Charles Stelzle, pioneer in church social service, who was the founder and has for ten years been in charge of this phase of the work of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, will leave that board on October 1. Mr. Stelzle plans to set up offices of his own as consulting sociologist and efficiency engineer for national church organizations, social service agencies and industrial enterprises.
The broader field which he proposes to cover on severing his connection with purely denominational work Mr. Stelzle outlines as furnishing “Expert service with reference to Sociological and Religious Surveys; Exhibits; Social Service Campaigns and Conferences; Social and Religious Work among Immigrant, Industrial, and Rural Populations; Publicity, Educational, and Evangelistic Campaigns; Efficiency Methods for Local Churches and National Organizations; General Industrial Problems.”
CHARLES STELZLE
Mr. Stelzle came to the church, when he was ordained minister about eighteen years ago, as a worker who in his twelve years in the machine shop had been made painfully conscious of the lack of understanding and co-operation between the church and the workingmen. He organized the Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church, and this was subsequently expanded into the bureau from which he is resigning. The Labor Temple in lower Second Avenue, New York, a religious labor center which he organized a few years ago, has so evidently responded to a need that the board has recently bought the property and put the temple on a permanent basis. Labor Sunday, a nation-wide campaign for temperance carried on through the trade unions and a press service on social, religious and industrial topics which is used by 350 of the principal labor papers, are other activities of the bureau. Mr. Stelzle has served as arbitrator in many industrial disputes and has established a permanent connection between the church and organized labor through ministerial delegates to the trade unions.
In addition to this industrial work he was for a year executive secretary of the Commission on Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches, had charge of the social service features of one of the Men and Religion Forward Movement teams and directed the surveys made by the movement in seventy cities. He conducted the recent publicity campaign for the Home Missions Council and the Council of Women for Home Missions.
Mr. Stelzle’s successor in the bureau has not yet been appointed.
The appointment of Louis F. Post, founder and for fifteen years joint editor with Alice Thatcher Post of The Public and worker for many public causes in Chicago, to the assistant secretaryship of the Federal Department of Labor has been generally recognized, to use the words of a fellow journalist, as something more than the dropping of a plum into the gaping mouth of a hungry politician. Mr. Post is no politician and was by no means hungry for the position, which he at first peremptorily refused, feeling that he could not give up his work on The Public. He consented only after pressure had been brought to bear upon him from all sides and he had been brought to realize that a still larger duty called him to the service of the nation.