The Evolution of the Country Community: A Study in Religious SociologyWilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Religion
The Evolution of the Country Community: A Study in Religious Sociology
Wilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Christian sociology; Country life
The effect of this individualism is exhibited in the multiplication of
churches among farmers. So long as it is admitted that the church is for
personal salvation, it does not need to be a social institution. A small
group is as effective as a large one for securing salvation for
individuals. Two churches or three may as well serve a community as one,
if personal salvation be the service rendered. The gospel is for the
farmer good tidings,--not a call to social service. The result of the
farmer period has been, therefore, the multiplication of competitive
country churches. An instance of this competitive condition is: the
community in Kansas in which among four hundred people resident in a
field, there are seven churches, each of them attempting to maintain a
resident pastor. In Centre County, Pa., in a radius of four miles from a
given point, there are twenty-four country churches. In the same
territory within a radius of three miles are sixteen of these country
churches. This condition is satisfactory to the ideals of the farmer. If
the farmer type were permanent these churches might serve permanently
for the ministry of personal salvation. They are well attended by devout
and religious-minded people. Their condemnation is not in the farmer
economy but in the inevitable coming of the exploiter and the husbandman
with their different experience and different type of mind.
In this period the minister frequently is himself a tiller of the soil.
Many of the older churches had land, ten or twenty or forty acres, which
the minister was expected to till, and from it to secure a part of his
living. A church at Cranberry, N. J., had a farm of one hundred acres
until the close of the nineteenth century. But with the coming of the
exploiter and the husbandman the minister ceases to be an agriculturist.
Like unto the tillage of the soil by the minister was the "donation" to
the minister, of vegetables, corn, honey and other farm products. At one
time this filled a large place in the supply of the minister's living.
In various communities the custom has remained with fine tenacity in the
presentation to the minister of portions of farm produce throughout the
year. But the portions so given are fewer, as years pass, and the total
quantity small. The donation of vegetables and farm produce has survived
in but a few places. The modes of life which succeeded to the farmer
economy are dependent on cash for the distribution of values, and the
"donation," if it remain at all, is a gift of money. Frequently the
"donation" has survived as a social gathering, being perpetuated in one
of its functions only, its earlier purposes and its essential form being
forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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