The Ladies’ Aid is often the only woman’s organization in the community. Most of these clubs meet once or twice a month, with regular programs for Bible study or missions, organize sewing and quilting bees, and bazaars, etc. The help they give in church finances has already been appreciated. Any such common interest and responsibility holds many an organization together. Several promote social welfare work. One organized a Teachers’ Training Class to improve material for Sunday school teachers. One village has a community Ladies’ Aid which works for the church, although only a few are church members. The community woman’s club in a small hamlet is studying missions as a part of its program. In one community, the Ladies’ Aid of the only church, which is pastorless, meets regularly and holds a yearly bazaar to pay the occasional supply preacher and keep the church in repair. At the “Frontier Day” given by a Dude Ranch, the Ladies’ Aid from a nearby hamlet had a booth for selling hamburgers and lemonade. In one of the mining camps, the Ladies’ Aid of the Mission church sent out invitations for an afternoon tea to raise money for a new piano for the Kindergarten. It turned out to be a great social event attended by women, many of them foreign, from all the camps in the vicinity. Here is another Ladies’ Aid, the only organization in all that part of a sparsely settled country, and many miles from town which holds eight socials a year and every social is a supper. Those suppers bring out whole families, and are the biggest annual events. Is it any wonder? The woman on the Range has a lonesome time of it. Ranches are far apart. She rarely sees her neighbors and less frequently goes to town. This woman needs social activities more than her town sister. Yet only nine out of thirty-four country churches have women’s organizations.
Young People’s Meetings are generally held Sunday nights, and the majority hold an occasional social. One town Young People’s organization has a successful Bible Study Class. The Purely for Fun Club, as its name implies, is purely social and meets twice a month. It has a special garden party once a year. This club is one of the activities of a M. E. community church located in a new dry-farming community which is having a struggle to make both ends meet, but is doing good work in that community. The people are loyal, even enthusiastic. There is not, however, even a church building, let alone any equipment for social activities. A building is desperately needed for church and community center, nor can the members provide it themselves. Cases of this kind represent possibilities for the most effective sort of home mission aid.
CHAPTER VI
The Preachers’ Goings and Comings
This is a field that challenges a preacher. The love of a new world has drawn his potential flocks and with them a pastor may come to new pastures where the satisfaction of creative pioneer work is not its least attraction. Settlements have grown up almost over night. People have come from all over the East, Middle West and Southwest. Many families live far from their neighbors. Leadership is the challenging need and it is primarily the task of the Church to furnish and develop it. The initial handicap is that here people, from a matter of habit, do not yearn for church ministry as they do in other parts of the country. Their traditions do not include it. It is the preacher who must “sell” the idea of religion and the Church. No one else will do it. He must be a “builder of something out of nothing—a pioneer of the Gospel, creator as well as evangelist.”
The Vagrant Minister
One of the most startling facts brought out by this survey is the degree to which the ministers have been transient. Always a detriment to effective work, this lack of permanency is especially unfortunate in a country of such rapid growth and so transient a population. It takes more than average time to win people’s confidence because they do not accept the Church per se. There are problems enough to be met when a preacher “hog-ties,” as the Western slang puts it, meaning when he stays on the job. But the preachers have come and gone along with the rest. Three of the forty-five churches organized for ten years or more have had the same preacher throughout the period, and five more churches have had only two pastors. But seven churches have changed pastors three times, ten have changed four, seven have changed five, six have changed six, five have changed seven, one has changed eight and one has changed nine times during this period. About half of the country and village churches, 38 per cent. of the town, and one-fourth of the city churches have had five or more pastors during the last ten years. Of the churches organized within the last ten years, ten have had one pastor, eight have had two, one has had three, three have had four, one has had six, one has had seven and two have had no regular pastors during the entire time. These men have indeed had the spirit of wanderlust. They have scarcely stayed long enough to get acquainted with their task.
