A most pertinent suggestion comes from Dean Meyer of the Agricultural Department of the University of Missouri which college students may well consider: “The greatest need of the rural community to-day is cooperation; but no plan of cooperation can ever be successful among farmers in the absence of some one, or a very few men who have all the qualifications of outstanding leadership. There is a real call for our college trained men to go into the country, study local conditions, and then promote a plan of business cooperation. If this is successful he may then expect with equal success to carry on a plan for social cooperation which will lead to a betterment of the home, the church and the school.” Again we are reminded that the ultimate problem is leadership, the costliest thing in the world; but the very commodity of personality which college men ought to have ready for wise investment. It is the call for community builders all along the country-side which forces itself upon the strongest men of brave initiative, of courage, tact and ability. This call, a modern call of new insistence and vast significance, should challenge the college man like a call to battle.
The Call of the County Work Secretary
Among the many calls to a life of service which challenge the college man, one of the most urgent is the call to rural leadership in the Young Men’s Christian Association. It is peculiarly a college man’s task. Possibly one country lawyer in four is professionally trained. The percentage of educated country ministers is smaller still. Country doctors, though usually medical graduates, are very seldom college men. But the rural secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association is usually college trained. With wise foresight, the Association is sending many of its best men into the country field where the need of leadership is so acute. No other branch of Association work has so large a proportion of college trained men except the work with college students themselves; this is the right perspective.
The man who aspires to this interesting and strategic work with the boys and young manhood of the country must be a man of large capacity for leadership and with a broad knowledge of human nature. He must be a keen lover of country life and must understand country people and their great interests. The more he knows of scientific agriculture the better; but he must above all be a man of devout Christian spirit and a thorough knowledge of the Bible; with a fine friendliness for all sorts of people, and a great longing to help the country boy to develop into useful Christian manhood.
In most other lines of rural service a man’s influence is ordinarily limited to the single community in which he lives. The County Work Secretary’s field is an entire county. He is not working merely with a single group of people but with similar groups in a score of townships and usually the finest people in each village, whom he selects for their local Christian influence and their devotion to community welfare. Through these local leaders our Secretary multiplies his own life, as he shares with them his visions and his hopes, as he enlists them for specific tasks and trains them for the service; giving them the benefit of his expert knowledge of country life, of rural sociology and of boy life, of teaching method and the modern interpretation of the Bible.
While his primary task is the discovery and training of local leadership as a Christian community builder, he also makes his office a convenient clearing house of ideas and practical plans for community betterment. As he quietly goes about his work it soon becomes evident that he is a “man who knows”; and his expert knowledge, his cooperation and advice are sought by parents and teachers, churches and Sunday schools, pastors and superintendents, school supervisors, women’s clubs, farmers’ institutes and Granges, and he must be a man of large ability to prove equal to his opportunity. As a trusted neutral among the churches, he of all men has the best chance to overcome church rivalries and bring together jealous churches in a working federation or a real unity. He must be at once a man of prayer and an athletic specialist who can through his local leaders organize wholesome sports among his boys; he must not only have a genius for cooperation and securing the cooperation of others in worth-while tasks, but he must be able to take the single farmer, single-handed, and in a quiet, friendly but masterful way get that farmer to give his growing boy a fair chance.
The call to the rural secretaryship is as genuine a call to a life of ministering love as is the call to the ministry. As a matter of fact, a few of the most successful rural secretaries are ordained ministers and find their theological training and pastoral experience of great value in their work. These secretaries are not using their present position as a stepping-stone to the city field. Few of them would accept any city opportunity, as experience has proved. They have devoted their lives to the work of rural redemption, especially saving the country boy. They have fitted themselves to be experts in rural work, the work they love, and few of them ever care to leave it. This complete consecration accounts largely for their success. Let a man not attempt to share their work unless he can bear their cross. It is a call to heroic service, but it is irksome only to the man who has missed the joy of complete consecration to the country field and to the Man of Galilee.
B. A CHALLENGE TO COLLEGE WOMEN
I. Some Responsibilities Shared with Men
A Necessary Partnership, and its Increasing Burden