THE COMMUNITY-SERVING CHURCH AND ITS ALLIES I. The Opportunity and Function of the Country Church. _Its Necessity to Rural Progress_ The city man's judgment of many things rural is apt to be warped. The country is a better place than he thinks it is. Country institutions are doing better than he thinks they are; and the country church is by no means as dead and useless as he is apt to imagine. Ridiculing the plan to federate three village churches, a typical city man remarked, "What is the use? Three ciphers are just as useless together as alone!" Such a superficial verdict must not be accepted. The church in the country is certainly involved in a serious and complex problem. In many places it is decadent. In most places it is easily criticised for its meager successes in this age of progress; but it is still essential in spite of its defects. No amount of unfavorable criticism can refute the fact that a community-serving church is the most essential institution in country life. Criticise it as we may for its inefficiency, it is to the country church that we must look to save the country. Even though it may be usually a struggling institution, inadequately equipped, poorly financed, narrow in its conception of its mission, slow in responding to the progressive spirit of the age, wasting its resources in fruitless competitions, and often crude in its theology and ineffective in its leadership,--nevertheless it is blessing millions of our people, and remains still the one supreme institution for social and religious betterment. It may be criticised, pitied, ridiculed. It has not yet been displaced. Because the rural church is absolutely essential to the rural community, it must be maintained, whatever be the cost. Let _surplus_ local churches die, as they ultimately will, by the law of the survival of the fittest. The community-serving church must live. The man who refuses to sustain it is a bad citizen. Dr. Anderson rightly claims "The community needs nothing so much as a church, to interpret life; to diffuse a common standard of morals; to plead for the common interest; to inculcate unselfishness, neighborliness, cooperation; to uphold ideals and to stand for the supremacy of the spirit. In the depleted town with shattered institutions and broken hopes, in the perplexity of changing times, in the perils of degeneracy, the church is the vital center which is to be saved at any cost. In the readjustments of the times, the country church has suffered; but if in its sacrifices it has learned to serve the community, it lives and will live."[33] To condense diagnosis and prescription into a single sentence: _The country church has become decadent where it has ceased to serve its community. It may find its largest life again in the broadest kind of sacrificial service._ _Stages of Country Church Evolution_