MAKE HASTE SLOWLY.
At one of our Southern conferences last spring, the brethren, colored and white, were bemoaning the small numbers and slow progress of our churches. A Baptist minister who was present, and who is engaged in this educational work, turned the tide by stating that there were advantages, for the present, in that state of things, and that his denomination suffered somewhat from the embarrassment of numbers. He said that he had been a farmer’s boy, and that when at the tail end of a steam threshing machine for shoving away the straw, if for only a short time his associate stepped away, he found himself unable to keep up with the thresher, and covered down by the accumulation. So they were sometimes bothered in handling their great numbers by way of discipline and effort at moral elevation.
There is no room in the South for our church system if its work be simply to transfer the people in bulk from other communions, with all their prevalent views and practices. Our brethren of the Baptist and Methodist churches are to be congratulated upon their large membership, and so upon their opportunity for doing good. They have the responsibility of purifying from within. Many are struggling nobly, as exhorted by the Christian Recorder, “to thin out the ministry of the church until there shall not be found an ignorant man, nor a bad man in the ranks. Thin out the church itself. Expel the vicious. Drive out the notoriously bad. Have a clean church.” Starting as a new church-life, we have no call, no excuse for sweeping in such material. It would be no gain to the kingdom to effect such a transfer in bulk. Our mission is, through our blended educational and Christianizing process, to help raise the standard of Christian and church character. By the stimulus of such example, we are doing more to help the old churches in their eliminating process than we could in any other way. That same article in the Recorder, from which I have quoted, shows this.
The editor also sets down the A. M. A. as the greatest rival of the A. M. E., and no doubt rejoices in this provoking of his church to love and to good works. But our churches, if they would attain to much of this helpfulness, must gain it upon the standard of intelligence and of Christian character, without the risks of wildness and superstition. And so, if God be with us, if we be humble and spiritually minded in our work, by and by we may expect large accessions of members. The president of a Baptist Colored University, himself a New England educator, remarked to me, a while ago, that he could see that in twenty-five years the Congregationalists would have a large church-work among the Freedmen, simply as the result of their educational process.
Our young pastors, who have not as yet the stimulus of the large congregations of some other communions, must remember that the influence of their churches is not measured by numbers, and that if they secure quality, this may go further than quantity.
But, as it is, our church-work is not destitute of encouragement now in regard to numbers. Fifteen years ago there was not a colored Congregationalist in all the South, except in the two ancient white Congregational churches of Charleston, S. C., and of Liberty Co., Ga. The system itself was utterly unknown, as it is to this day, except where it has crept in since the war. The experiment, in one single locality, of swallowing down the old-time churches, proved a failure, and taught us a lesson. The only gain has been by the slow process of enlightenment and of assimilation, mainly by the Christian-school process. A high official in the M. E. Church said of us: “You can afford to wait for the youth; we cannot.” He was right. That great Church, which is doing so grand a work for the Freedmen, had already on its hands hundreds of thousands of adult members, who must be cared for at once. By our policy of waiting, the last Annual Report set down sixty-seven churches, and 4,300 church members, an average of 69 members to each. As this is all new work, let us compare it with new work at the West. Alas, for the lack of church statistics in our last Year Book! By that of the former year, we find that the churches of Missouri and Nebraska had an average in each State of 27 members; Kansas had 34; Iowa had exactly our average of 69; and Illinois, which has been under Home Missionary culture for sixty years, has an average of only 25 members more than that of the churches of this Association.