Empty churches : $b The rural-urban dilemmaGalpin, Charles Josiah
Religion
Empty churches : $b The rural-urban dilemma
Galpin, Charles Josiah
Church attendance; Community churches; Rural churches -- United States
And there are other varieties, which could indeed be dignified into
types, if we were pushed to it. The important thing, however, is that
out of a general unrest and dissatisfaction with churches that aim
to keep breeding up within themselves a highly pedigreed group of
personalities which possess decidedly exclusive, if not aristocratic,
characteristics, have arisen overnight, as it were, churches which
admit to the inner circle all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic
ideal of acting in the realm of religion for the last man, woman, and
child in the community.
_Churches for the Whomsoever_
Here we have before our very eyes, then, a kind of a church which is
run, as President Van Hise said his university was run, not for a
select few within its walls, but for the whomsoever within its own
territory; a church that views every single member as a “carrier” of
the goods of life to the last man, rather than as a precious mechanism
in which should be lodged all the mysteries of a peculiar cult.
Look over some of the stories of these churches which are confessedly
trying to find their way to a new expression of social religion
designed to prevent the wastes of competitive Christianity.
Here are the high points in an Idaho community church: Rural, in a town
of 600 souls. Presbyterian by connection, but with members formerly
of sixteen different denominations. Membership, 400. Plant worth
$50,000, with eighteen separate class-rooms for Sunday-school use.
A community house, with gymnasium. Rest room for women and girls. A
week-day church school using one hour a week of school time. In summer,
a daily vacation Bible school. A Boy Scout troop. A Campfire Girls’
organization. Potato growers and fruit men freely using the community
hall. High moral standards reflecting the unity of the people.
Take another community church of farmers in Iowa, in the open
country: An architecturally commanding building, providing, like
a well-organized school-house, many separate rooms for religious
instruction. The church has deliberately packed into its conception
of “community church” the idea that, assuming Christianity to have
contact with every phase of living, the church has responsibility
for providing the auspices under which all social activities of the
community take place. What more natural, then, than that the Fourth
of July celebration should be around the most beautiful spot in the
community, the church? Farmers’ Institute in the church? Young people
having a place for good times at the church? A church committee looking
after the matter of bringing good families on to farms that are for
sale or rent in the community?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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