2. The Church needs a more business-like organization and way of work.
It needs a more military spirit and discipline. The Church is diffuse
and loosely strung. There are in the United States alone about two
hundred and fifty-six kinds of religious bodies. There is no centralized
interest or work; there is no economic adjustment of funds; there is no
internal agreement as to practical methods. The result is a most
wasteful expenditure of force. Movements are not only duplicated, but
reproduced a hundred times in miniature, in one denomination after
another; special talent is restricted to a narrow field; buildings and
church-plants are multiplied, but lie largely disused; sects and
communities are at loggerheads on unessential points; all this--and the
world is not being saved! The Church fails to see openings for
aggressive work; it fails to seize strategic points; it does not carry a
well-knit local organization, with a husbanding of economic force; it
does not front the world in dead-earnest; it is not proud and honorable
in meeting its local debts; it loses progressive force, from lack of
knowledge as to how to judge men, and train them, and set them to work.
It also lacks greatly in office-force and in supplies. The gospel itself
is without price, but in the nature of things it cannot be proclaimed,
nor church-work efficiently carried on, without financial outlay. There
should be a more adequate equipment for this work. All other enterprises
need, without question, stationery, stenographers, literature for
distribution, office-rooms, office-hours, and a general arrangement
looking toward enlargement and progress. A busy pastor should have an
office-equipment just as much as a business man, and it should be
supported, as a business office is, out of the funds of the business
organization, _i.e._ the local church.
There should be, first of all, a united spirit, and a general
reorganization throughout the whole of evangelical Christendom, not
necessarily destroying denominational lines, with a view to quick
mobilization of energy in any direction most needed. What would a
general do, who, in looking over his troops, should find two hundred and
fifty-six provincial armies, not at ease or at peace with each other,
and yet expected to make war upon a common foe? Shall we not endeavor to
share in some broadly planned, magnificently executed scheme of
world-advance?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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