That afternoon that young pastor wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain and bitterness, but also in hope, in earnest desire to get the facts before the nation:
I saw in the paper the other day some mention of the chief rural problems of the United States. May I call your attention to what ministers in every country district regard as the stiffest problem known to them and to their people? I refer to the problem of the competitive religion, which affects not only pastors, but the entire rural population, financially and spiritually, as well. The spiritual rivalry set in motion by well-meaning home-mission boards and zealous and jealous denominations is undermining the present and the future welfare of the country church by ignoring the law of supply and demand. If you can suggest any solution for this great problem, we shall all be grateful.
The case was in no way overstated by this young man. It is quite true that there are few, if any, greater rural problems to-day than the problem of the country church. It is undeniable that any honest student of conditions in rural churches is confronted by staggering and depressing statistics of overchurching and underattendance in some sections, and of entire lack of attendance due to no churching at all in others.
Any map that showed the present rural church distribution of the United States would be alarmingly reminiscent of a map of a country with large areas of sterile famine-land. Nine persons out of every hundred in rural America can not get to church because there is no church for them to attend. This means that one seventh of all the rural communities of the United States are entirely without Protestant churches. Pathetic reports of the spiritual hunger of these land dwellers, living in a Christian nation yet entirely shut off from Christian organization of every kind, come from these communities.
“No Protestant sermon has ever been preached in this locality,” is one S O S sent out from a neighborhood of two hundred persons. “Not a child in this district has ever attended Sunday-school,” deprecates another community of approximately the same size. “This back-to-the-land movement is fine, but why should loyal land dwellers have to condemn their children to heathenry?” demands a distracted mother, in a remote section of a Western State. “My children are growing up to be little savages, as far as religion is concerned. They have never been inside a church in their lives, and they don’t know what Sunday-school means.”
Only one fifth of the rural population goes to church.
Two-fifths of the rural churches of the country are standing still or losing ground.
A quarter of all rural churches have no Sunday-school.
One fifth of all rural churches are kept alive by home-mission aid. Of these subsidized churches, a large number are in active competition with churches of very similar doctrines.
Seven out of every ten rural churches have only a fraction of a pastor apiece.