Human or Superhuman?
THE Great War has called attention to many aspects of human endeavor, and among them it has challenged the efficiency of the Church as an institution which was supposed to exercise a powerful influence over the passions of civilized mankind. In this crisis of human affairs, it is claimed, the Church, as the regular, established, recognized institution of Christianity, the one avenue through which it has attained organized expression, has failed. Why?
Not only has the War challenged the Church as a failure to influence men to love instead of hate, but within the last two years more articles have appeared in magazines charging the Church with weakness and failure than during any previous period of twenty-five years. This is true of American as well as of British and Continental periodicals.
Within the Church itself there is a profound feeling on the part of the thoughtful ministers and laymen that something is fundamentally wrong. What? Something ought to be done to make things fundamentally right. How?
I am writing from the standpoint of the minister after twenty-seven years of church life. I am not writing a wail or a whine or an excuse, but I honestly believe that the great body of church members, and people calling themselves Christians, do not understand the superhuman task required of the human instrument called a minister, and, in large part, that failure to understand the gigantic nature of the ministry as a profession is responsible to-day for a feeble and inefficient Church so far as it is feeble and inefficient.
The minister of the average church is one man. He is very human. He is far from superhuman. Yet his programme calls for superhuman powers. He is not and never will be equal to them. He therefore fails, and the Church is challenged as a failure because he fails.
Here is the minister’s programme, unlike that of any other human being — in medicine, music, art, journalism, business, politics, teaching, science, amusement, or farming.
I. Preaching
The average minister in the average church is supposed to prepare two sermons a week, and something in the way of an address for a mid-week service.
After trying for twenty-seven years to preach, I feel convinced that a sermon is the most difficult of all mental productions. A real sermon is a task that might well absorb every part of a man’s thinking powers, and preclude any other mental effort, for a whole week. When two sermons are demanded, the requirement passes the bounds of the possible. No minister ever lived who could prepare and preach two really good sermons every week. If the work of preaching were the only work required of the minister, it would keep him busy eight hours every day for a week, even to approach the ideal of one good sermon.
II. Parish Work
I have a church of nearly a thousand members. Each individual of that membership ought to have some special and particular shepherding. By parish work is not meant trotting around in the afternoon and calling on people who are not at home. By parish work is meant letter-writing, advice and counsel to people in distress, finding positions for people out of work, directing young people into life-work, serving as peacemaker in family differences — in short, acting as the human buffer between individuals and their daily accidents; being trouble-clerk for two hundred and fifty families made up of all sorts and conditions of human material.
This parish work is of such a nature that any man who is fit to be a minister could spend his whole time and strength in trying to do it, and work sixteen hours a day at it every day, and then succeed in doing only a small part of what needs to be done. And no assistant or other member of the church can do most of this work. The people want to see the minister, not a paid visitor or hired hand.
III. Bible School
Connected with every modern church is a Bible school organized to give religious instruction to all ages. This school is so tremendously important that any man could well find all his energies taxed to the utmost to direct its course of study, examine its teachers, plan its programme, and carry out its purpose. There is enough that is vital in the average Sunday school of every church to occupy all the time of the most thoroughly equipped educator as the superintendent of it. Such a man ought to have nothing else to do. Yet this is only one of the tasks out of a dozen others that the minister is supposed to direct and supervise in all its many intricate, and often delicate, parts. No highschool principal is ever expected to be at the same time the head of a department in a great store, superintendent of a machine-shop, and trafficmanager of a railroad. But the minister is supposed to keep his hand on all the details of a great religious educational school and attend to all the other details of his church and parish besides.
IV. Finances
The great majority of all the ministers in this country find it necessary to manage the business end of the church and devise ways and means to finance the institution. Sometimes this requires financial ability of a very rare order. And the wonder of it is that so many ministers succeed half as well as they do. They may have scores of men in their churches who manage great business enterprises; but it is one of the astonishing things about church finances that a board of trustees, accustomed to handle calmly and successfully millions in their own business, suddenly grow appalled over the budget of a church which calls for a few hundreds. They apparently lose all their business ability when religion is involved, and the minister has to come to the rescue and devise plans for raising money and distributing it. This business calls for an outlay of time and thought which requires weeks and even months of careful planning, yet it is only one item out of all the rest that make up the minister’s programme. In connection with this whole matter of financing a church, how many men working on a salary do you know who have to do the principal work of planning the way to raise that salary and then see to it personally that it is paid? Yet that is exactly what the majority of ministers in this country have to do.
V. Organizations
The average church of to-day, if it is ambitious to keep up with all demands, has many organizations for various phases of religious activity. I have in my church, which is only an average institution, eleven distinct organizations, each one representing some feature of church activity and each one claiming a certain amount of time and attention from the minister. Each one has its regular meetings, which the minister is supposed to attend, and at most of which he is asked to make an address, sometimes of a technical character. These organizations are all supposed to be important. Some of them are of such a nature that a man could give almost his entire time to them to good advantage in the building up of a proper constituency that would rally to the church as a whole. These organizations are in the habit of meeting so often that the average minister in this country is seldom at home in the evening, and sometimes months elapse before he has the leisure to attend to his own private business affairs.
The average business man, and nearly every other professional man, calls it a day’s work when night comes. But for most ministers, when night comes, it means meetings, which keep him away from home until ten, eleven or twelve o’clock; for all this overtime he gets no extra pay; there is no eight-hour day for the minister; with a majority of ministers it is nearer eighteen.
VI. Music
The music in the average church in America is in a state of chaos. There is no standard, no fixed policy, no satisfactory result from policies that are pursued. As a result of this condition many ministers are asked to add to their programme the direction of the music of the church, and many of them are actually taking the matter into their own hands.
The music of a church is a task that might well demand the entire time of a competent and skillful professional musician. There are in a very few churches in America persons who are paid high salaries to direct and drill the entire musical talent of the congregation, including the Bible school, young people’s societies, and the children, and to arrange all the programmes for special occasions, and so forth.
Such a task is enough to keep busy all the time any one who is competent for such a position. In fact, the ability to do such work is so rare that very few men or women, even among professional musicians, can be found to fill these positions with full satisfaction to the church. But the average church, like my own, cannot afford to hire an expert to direct the music. Yet the music of a church is so important to its worship that it cannot be neglected, and the minister feels it to be a duty of his own if no one else can be found to assume it.
VII.Reading
The average minister in the average church must do an immense amount of reading of all sorts if he is going to keep his pond full and not fall behind in the intellectual pace set him by his educated parishioners. If he did nothing else but read books and magazines which touch on his own work as a minister, he would have to read every waking moment and do nothing else. If he takes time for even a fraction of the reading he needs to keep him posted as a preacher, he must rob some other department of activity calling loudly for attention. If he does not read, he is soon rated as commonplace; the people begin to be able to anticipate what he will say, and then — he is lost. As a matter of fact, most ministers read after a full day’s work, when heart and mind are tired, and instead of assimilation mental indigestion follows. In the matter of his reading, the average minister is not between the devil and the deep sea —he is hopelessly in the clutch of both of them; he has never had time to get between them, and he fools himself that he is keeping up with the insatiable demands of his congregation because he buys a certain number of books (but never reads them), and subscribes to a certain lot of papers (but knows nothing of them except their tables of contents).
VIII. The Sick
In the parish of the average minister there is generally a list of invalids and sick people who make a special appeal to him for time and sympathy. Hundreds of ministers make heroic efforts to call on the sick in their parishes, making as many calls in the course of a year as the average doctor. This past winter has been exceptionally severe perhaps, for I find a record of nearly every family on the sick list, and the attempt to see all who would have welcomed a visit and really profited by it was an attempt that failed simply from physical limitations. If the average minister were performing the duties of an average doctor and had no other duties, he could keep busy most of the time doing nothing else but call on the sick and shut-in of the parish; and in doing this he would be doing only what the average church expects him to do as a part of his calling, a failure to do which is regarded as a serious defect in his qualifications as a successful minister.
IX. Civic Duties
It has been an unwritten law of centuries that the minister should be active in all matters that pertain to civic righteousness. And through all the centuries from the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the prophets, to the credit of the minister be it said that he has been willing to bear the brunt of the criticism and scorn that are the regular compensation of most prophets and reformers. To-day, hundreds of ministers in cities and towns all over this country are adding to the superhuman programme demanded by their own parishes the disagreeable duty of law-enforcement, of sanitary regulations, of movements for playgrounds, conservation of health, establishment of tuberculosis camps, agitation in the press for justice to working men and women, and civic progress generally.
I know a score of ministers who are serving acceptably on civil-service boards, as heads of committees for social surveys, as members of commercial clubs, interested in better conditions for the criminal classes, working long hours into the night on public-welfare boards, wrestling with difficult problems of foreign-born, establishing settlements, founding kindergartens, encouraging plans for city or town adornment, and neglecting their own homes in the effort to beautify the homes of others. A minister was arrested the other day for not obeying a law requiring householders to secure a garbage-box called for by a municipal ordinance. And he was chairman of a committee of the Commercial Club, appointed to see that in the poorer districts garbage-boxes were secured! He had been too busy on that committee to attend to his own, and frankly told the judge that he had forgotten it!
All this civic work is done, of course, without pay. Neither the church nor the city would consider for a moment that it had any obligation in the matter, and would laugh at the suggestion. And yet large numbers of ministers are giving to civic betterment days of valuable time and valuable service; and in many cases that I know, the annual postage spent on necessary committee work is equal to more than a week’s salary of some city officials who do not do a tenth part of the service the minister does, serving without thought or expectation of financial reward.
X. Sundries
Under the head of ‘ Sundries’ the college-boy sometimes puts down items of an embarrassing character, which when footed up may present as important a total as those which are itemized.
It is so with the minister. There is his own home, family, private business, and the like. It was not without its tragedy that the neglected wife of a minister asked her husband, as he was leaving the house one evening on an errand of mercy to other homes in trouble, ‘John, won’t you get a new motto to hang on the wall?’
‘What kind of a motto, Mary?’
‘I have been thinking this would be appropriate: “There’s no place like home — any more.” ’
Some churches never seem to think that the minister has any right to a home and wife and children. And some ministers sometimes wonder if they ought to have them, if they must neglect them after getting them. I know one prominent minister who, on his own confession, has not had a quiet evening at home with his family for more than three months. And the meetings, committees, conferences, organizations, and engagements of the parish that fill his notebook for every night, stretch on endlessly into the future. And he is a very human man. But he lives in an atmosphere of superhuman conditions which he is trying to meet with superhuman heroism, only to fail, as all of us are failing.
The average pay that churches in this country give their ministers is less than $1200 a year. The average minister is trying to fill a dozen positions, any one of which, compared with a position as superintendent of a railroad division, is a giant’s task. And the railroad man receives for his one position five times what the minister gets for his dozen.
Is it any wonder your boy does not care to enter the ministry? Would you enter it again, knowing what you know of it now?
This is not an attempt to suggest a remedy. It is only a statement of the facts. The minister is just a plain, average, human creature, fitted like other men to do some one thing fairly well. The church, or custom, or something, has put upon him superhuman tasks. Flesh and blood and brains and heart cannot bear the strain. Is it fair to impose on the human the superhuman? Something is fundamentally wrong. What? It ought to be made fundamentally right. How?