The passing away of pioneer days discredits the ministry of mere preaching, through increasing variation of communities, families and individuals. The preacher's message is not widely varied. It is the interpreting of tradition, gospel and dogma. His sources can all be neatly arranged on a book shelf. One suspects that the greater the preacher, the fewer his books. On the contrary, the pastor's work is necessitated by growing differences of his people. He must be all things to many different kinds of men. In the country community this intimate intercourse and varying sympathy take him through a wider range of human experience than in a more classified community. He must plow with the plowman, and hunt with the hunter, and converse with the seamstress, be glad with the wedding company and bear the burden of sorrow in the day of death. Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this. Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns these things by his daily observation of the lives of men.
The communities themselves in the country differ widely, even in conformity to given types, and when all is said by the general student, the pastor has the knowledge of his own community. It belongs peculiarly to him. No one else can ever know it and there are no two communities alike. In the intense localism of a community, its religious history is hidden away and its future is involved. The man who shall touch the springs of the community's life must know these local conditions with the intimate detail which only he commands who daily goes up and down its paths. This man is the pastor. Except the country physician, no other living man is such an observer as he.
The end of the pioneer days means, therefore, to religious people, the establishment of the pastorate. The religious leader for the pioneer was the preacher, but the community which clings to preaching as a satisfactory and final religious ministry is retrograde. In this retarding of religious progress is the secret of the decline of many communities. The great work of ministering to them is in supplanting the preacher, who renders but a fractional service to the people, by a pastor whose preaching is an announcement of the varied ministry in which he serves as the curé of souls.
The pioneer days are gone. Only in the Southern Appalachian region are there arrested communities in which, in our time, the ways of our American ancestors are seen. The community builder cannot change the type of his people. He can only wait for the change, and enable his people to conform to the new type. For this process new industries, new ways of getting a living are necessary. The teacher or pastor can do something to guide his people in the selection of constructive instead of destructive industry.
In East Tennessee and in the mountain counties of North Carolina lumbering industries are for the time being employing the people. The result will be a deeper impoverishment; for the timber is the people's greatest source of actual and potential wealth. The leaders of the mountain people should teach reforestation with a view to maintaining the people's future wealth.
In a mountain county of Kentucky a minister seeing that his people needed a new economic life, before they could receive the religious life of the new type, organized an annual county fair. To this [he] brought, with the help of outside friends, a breed of hogs better than his mountain people knew. He cultivated competition in local industries, weaving and cooking; and started his people on the path of economic success of a new type.
In conclusion, the pioneer was individualistic and emotional. These traits were caused by his economic experience. While that experience lasted, he could be made no other sort of man than this. To this type his home and his business life and his church conformed. Within these characteristics the efficiency of his social life was to be found.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "The Agrarian Changes in the Middle West," by J. B. Ross, in American Journal of Economics, December, 1910.
[2] Rev. Norman C. Schenck.