in the life of a man should be the concern of the Church, and that whatever cannot be brought into harmony with the Church and its principles has no proper place in the real life of a man.
4. The conviction became strong that the village church, if it would fulfil its mission, must be responsible for country evangelization. It must reach out into all the surrounding neighborhoods, and touch the people in a vital way for many miles around. In the popular conception the influence of the church has been contracted and narrowed till it does not include half the territory nor half the people embraced in its responsibility. Many ministers are content to tramp around in the narrow confines of their own village, with an occasional excursion into the country, while there are scores of families living a little more remote for whom they are attempting nothing. Some ministers look upon their churches as their field rather than their force—a field to be cultivated rather than a force of workers to be led out into the widestretching fields that lie beyond. This is a serious mistake. Such a limited conception of the extent of its work and such an inadequate idea of its real responsibility and of its best opportunity will certainly condemn a church to comparative uselessness, and in the end to failure. When all the village churches get the vision and see their work in its fulness, the country problem will be solved.
Country evangelization belongs primarily and practically to the village church. The village church is the only one that can really take it up and deal with it in a successful way. It is in the power of the churches in the villages and small towns to change the whole aspect of things in the country, religiously, morally, and socially.
For some years the pastor and church of this story had been trying to do something for the outlying regions, but they had not grasped the idea that all the people for many miles around who were not cared for by some other church were in their parish—that for them they were responsible and to them they had a mission. They began to see that they were not doing half the work they might do and ought to do; that there were scores of families, and hundreds of people, to whom the church was nothing, who should be made to feel its force in a stimulating and uplifting way. They began to feel the pressure of that obligation that had rested on them all along, and of which they had been unconscious or unheedful. The voice of God began to sound plainly in their ears, “Go ye forth into these ripe harvest-fields, and gather sheaves for the Master.” The conviction became so strong that they ought to take up the wider work, and the duty grew to be so plain that they wondered that they had not seen it long before.
5. The conviction became strong that, if the village church would fulfil its mission, it must be a community church. I used to think that the church had simply to do with individuals; that its work was to reach out here and there, to get hold of this one and that one, and that there its work terminated. Society was thought of as a heap of sand, and not as an organism. Man was considered in himself alone, and not in his relations, and so he was misunderstood, for nothing can be truly and fully known except in its relations. But it has become plain that this exclusively individualistic conception was a mistake; that there is such a thing as community life, the life that all the people have in common; that men are bound up together by common interests; that they are members one of another; that “none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself.” The conviction became strong that the church should take account of this community life of which the individual is a part; that it should concern itself not only for men, but for man; that it should serve the whole community, and that nothing should be foreign to the church or ignored by it that in any way concerns the common life of the people.
This conviction did not detract from my estimate of the importance of the spiritual, or of the individual. I still regarded the spiritual part of a man as his most essential part. It was still plain that we have to deal with men as individuals, but I recognized them also in their organic relation to the whole life of the community. Not only were the men’s souls to be saved, but the men themselves were to be saved. Not only were the men to be saved and lifted up to a better life, but the whole community was to be saved, and the community life was to be uplifted and placed on a higher plane.
Out of these convictions, which grew more and more positive, came the vision whose fulfilment is the subject of this story.