A cross-section of Christianity will reveal a ten-thousand fold variegation of human streak and human color wherever religion has filtered into actual life. This meeting-ground of all the higher interests of the community will, therefore, be home for each interest. As no single type of temperament should repulse the others and shrink the church, so no single activity of the church should monopolize the focus of attention. The mission interest, the Bible interest, the educational interest, the interests social, musical, ceremonial, disciplinary, the evangelistic interest, the civic and industrial interest, the financial interest, the idealistic interest, both personal and social—all these and the rest will have good footing in the community church.
A church which should undertake to be a democracy in fact would find that there is only one way of “maintaining interest” enough actually to keep bringing the people together. This way is sounding God’s summons to keep going the redemption of its community at every point. The summons to definite undertakings to improve community life is like the summons to a pioneer homesteader to make a home fit for his family. He gears his hands to ax and saw, to plow and hammer, and he knows that he can change the wilderness.
Besides stereotyped church procedure, a steady look at living conditions in the community, with the determined expectation of changing these conditions for the better; a look for the moral clues to whole wretched situations; a look to disentangle from the chaotic mass single, great, unmistakeable moral issues—these steady looks, under God’s summons, must be given anew in every generation to the kaleidoscopic facts of human life.
The church that shall go into the business of becoming self-conscious and of realizing its democracy will hear God’s summons to community redemption and begin to re-scale the map of church importance and usefulness in the community on heroic lines.
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized where appropriate.
Other spelling has also been retained as originally published except for the corrections below.
| Page [127]: | “pinked out in my mind the” | “picked out in my mind the” |
| Page [144]: | “which appopriate money we” | “which appropriate money we” |