But will there ever be such a right-about-face of virile, holy men until we have in America a new type of theological seminary for the training of country-bound ministers of Christ? I doubt it. The present schools of training are city-set, city-wise, city-satisfied; not but that a score or more of them give some “rural courses”; not but that a trickle of men has started already from them toward the country. You can better understand the case if I were to ask what hope there would have been for agricultural science, if total reliance had been placed upon the great city universities, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, to develop the practice of farming. Each of these universities has already made some notable contribution to agriculture in one form or another; but the great hope of agriculture lay in a farming college, and fortunately, the common sense of this country perceived this truth.
In like manner, the hope of the rural ministry, in my estimation, lies in a rural theological seminary under the eaves of one of our great colleges of agriculture—preferably a college of agriculture in close proximity to a great state university. Here is the farmer’s intellectual center. Here are gathered men and women of hope for farm life. Here are the men and women who have social vision for rural society. In touch with these men and women, under the spell of the intelligent hope for the American farm and farmer, a school of religion can grow up which will train men to go into the country and help redeem it from its present social chaos. They can carve out community churches of distinction. They can create a line of such churches, wholly in rural territory, which will furnish steps of promotion for the most strenuous and ambitious pastors. Flight is not the cure of the plight of country parsons. The cure is rather intelligent consecration to the country flocks.
CHAPTER V
“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.