Preaching in Obscurity

by WALTER R. CLYDE

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AMERICA has thousands of obscure pastors of congregations in predominantly rural communities, the “little brothers” of the Protestant Church, who seldom come to notice or rise to positions of eminence. Participation in the more important Church conferences is not often their privilege; they cannot pay their own way and their denominations hardly ever commission them as delegates. Almost never are they named to high denominational posts like those of the state executives, board secretaries, and bishops.

Invitations to exchange pulpits with pastors of prominent congregations, to address official Church gatherings, to lead in Church conferences of their fellow ministers, are very few for them. Often their colleagues of the metropolitan and county-seat pulpits look down upon them with complacency and condescension, with self-satisfaction and pity, and sometimes, even, with a trace of contempt. They wear out entire lives in the same kind of small churches and small communities, with the same absence of reputation, and finally, in their old age, lay aside their work without publicity.

I would speak a word for these “little brothers” of the Protestant Church as one contribut ion toward rendering them the honor which in simple justice is their due. I would speak a word for them because they constitute a major cause for optimism regarding the future of the Christian Church. Quite correctly it is many times lamented that the Church of today has brought its existence into jeopardy by loving popularity more than truth, until its ministry has failed properly to denounce modern secularism, with its materialism, its sensuality, its superficial view of man’s goodness. But the devout “little brothers” of Protestantism deny secularism and all its concomitants by their lives of persistent devotion to their humble duties. Sensitive to the needs of common people, they maintain a single purpose: the service of those needs in the name of their God. Their Christianity is a living Christianity; their Church is a living Church, a Church which will continue to live.

I can speak for the “little brothers” of the Protestant Church because I know something about them. My father was one of them. Many of them were my pupils in the theological seminary before they left for their years of ministry in the rural trading towns and the open country. I have seen them in the Northeast, the East, the South, the Far West. I have seen them all about me on the vast prairies of the Missouri valley. And I know them to be men of God in very truth, worthy of the Church’s highest honors, foundations for the Church’s highest hopes.

There is, for example, the aged minister who attended a Church conference at which I was present last fall. It was the annual state meeting of one of the larger denominations; and this old saint was present for the fifty-fifth consecutive time! Fifty-five years ago he had left an Eastern theological seminary, traveled westward for over fifteen hundred miles to the frontier lands of South Dakota, and begun his first pastorate in a mission church just established, where only recently oxen and plow had broken the rich black loam of the plains. He remained twenty-nine years, leaving only to become supervisor, for a decade more, of a group of even more primitive congregations.

At the same conference with the venerable father of the Church was a young man with a theological degree not yet a year old — a young man who is now pastor of five rural churches. He told me of his conversation with a lady who was expressing her appreciation of his work and his special helpfulness to her. He said to her: “I entered this work because I wanted to. I am only afraid that some day something will come up that may attract me away from it.” That something? A pastorate in a bigger town, with a more imposing church building, a larger salary, a more comfortable manse, greater cultural opportunities, a better school for his children. A strange fear!

There is the man who served a village congregation of a few more than a hundred members for seventeen years, the man who has ministered to a similar congregation for fifteen years. There is the man, about fifty and with the vigor and balanced judgment of healthy maturity, who lives in the open country beside his church building, of necessity supplementing his salary from the produce of cows, chickens, and a limited acreage, but who steadily declines calls to substantial congregations because “my people need me here.” There is the man, not yet twenty-five, who went to a Nebraska sand-hill town to serve a congregation which had been without a pastor for three years because it could barely offer a living salary. There is the man who ministered to a succession of struggling village churches for thirty-nine years, of whom it was said at the close of a necrology committee’s report: “ He was not a seeker of honor and position.” There is the man, not yet forty, who recently entered the army chaplaincy from a small-town pastorate which he took thirteen years ago directly following his graduation from seminary.

Young, elderly, middle-aged, these “little brothers” of the Protestant Church have the same high vision of humble service, the same abiding purpose of persistence in unrewarding toil.

Significantly, they willingly accept positions that most of the prominent ministers, board representatives, and theological seminary professors — those who fill up the Church’s conferences on social problems — would refuse. These ministers, board members, and seminary teachers, in comparison with the rural pastors, occupy places of ecclesiastical privilege. One notes a remarkable difference between modern social documents written by labor and those written by the Church. The social documents of labor are written largely by men at the bottom of their specific working class while the social documents of the Church are penned by men at the top of theirs.

The pastors of the large congregations, the department executives of the denominations, the professors of the theological seminaries — these are the men who write the social manifestoes of the Church; and they are the men who have risen to the places in the Church where incomes are highest, honors most abundant, and prestige most satisfying. Theirs are the posts of privilege, and they endure few of the economic privations, the intellectual restrictions, and the discouragements experienced by their lesser brethren in the town and country parishes. Certainly many of them give generously of their money; certainly their very positions and talents add to their effectiveness as prophets of the social implications of Christianity. But the fact remains that economically and socially they are the more fortunate among the Christian ministry, and few of them would readily accept the hardships of the rural ministry even if they believed they could be more effective in it.

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THIS is not to imply that numerous village and open-country pastors would not change their positions for ones more profitable materially and culturally if they could. On the other hand, there are the many, many village and country pastors who have consecrated themselves to their rural churches because they wanted to, with scarcely any sense of sacrifice. Sometimes they are men unsparingly honest in acknowledging their limitations. Like the young man who a few weeks ago said to me, “ I know I can never handle a big city church, but I can work with rural people,” they realize their intellectual and administrative shortcomings and their inability to cope with the more subtle minds and the more complicated organizational problems of the larger congregations.

Sometimes they are men of surpassing ability, who have dedicated their lives to the small church in the small community solely because its needs have caught their hearts. And they have made their dedication, moreover, because they are men who see not only the immediate needs; they see farther and know that if the religious life of the towns and the countryside is not kept warm and pulsating, then the religious life of the cities which draw so largely upon the rural areas behind them will be stifled in the materialism, the industrialism, the confusion of city life. But all of them — these ministers who are rural ministers because they want to be — are men abundantly satisfied with the careers they have chosen. If occasionally they are tempted to bigger, more lucrative positions, it is not so often for themselves as for their wives and children. But steadily, resolutely, they deny the temptation.

What, we may ask, is ministerial ability? Is it the ability to preach dramatically, with something of the theater, so that great crowds are attracted ? Is it the ability to preach innocuously but elegantly, and so delight the idle well-to-do and the superficial ? Is it the ability to make things “go” in the church organization by causing it to function as a kind of glorified Y.M.C.A. or social or service club? Is it the possession of such personal and social graces that the minister is persona grata to the exclusive set? Is that what ministerial ability is?

Or is it chiefly a consuming love for God and therefore a singlehearted devotion to the needs of men and women? Is it a Gospel preached so much in life and with such sincerity in the pulpit that the minister, though he be but one of the people and lacking in poetic eloquence, has the respect of his fellows? Is it such a humble walk with God, such a speaking of truth in simple language, that a few lives are genuinely transformed and enlisted in the work of building a better world? If that be real ministerial ability, essential ministerial ability, then these ministers have few real limitations.

One cannot claim that here are men of perfect virtue, exhibiting none of the failings with which humanity in general is afflicted. No man can wholly surrender himself. Often these men are troubled by discontent, self-righteousness, criticalness toward others, jealousy, the desire for attention. Nor can one claim that here are the only persons in rural communities who dedicate themselves, with no anticipation of reward, to a labor of love. Many a schoolteacher does that. And so do some physicians, dentists, lawyers, businessmen, housewives.

But one can claim that here are men with an exaltation of character and a devotedness of purpose unsurpassed by any other group of men — perhaps unequaled by any other group of men. From among all classes of people, the minister, and especially the rural minister, is the only one supposed to ask nothing for himself. And since he is supposed to ask nothing for himself, the community and the congregation accept his lack of the many things so many others possess.

The minister is consecrated to sacrifice; and so his pittance of a salary becomes the inspiration for numerous pleasantries. (Was it a joke that Jesus had no place to lay His head?) Various kinds of alms are given him, sometimes out of real generosity, but more often because it is considered no injustice that the minister who serves his people should become a pensioner on his congregation’s charity. The comfortably situated have no conscience about the contrast between their own adequately furnished homes and sleek cars and the minister’s bare necessities and noisy “jalopy.” In many quarters it is still considered altogether proper that the minister’s wife should don a hat of dubious season and his children wear the discarded clothing of his parishioners’ offspring. The minister should not be interfered with in fulfilling his willingness to sacrifice. I recall a woman whom the finance committee of my father’s congregation approached for her annual subscription to the congregation’s budget. After considerable persuasion from the committee, she finally wrote down some figures on the pledge card and handed it back to the committee. The committee looked at the card in disappointment: “But surely you can do better than this. Certainly most of us will have to do better or we’ll not be able to keep up the minister’s salary, and that wouldn’t be doing right by him.” The reply came airily: “Oh, don’t worry about that! The minister will get his reward in heaven.” When Dad heard the story he chuckled and said he guessed the good woman wanted to help him along to the collecting of the reward!

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THE amalgamation of rural churches would improve the financial situation of many ministers. Furthermore, it would improve their morale and the possibilities of their ministry by stopping the endless succession of sparsely attended meetings, religious rivalries, and divided efforts. But the laymen are seldom interested. For sentimental reasons, or through desire to sustain immediate positions of eminence in their respective congregations, they prefer to be religious (one can hardly say, worship God) in their separate denominational ways, though their pastors languish in economic privation and spiritual frustration.

A church officer in an overchurched town wrote me the other day: “ We have not been able to afford a full-time pastor for ten years. Now we think maybe we can. Will you send us a good, strong young man, a hard worker, to lead us?” Send him to break his heart and perhaps starve his body as well?

Whenever laymen are eager for union of rural churches they are ordinarily prompted by economic self-interest. The opportunities for strengthened Christian work and for more adequate provision for their ministers do not inspire them. Rather they are moved by the opportunity to save money by reducing overhead, including the elimination of all the ministers’ salaries save one. The budget of the united church usually remains about the same as that of the strongest of the congregations entering the union, and if the salary of the now single minister is increased, the increase is generally microscopic and is later eliminated at the first chance.

Sometimes, of course, ministers themselves oppose church unions because consolidation means the loss of their positions. The main fault, however, is not with them. One can sympathize with their desire to remain off the bread line. They favor union whenever they have reasonable prospects for further employment. The main fault rests with the denominations at large for their lack of vision or will to effect such widespread consolidation and increase of budgets that the unneeded ministers can be absorbed in expanded work where no congregations now exist.

As the result of their straitened circumstances, village and country ministers belong to the lower economic groups of their communities. A few classifications are below them: common laborers, restaurant waiters, store clerks, and the like; but most of the others have incomes above theirs. And this is despite the fact that the ministers belonging to the older denominations are better educated t han most of the citizenry. Individuals in some denominations are becoming increasingly convinced that if the Church is to preach social reform and justice to business and state, it must practice what it preaches by improving the condition of its underpaid rural pastors.

To this end, plans for equalizing clerical salaries by denominational stabilization funds are being discussed. For a long time some practical steps have been taken in the direction of equalization by the effort to fix minimum salary levels and the supplementing of congregation salary payments by grants from home or national missions funds. Also, a number of communions have adopted pension plans designed to compensate partially for their ministers’ inability to save sufficient sums for their old age. Nevertheless, rural ministers remain in the lowincome class. Minimum salaries are still too low; supplementary grants are too small; and their pensions are eventually lowest because their salaries are lowest — another fact which may well make the advocates of Christian social justice question the Church’s application of it to itself.

These disabilities of small-town and country pastors are not presented to win sympathy for them. These men do not assume their work with any idea of financial reward or cultural privilege. No profit motive inspires them, no conviction that they ought to be paid in proportion to the degree of their preparation or the number of hours they work. The words of the call extended a minister by a Presbyterian congregation asking his pastoral services express the relationship to money intended ideally for all Protestant ministers and actually accepted by those in the rural areas: “In order that you may be free from worldly cares and avocations, [this church] promises to pay. . .”In other words, what the church pays the pastor is not properly a salary or a wage in the sense that a salary or wage can be regarded as payment for so much service rendered.

No church “hires” a minister, though that is a common expression; and a Protestant, non-Quaker minister is no more “a hireling” than is a Quaker minister whose society rejects “salaried” ministers as “hirelings.” The money paid a Protestant minister is simply an expense account, or a release from the necessity of doing other work so that he can give his whole time and energy to the work of the church. Knowing this, the rural ministers request no more income than is required to keep them and their families in decent livelihood and to enable them to perform their responsibilities.

The disabilities of the rural ministers are presented, rather, to suggest the degree of their sacrificial, and therefore Christian, living. They are not simply telling people to be Christian; they are actually Christian. Unlike many metropolitan ministers of prominent congregations, unlike the bourgeois Protestant laity, they do not seek to make the best of two possible worlds, luxuriating in this one and persuading themselves that pious phrases and sentimental feelings will guarantee them the comfort of the next. Theirs is no suburban paradise enshrouded with the aura of middle-class gentility and isolated from the harsh world of men’s want and pain. They themselves experience want; they themselves experience pain. And their own anguish becomes many times more intense when they see their families suffering with them, and when they wonder whether they have any right to subject others to the vow of poverty which is theirs. They are of the tens of millions who know what it is to hunger and to lack; to eat whole meals of potatoes and beans; to own only one suit — and that shiny and threadbare from much pressing; to shiver in a cold house in winter because coal must be saved.

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CERTAINLY the town and country pastors, consecrated to lifelong ministry to unimpressive congregations in unimpressive communities, are one of the causes for hope regarding the survival of the Christian Church. They have not come to terms with the materialism of earth, and though the world is now little impressed with their manner of life because it seeks another, yet when it comes to itself it will see in them what Christianity really is, what the Church is at its best, and it will turn to Christianity and the Church — to their kind of Christianity and their kind of Church. The forgotten men of the Church will become the hope of the world, as the forgotten Man of the Cross, now and again in moments of the world’s sanity, becomes the hope of the world. The world will look to them, who know insecurity and want, as those who yet possess rich treasure and find in it a joy and a peace such as things cannot give, neither can they take away. The world will look to them as men who walk humbly among men, with characters unsullied by greed, untainted by conceit, unmarred by bitterness. And the world will gather about them in their villages and by their roadsides and about their spirit in the cities. And that will be the Church’s rebirth.

This vision of the Church’s rebirth through the devotion of its rural pastors is not simply prophetic fancy. The fulfillment of the vision is already appearing, and, indeed, has been appearing for some time. While perhaps the Protestant Church and its ministry on the whole are chiefly concerned for the larger centers of population, a growing number of ministers of statesmanlike outlook, sensitive spirit, and consecrated heart are realizing that the Church cannot be reborn unless it is reborn where most of the enduringly constructive movements of the spirit are born — in the grass-roots.

The spiritual impoverishment of rural areas must be relieved; the decay of rural parishes must be halted; the lives of rural young people must be inspired; the enfeebling competition of rural congregations must be checked; the best of rural pastoral leadership must be provided. Then, with new religious life brought to being in the rural districts, sources of vitality and power will exist from which the county-seat and metropolitan centers can draw. The concrete results of this renewed concern of the parishes of town and country are two: first, multiplying efforts to encourage and make more effective the work of ministers already serving rural pulpits; and second, increasing emphasis on the challenge of rural work and the necessity of physically virile and intellectually able young ministers’ enlisting for life in that work.

Last year the Committee on Town and Country of the Home Missions Council of North America and the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America published a pamphlet entitled “ In-Service Training for the Ministers in Town and Country, 1943.” It was a calendar and description of the schools, institutes, and conferences to be held during the summer at various colleges, theological seminaries, and camps. Forty-four locations were listed, with the study periods ranging from a few days to more than two weeks. Courses offered were such as these: “The Country Church and Our Generation”; “Inter-Church Coöperation”; “Agriculture of the Old Testament”; “Rural Sociology”; “Agricultural Economics”; “Adult Education in Rural Life.” The announced objectives were: “(1) To help ministers become acquainted with tested methods of town and country church work. (2) To assist them in securing an understanding of the trends and problems of modern country life. (3) To develop fellowships among ministers in town and country. (4) To increase contacts of ministers with agricultural leaders.”

What is happening in the way of encouraging young men to commit themselves to the rural ministry can be seen in one of the most interesting movements toward such dedication, a movement just now developing among a group of young Presbyterian ministers in the East. Their avowed purpose is to secure “a dedicated order within the Presbyterian ministry,” composed of men who will serve “where the Church has found the going toughest.” They seek their recruits from the theological students in the seminaries. Then they take those who volunteer, after their graduation, to an old-fashioned farmhouse not far from Pennsylvania’s famous Delaware Water Gap. There, at “Kirkridge,” on a mountaintop with a view of God’s heaven above and God’s world below, the recruits are led by several experienced pastors in periods of discipline in worship, manual toil, and study. The Kirkridge movement hopes to be a “ ‘seed-bed’ for new life among ministers: informal but earnest in discipline and intention ... a symbol of fearless social thinking and action, grounded in manual work and life renewed in God.”

The theological seminaries, which have the major responsibility for directing the study and inspiring the work of the Church’s future ministers, are also more and more placing before their students the challenge of the rural pastorate and offering them specialized training for it. Leadership among the seminaries in this respect has been taken largely by the Interseminary Commission for Training for the Rural Ministry, a group of six seminaries in New York and the New England states, and by the American Association of Theological Seminaries, the national accrediting agency for theological education. Efforts are made to set before the seminarians in impressive fashion the call of the town and country ministry as a lifework; to secure the response, particularly, of young men who evidence special vocational fitness for the rural parish; to develop courses and methods contributing to successful rural religious service; to formulate and supervise a program of field work affording practical training for rural church leadership.

One of the most significant things the seminaries have done, working through the American Association, has been to arrange, with the coöperation of many colleges of agriculture, a pre-seminary course which can be taken in those colleges by young men who plan to make careers of the rural pastorate. In general, a great deal has been accomplished in developing fruitful coöperation between theological seminaries and agricultural schools — coöperation extending through pre-seminary, seminary, and post-seminary education.

These new emphases are developing a type of rural minister increasingly competent, by reason of both education and native ability, to deal with the unique problems of the rural churches. Equipped with wide knowledge, not only specifically religious in the more formal sense, but sociological, economic, and psychological, they are rapidly gaining influence in their communities. Trained in summer schools and conferences, fresh from theological seminaries, these modern rural pastors come to their parishes to inspire them to hard, realistic, intelligent thinking toward building the Kingdom of God both within them and about them. Through such service a different sort of town and country church is coming into being; through such service the Church is already being reborn.

Certainly much more of consecration, of vision, of technical training is needed on the part of the Church as a whole before the new Church can grow and develop into maturity. But the rural ministers, the “little brothers” of the Church, will more than supply their share. Many of their contributions will come through the hundreds of them who, after torturous searching of soul as they looked upon their needy parishes, have entered the military chaplaincy. Large numbers of these chaplains, already pledged to the ministry of town and country, will return to the rural areas. They will surely have a deeper understanding of human needs, a more tolerant spirit toward other faiths, a broader view of world interrelatedness, an enlarged understanding of the enormous complexities of modern life. The rural churches these former chaplains will serve will be more effective churches because of their pastors’ war experiences.

The “little brothers” of the Protestant Church, the faithful, self-effacing, patient, uncomplaining, undersalaried pastors of the village and country churches of American Protestantism! Salute them for their nobility of character. Salute them even more for the promise that rests in them for the future of the Christian Church.