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
develops to comprehend the world in his daily thought under the impetus
of a daily newspaper, his conscience and his religious experience should
be expanded correspondingly.
In a time of exploitation of land the country church should regenerate
its financial system. The system of barter passes away in the day of
speculation in farm land; and the country church which can find means to
endure the period of exploitation must put its financial system on a new
basis. The tenant farmer is crudely striving through problems of
scientific agriculture. He may, indeed, be a soil robber, but by his
waste of economic values he and other men are learning to conserve. The
financial system of the church should be placed at this time on a basis
of weekly contribution, for with the tenant farmer comes system, cash
payments, regular commercial processes. The business administration of
the church must be made to correspond.
The country minister and schoolteacher must therefore become prophets of
the intellect and of the spirit, in the new order. If they cannot
minister to the new intelligence of the farmer and his children, their
institutions will necessarily decay. The farmer who succeeds in the new
social economy of the country will not endure old sermons which were
appropriate in his father's time. The emphasis must not be placed on
tradition, but upon inductive study. The preacher must not feed the
people on special instances, but upon representative cases. The
intelligence of the new type of farmer will not be satisfied with
sensations and with the unusual; but he demands to be trained in
standards of the new day, when science, system, organization and world
economy are making their demands on him and his very soul is concerned
in his response to those demands.
The task of dealing with newcomers in the country community is
educational, financial and recreative. One should add that it is also
evangelistic, but I have in mind the possibility that these newcomers
may be Catholics with whom Protestant evangelism will not be successful.
It is possible also that they will be of another Protestant sect from
that of the reader of this chapter, so that to evangelize them would
mean proselyting. The writer believes very heartily in rural evangelism.
It is an essential process in building the country church. These
chapters are devoted primarily to the building of the country community
and in that process the securing of members for the country church is
preliminary only. Leaving, therefore, the question of rural evangelism
for treatment in another place, let us take up the educational treatment
of the newcomer in the country community.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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