The ministry too is more attractive among Negroes than among whites. The white minister has only one important function to perform in his group, that of spiritual leadership. To the Negro community the preacher is this and besides the walking encyclopedia, the counselor of the unwise, the friend of the unfortunate, the social welfare organizer, and the interpreter of the signs of the times. No man is properly introduced to the Negro community unless he comes through the minister, and no movement can expect success there unless it has his cooperation or endorsement. The rise of the Negro physician has during recent years comparatively diminished the influence of the Negro preacher, but the latter is still the greater force in the community and will remain so unless the Negro learns to imitate the white people in substituting in their faith the doing of the will of their race for that of doing the revealed will of God. The importance of the position of the Negro minister is apparent when one considers the large following which some of these churches have. Here the minister controls not only hundreds but thousands, as in the cases of Rev. J. E. Willis of the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, of the Rev. Mr. Adams of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Dr. M. W. Reddick in the leadership of thousands of Baptists in Georgia, and the eloquent Dr. M. W. D. Norman, who after years of service as a minister in North Carolina and Virginia and as Dean of the Theological Department of Shaw University, succeeded the lamented Rev. Robert Johnson at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, where thousands wait upon Dr. Norman's words. Some of these ministers are drawing very large numbers, because, instead of merely building large edifices and buying fine clothes and gifts for themselves, they are putting efficiency in the management of the churches, as in the cases of R. H. Bowling in Norfolk, Mordecai W. Johnson in Charleston, and Dr. A. Clayton Powell in New York City. In the Negro churches, moreover, as with Dr. J. C. Austin in Pittsburgh, there are being organized banks, housing corporations, insurance companies, and even steamship projects in keeping with the ideas of Dr. L. G. Jordan. Yet despite this change in point of view, the Negro church has not become a corrupt machine. Its affairs are still in the hands of men who, as a majority, are interested in their race rather than in themselves. The opportunity here sought is not that of leadership but that of service.