Church Cooperation in Community LifeVogt, Paul L. (Paul Leroy)
Religion
Church Cooperation in Community Life
Vogt, Paul L. (Paul Leroy)
Rural churches
The sad part about the traditional limited method of approach to
improvement of group life has been that in probably the majority of
cases impulses were aroused by personal appeal to do good and then
through ignorance of objectives in group advance those impulses were
allowed to die. The "backslider" is an excellent illustration of the
results of periodic renewal of impulse to right living. In most other
cases the impulses thus aroused have found their expression in a
hypersensitiveness in regard to certain phases of personal conduct.
Emphasis upon personal moral conduct to the exclusion of effective
interest in social progress characterized much of the product of the
personal evangelistic campaigns carried on periodically during the
past two or three generations, while the real work of making the world
better has been directed by men and women not particularly subject to
these periodical waves of religious impulses but imbued with a steady
abiding faith in the worth of social action. They have had the good
impulses, but these impulses have been steadied and rendered
permanently valuable because faith based on knowledge of objectives
was available.
If the serious errors of the past are to be avoided it will be
necessary for those intrusted with responsibilities of church
leadership to vastly increase their knowledge of problems of group
life and of methods of control of group life. The following pages are
designed to aid the prospective religious leader, either professional
or lay, as far as possible in understanding some of the problems that
must be dealt with in making human life what Christianity hopes for.
Results already have been achieved sufficient to place beyond question
the principle that the church must approach life from every possible
angle. The effort to produce right attitudes in the individual must be
continued, but the methods used must be varied and multiplied.
Furthermore, before the sound point of view with reference to the
method of approach to the problems of the church can be obtained it
will be necessary to have a clear understanding as to the place of the
child in the moral order. Those who derive their theology by reading
and interpreting isolated passages of the Scriptures sometimes arrive
at unexpected, and, from the point of view of rational living,
eccentric and positively harmful conclusions. Some devoted readers
find in the writings of Paul something about "Whereas in Adam all die,
in Christ all are made alive"; and in Christ's words the utterance to
Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again he shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven." They have drawn from these doctrines that all men are born
with sin inherent in their natures and that there is no good in the
soul until "conversion" has taken place. So long as these doctrines
find a place in the preaching and practice of churches the method of
world salvation will be radically different from that for which the
writer is contending.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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