The Community Course
Part 3 - Specific Community Interests
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22. The Church in the Community

Community Churches
There are tens of thousands of rural and small community churches in the United States. They have an average membership of about a hundred, about a fifth of whom are not active, and their membership or adherents include about a third of the entire population of their communities. With improvement in transportation and with increased tendency to cooperate, the number of rural churches tends to decline, while the membership of the individual church tends to increase. (See Kolb and Brunner, A Study of Rural Society, Chapter XX, “Religion and the Rural Church.”)

Church’s Role in Settling America
In the pioneer settlement of America the community church played an important part. To a large degree it defined the social standards of the community. For the most part, America was settled by people of small means, limited education, and of vague, rough and ready standards, except as those standards were defined by the church. The church, almost alone among formal social organizations, had a clearly defined social and ethical code, in advance of that required by law. It helped not only to maintain existing social customs, but to create better ones. It founded hundreds of colleges, and was one of the chief influences in transmitting some of the better elements of the cultural inheritance to the motley and largely uneducated mass of men and women who pressed westward.

The community church also was one of the principal schools of democracy. Except for a few denominations that were ruled by a non-resident and anti-democratic church hierarchy, the American community church was democratic. Often it provided much more direct, democratic participation in policy-making and in administration than did political government.

Community Church as Social Organization
The community church has been a social organization, often providing almost the only opportunity in the community for people to meet and to visit with each other. It was one of the principal means by which young people became acquainted and found their mates. It was a recognized agency for social service in case of want and suffering. The democratically governed community church was a true folk institution, and not an imposed authority. During the pioneer times when the spirit and organization of the community was inadequately developed it supplied for its members many of the elements of community life. Its principal value, however, was to nurture the vision and the idealism of the community, and to keep alive that spiritual aspiration which gives the highest quality to life, but which tends to be crowded out by the immediate pressure of economic affairs.

Church Competition
Yet the community church has not been altogether an asset in community life. The claims of the several denominations to be unique guardians of the truth and receivers of true revelation made it natural for each to compete with the others for numbers and loyalty, and tended to intolerance. That tendency to competition and to isolation has been one of the most divisive forces in American community life. It has broken up even small communities into separate church groups which, if they did not combat each other, yet did not often cooperate.

A study of 140 villages in nearly all parts of America, made about l925 under the direction of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, indicated that the home mission policy of several denominations accentuated competition between small community churches. More than half the churches receiving home mission assistance were in communities having four or more churches, whereas “unchurched" communities were generally neglected. (Brunner, Hughes and Patterson American Agricultural Villages (New York, George C. Doran, l927), Chapter VI, "The Village Church.”).

Church Values
The community faces the problem of preserving and developing the values of its churches, while escaping their disadvantages. The democratically governed churches are tending to see themselves, not as the sole transmitters of revealed truth, but as associations of sincere people who are committed to a search for the truth and to achieving better ways of life for themselves and for society. Insofar as that attitude has developed they are learning to cooperate. Half-starved and competing churches are consolidating or are working together in harmony.

Community Council Assistance
The Community Council greatly assists cooperation among community churches. Through Community Council activities, without surrendering their distinctive views, the churches of a community can work together on common problems. As an association of people who have set themselves to achieve more than the average level of personal and social standards, a church can be a pioneer institution in the community. By expressing its united voice through representation on a Community Council it can be a force for refinement of community purpose. In many American small communities there are too many small, struggling churches, with but slight differences in actual creeds or programs, each striving to keep alive or to extend its influence, and but slightly active in affairs of the community as a whole. Yet small churches are not of necessity undesirable. If they are not too small, too weak, and too ambitious, they often may be of more value to their members than large ones. Small numbers are essential to intimate personal and neighborly relationships. A small church of fifty or a hundred active members, if it does not have ambitions beyond its means, and if it heartily cooperates in general community affairs with other bodies, such as the Community Council, may constitute a compact body of neighbors and associates who sustain each other's purposes and provide intimate fellowship which larger organizations miss. On the other hand, where the church tries to supply most of the community needs of its members, larger membership is necessary to effectiveness.

Separating Church and State
The separation of church and state is relatively recent. When they were united the church saw itself as the center of social life, and that habit has carried over. Often the churches of a community have been in competition with each other and with the community as a whole in the effort to organize community social life, and as a result the spirit of a community as a whole has almost died. To what extent individual community churches should maintain social programs cannot be decided in the abstract. Even where there is well developed unity in the community, it is natural and wholesome that smaller groups should have still more intimate relations. But they should contribute to community integration, and not obstruct it.

Serving Community Needs
If general community needs should be served by the community as a whole, and if small community churches should undertake to do only those things which a small group can do better than a large one, both the community and the church would profit by the change. In the small church, if it is truly a live and active group, the members can be concerned with working out a common life purpose, with encourag­ing and sustaining each other in their standards and convictions, and with worshipping together. As for musical programs, lecture programs, and general social events, often it is well when these can represent the efforts of the entire community, with the churches cooperating. In a well developed community, with vigorous and unified community life, the church might be most significant and effective by acting as a sort of social hormone, adding tone to the whole, instead of trying to be a nearly complete social organism in itself. In a small community the so-called "institutional church," with playgrounds, educational classes, music clubs, etc., often is undertaking functions which had better be performed by the community as a whole, with the help and cooperation of all local churches.

Such a view of its function would greatly simplify both the church's problems and those of the community. The church would be an association of people for inquiring into a way of life, for making that way clear to young and old, and for inspiring and strengthening each other in that way. In many cases it would need less physical plant facilities and a smaller budget. Through its representation as a body on the Community Council, and through the activity of its members in community affairs, it could promote the unity of the community as a whole, and by example could illustrate to the community the way of life which it had set out to achieve. Its influence would be, not so much in the number of its members at the moment, as in the clearness and excellence with which it had worked out a way of life, and in the degree to which that way of life was exemplified in its members.

There may be some denominations, especially if not democratically governed, to which such a situation would be abhorrent. Some of them may try to undermine activities of the community as a community, such as the public school. A religious institution of that kind may feel itself to be the proper supreme authority, temporarily robbed of its power. It may try to isolate its members as much as possible from general community participation, and to set up a state within a state, or a community within the community. The presence of such an influence is very detrimental to efforts for community unity. The spirit of America seems to be bigger than this attitude of exclusiveness and dominance, and even these organizations are coming to deny an attitude of exclusiveness and unique authority, and are participating more and more in the general community life.