CHART VIII
Lapses between pastors are revealed. The changing has meant loss of time to three-fourths of the churches. Thus, of the group of churches organized ten years or more, city churches have been vacant 2.5 per cent. of the ten years, town churches 6 per cent. of the time, village churches 11 per cent. and country churches 17 per cent. of the time. The churches organized in the last ten years, of which the majority are in small hamlets and the open country, have been vacant 20 per cent. of the time. Again the churches in the larger centers fare better.
Distribution of Pastors
The churches in the four counties are at present being served by forty ministers who have been a long time in church service, but only a short time in their present fields. Their average length of time in their present charge is only two and one-third years. Twelve of the forty-one present pastors have been in their parishes less than a year, and fourteen more have been serving from one to two years inclusive. Thirty-two ministers give their entire time to the ministry. Eight have some other occupation in addition to their church work. One is a student, and the rest are ranchers. These eight men serve eleven churches in the four counties and eight churches outside. Thirteen churches were without regular pastors at the time of the survey, but five churches were only temporarily pastorless—transiency caught in the act! Four of the thirteen were being supplied by local or travelling preachers, one a woman homesteader. The remaining fifty-seven churches, therefore, were being served by forty regular ministers, and two resident social workers who take care of a Baptist Mission at a mining village in Sheridan County. The regular ministers also serve twenty churches in other counties, making a total of seventy-seven churches, or 1.87 churches per man. This is a slightly lower proportion of ministers per church than the region averages.
How the ministers are divided up so that they will go around is shown in the following table. The sixteen preaching points and missions which these same men also serve are not included because in general they do not take the same amount of time as a regular church.[8]
| Preachers with No Other Occupation | Preachers with Other Occupation | |||||
| Serving one church | 18 | (B-3, H-5, S-8, U-2) | 3 | (H-2, U-1) | ||
| Serving two churches | 9 | (B-1, H-3, S-2, U-3) | 1 | ( ....., U-1) | ||
| Serving three churches | 3 | ( ....., H-1, S-1, U-1) | 2 | ( ....., U-2) | ||
| Serving four churches | 2 | ( ....., U-2) | ||||
| Serving five churches | 2 | ( .......................U-2) | ||||
| Total | 32 | 8 | ||||
The denominational basis of church organization, as a preceding chapter shows, leads to an uneven distribution of churches and ministers. If it were not for denominational lines, it would be possible to make a better distribution of the ministers so as to give a larger proportion of the communities a resident minister. The centers have an abundance of ministers, but outside the centers there are too few. Thus, thirty-three of the churches have resident preachers, but twenty-two, or two-thirds, of these churches are located in centers which have other resident ministers. More than half of the churches with resident pastors are town or city churches. Only nine communities have one or more resident ministers serving a single church on full time. One of these communities is the city, three are the towns, one is a village community in Beaverhead, one the mining town with the two social workers, and three are country communities. Only eighteen communities have such full-time resident pastors. Ten other churches have pastors living adjacent to their buildings, but in each case the pastor also serves other churches, or has other occupation. Fourteen churches have pastors living from five to eighteen miles distant, four have ministers living from eighteen to thirty-five miles distant. One has its pastor living fifty miles away, one sixty-five and one 120 miles. Four pastors live outside their counties.
CHART IX
An adequate parsonage is one means of keeping a resident pastor. About half of the churches have parsonages. Of the forty churches with buildings, thirty-four have parsonages and one country pastor has a parsonage and no church building. Three parsonages were not being used at the time of the survey.