Having seen with my own eyes these last communities of a State quickened into intellectual fervor through the devotion of university men and women, do you think I do not know what would happen to the spiritual life of these out-of-the-way communities if the supreme love of devoted church men and women were brought to bear upon them?
A Forecast Founded on Fact
I will venture to forecast some of the things that would happen. Every rural community would have a community church—a church for the whomsoever, even to the last man, woman, and child in that community. If topographically possible, every such church community would stretch the bounds of its parish to include a thousand souls all told. In communities of two thousand souls, there would be two churches—two only, and both community churches. In communities of three thousand souls, there would be three community churches, and three churches only, every church, a community church; and no more churches than one to one thousand of the community population; for it takes one thousand of the population to maintain an effectual modern church; and every church is to be a Christian community church as a safeguard against paganism. But why am I so foolish as to foretell what would happen when I can tell what is happening?
There are to-day, we are told by those who keep informed on the matter, a thousand community churches in the United States, of which the greater part are in rural territory. In fact, it is reported that new community churches are being organized at the rate, at present, of six a month. To say that there is a community church movement well-started is no exaggeration. Some States such as Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, California, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, are outstanding in the movement.
Of course, the community church is not yet standardized, but it is shaping up. To affirm that there are three types, as some say, or five, as others put it, is more or less arbitrary. Still, for the sake of the man who understands better by types, I may say that some community churches like to be known as having arrived at the community ideal by “federation” of two or more denominational churches, the new church preserving connection with a national church body.
Other community churches pride themselves on being “union” churches, each having originated from the organic union of two or more churches, or having been established as a “union” church in a community possessing no church, but containing families of various denominational connections in the past. The union church once formed usually stands alone, without any denominational affiliation.
Then there is the regular “denominational” church, which either just happens to be or has come purposely to be the only church in the community; and which makes the boast of existing for the whole community rather than for its particular denominational group.
And there are other varieties, which could indeed be dignified into types, if we were pushed to it. The important thing, however, is that out of a general unrest and dissatisfaction with churches that aim to keep breeding up within themselves a highly pedigreed group of personalities which possess decidedly exclusive, if not aristocratic, characteristics, have arisen overnight, as it were, churches which admit to the inner circle all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic ideal of acting in the realm of religion for the last man, woman, and child in the community.
Churches for the Whomsoever
Here we have before our very eyes, then, a kind of a church which is run, as President Van Hise said his university was run, not for a select few within its walls, but for the whomsoever within its own territory; a church that views every single member as a “carrier” of the goods of life to the last man, rather than as a precious mechanism in which should be lodged all the mysteries of a peculiar cult.