In an earlier section we have considered the obstacles and hindrances which confront Christianity to-day and which prevent, or at least slow down, its triumphant progress. Secularism, naturalism, materialism, and, in some parts of the world, communism, stand out in intrenched hostility to the Christian way of life and to the Christian body of ideas and ideals. In one form or another, by silence or by setded opposition, they all deny the reality of God and they leave human life stripped almost bare of spiritual significance and transcendent meaning.
But there is another obstacle to be found within die Christian movement itself, which perhaps presents a graver difficulty to the spread of Christianity than any one of those militant foes on the outside. No one of these temporary formulations of thought, which for the moment seem to be a menace to the spread of Chris-
[ p. 137 ] [ p. 138 ] tianity, would present any serious obstacle if the forces of organi2ed Christianity were united in heart and purpose and if the Church of Christ were in truth and in reality a living organ of His Spirit. The divisions in the Church itself and its failure to confront its tasks with vision and leadership and creative power constitute, if the truth were fr ankl y uttered, the supreme difficulty which confronts the Christian interpretation of life in the world to-day. Organization in a subtle, more or less unconscious way tends to become an end in itself and may even defeat the very ideals and aims it exists to promote and foster. The power and authority of a great system, made august and sacred by time and perspective, fit rather badly with the spiritual demands of personal freedom, initiative and fresh creative leadership. Ecclesiasticism does not easily keep house on friendly terms with a growing faith of first-hand experience and inward vision. The natural conservatism of a great historic religious body is bound to produce a dampening effect on glowing and original minds, and it makes it difficult for the prophets of a new age, when they appear, to find scope for their transforming work. The importance of the preservation of the inheritance from the past cultivates an attitude of caution and inclines an ancient organization to defend the status quo, to stand sponsor for outgrown customs, and to protect forms of worship and systems of thought which have become inadequate for the expanding life [ p. 139 ] of the race. We are only too familiar with the tendency to compromise, the lack of social vision, the failure to see, as from a mounrain-top, the dawn of new epochs and to give prophetic leadership in times of moral crisis.
For these and other reasons the organized Church often seems to social and economic reformers a main obstacle to human progress. That attitude to-day is widespread and it is well-nigh irreconcilable. It is a primary item in the Soviet creed and it dominates the modem culture of most countries in Europe and Latin America. In the United States and Canada the lines are not quite so sharply drawn. The hostility to the Church, except in the ranks of organized labor, is moderate and tempered. It is an attitude of neglect rather than positive opposition. A great many of the educated youth of these countries have lost faith in the Church as an instrument of progress and have gradually, often reluctantly, turned away from it because it does not minister to their highest needs and because it seems to them so hesitant in its championship of the ideals of life with which they are kindled and possessed. They find it difficult to understand how a Church founded by Christ can show such feeble loyalty to the principles of truth, the way of life and the spirit of love to which His life was dedicated. Their very loyalty to the Christ of the Gospels often makes it difficult for them to be enthusiastically loyal to the Church [ p. 140 ] which bears His name. The inability of the Church to meet the intellectual issues of modern times and to rise to a convincing spiritual interpretation of the world which laboratory science has been discovering has left many minds stranded in doubt and many more persons suspicious and lethargic toward it. Its pronouncements often seem to them helpless and futile. It spends time on issues and problems that are remote from the ones that are central in the minds of the youth of to-day.
They come from their books and class rooms and laboratories, and are asked to listen to matters which have no vital interest for them. They look up and are not fed. It is not altogether the fault of the Church. There is a certain element of perversity and caprice of attitude to which no amount of wisdom and insight would probably bring health and healing. But in the main the present generation of youth are sound in their fundamental aims and keen for reality and truth. They are ready for great adventure when they are summoned to it and they would go the whole costly way with a Church genuinely pledged to Christ’s program. Whenever the Church has taken a position of creative leadership and has summoned its youth to some great spiritual adventure significant enough to draw forth the potential capacities of its youthful members, they have always responded with zeal and alacrity, as they would do once more if the call reached them with kindling power. [ p. 141 ] n
Among its weaknesses and grounds of failure for its present task stands the central weakness of the divided forces and cross-purposes of the Christian Church. It is a serious confusion to thoughtful minds to have so many “kinds” and “varieties” of Christianity bidding for loyalty. This obstacle is probably a good deal more in evidence in rural districts and in village communities than it is in the cosmopolitan life of great cities. A number of small, weak churches, often manifesting a rival animus to each other divide the spiritual forces of the communities and the division makes it impossible for any one of them to be properly equipped or adequately financed for the execution of its mission in the world. Sectarian fervor tends often to emphasize and keep alive peculiar and sometimes obsolete aspects of ecclesiastical order or types of thought which had better fade away and give place to new and more vital features adapted to the spiritual needs of the time. The sectarian divisions which are such a source of weakness and confusion here at home play still greater havoc in missionary lands. Those who are asked to leave the ancient religion of their fathers for Christianity are both amazed and confused to find how many “kinds” of Christianity there are. In some instances the adherents of one “kind” will have nothing to do with the adherents of another “kind.” They [ p. 142 ] reciprocally give the impression that each other “kind” of Christianity is of a lower order than their own, and, consequently, that love, which is the most essential aspect of Christ’s Christianity, and which should certainly be the most characteristic feature of a Christianity that goes out to penetrate the life and thought of another country, is missing. There will never be a world-conquering Christian faith until there is, at least in spirit, a united Church.
One of the gravest obstacles to unity has been, and in some regions still continues to be, the infallible state of mind on the part of those who present their interpretations of Christian thought. In the first place, such persons fail to recognize that Christianity is founded on love and grace rather than on theories and speculations. And in the second place, they mistakenly set up cocksureness, the fiery positive, as a criterion of truth. “I beseech you by the bowels of Christ to consider that you may possibly be mistaken,” was the way Oliver Cromwell on a famous occasion addressed the infallible Scotch Elders. It may always conceivably be a fact that the most infallible-minded asserter of ultimates is wrong. Infallible-mindedness is sometimes only another name for excessive egoism, and sometimes, again, it is a subtle psychological “compensation” for deeplying doubts and fears. One shouts louder or whistles more vigorously in the presence of dark and danger. The person who is most secure and confident of his [ p. 143 ] faith and truth is humble and modest. He does not strive nor cry. He does not lift up his voice in the street. He is respectful of the truth which others hold. And in any case, he holds his truth in love and reverence. He draws and attracts others into truth, and he suspects the reality of that so-called “truth” which divides and severs. The beatitude on meekness has been well called one of the most “incredible” of all the beatitudes, and so it is. Meekness is just that attitude of quiet confidence in eternal principles of truth which enables one to be calm and unmoved and free from turmoil and bluster “though the nations rage and imagine a vain thing.”
And yet, on the other hand, there are dangers of another sort involved in the formation of one single imperial organization inclusive enough to hold the entire Christian family of the world in one organic body. There has been a curious and yet widespread tendency manifested to confuse unity with uniformity. They are totally different. The former is of the highest importance; in fact, it is an essential feature of a Church that is to be effectual. Uniformity on the other hand is disastrous, even deadly. It levels down instead of up. It cramps and compels the mind. It is mechanistic [ p. 144 ] and not spiritual. It is even conceivable that a tightly organized and uniform Church, which allowed no freedom of deviation, might present more dangers and difficulties to the spread of Christ’s Christianity than are to be found in the divided Church of the present.
A few years ago, some one, in friendly conversation with one of the leading American officials of the Roman Catholic Church, asked him what he would say if he saw a person who obviously possessed and manifested grace in his life and yet never made use of what his Church called “the means of grace,” or “the channels of grace”? Without a moment’s hesitation the distinguished Churchman replied: “I should say that he belonged to the invisible Church and I should say further that it is more important to belong to the invisible Church than to the visible one.”
No one could question the breadth or the liberality of that answer. It is exactly the position that was taken in die sixteenth century by a number of profound spiritual prophets who regretted to see the Reformers of that epoch laboring to set up another infallible visible Church to take the place of the one against which they were “protesting.” These spiritual prophets were afraid of organizations and fo rms and systems. They hoped to have the spirit of love and truth and gentleness propagated through personal lives and they believed that the Light and Life of Christ as Eternal Spirit could be forever bom anew in the hearts [ p. 145 ] of saints without the necessity for any visible body anywhere in the world to be the incarnation of it.
This is a very popular and a taking theory in the world to-day. It avoids the dangers of a great organization. It entails no burdens. It imposes no statement of creed. It loads no inherited cargo of ideas upon the tender backs of an unborn generation. It trusts to the contagious power of truth and love. The ideal is, no doubt, a beautiful one which has attracted and fascinated many noble souls at many different periods of human history. But it is almost certainly a dream rather than a solid reality. There might, no doubt, be a world in which truth and love are transmitted and propagated by invisible contagions without any visible organ of preservation and transmission, but it seems pretty certain that we are not living in that kind of a world. The “spiritual,” as we know it, is never disembodied, existing apart by itself in isolation and floating intangibly above the realm which we inhabit. The spiritual is conjunct with the physical. The one is superposed on the other. However unalike they may be, they belong together and both suffer by division into sundered halves.
In spite of the dangers, therefore, which beset organizations, institutions and systems, and in spite of their tendency to smother the truth they carry, there appears to be no solution of the problem of the transmission of the Life and Love and Truth of God re- [ p. 146 ] vealed in Christ without the existence of a visible corporate body in the world as the organ of its apprehension and transmission. The most urgent problem before us to-day, if we are eager to carry spiritual vision and power into the life of our present-day world, is the task of drawing the branches of the Christian Church together into one living whole, sufficiendy unified to be an organ of the Spirit, and possessed of wisdom and power enough to attract into its wide family life the multitude of spiritually minded persons who at present have no religious home and no group fellowship.
The best type of organization for the preservation and transmission of the precious spiritual treasure which constitutes the heart of Christianity would seem to be one that approached as closely as possible to a living, growing organism, and that was as far removed as possible from a mechanism, though organizations tend by their law of habit and custom to slide in the mechanistic direction. St. Paul is one of the greatest interpreters of the organic type of Church that ever lived. Again and again he used the human body with its vital functions as his best illustration of the unique organism that was to be Christ’s new Body in die [ p. 147 ] world. “You are the Body of Christ,” he sol emnl y r emin ds his Corinthian believers, “and each, one of you is a particular member of it.” [1] And he proceeds to explain how this living Body which was to be the reincarnation of Christ was to be led, guided, directed and taught by persons endowed with spiritual “gifts” rather than by technical officials. [2] That there might be no doubt in any one’s mind what was in his thought the highest gift and qualification for spiritual leadership he gave the immortal description of the gift in the Hymn of Love in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. The spirit of love which suffers long and is kind towers over all other qualifications and far surpasses that knowledge of speculation which puffs up the possessor with pride and sets one group of speculators against another group with a different set of speculative ideas and ends, sooner or later, in division if not in hate and hostility. Love, for St. Paul, is the heart of the organic type of Church.
In a flash of insight, while he was living in Ephesus, where he daily saw the famous Temple of Diana, he leaped to the novel idea that a person could be a temple. “Know you not that you are temples?” he ■wrote to the members of the Corinthian Church. Gradually the idea ripened and expanded, and when he wrote his Epistle to the Ephesians, he had come to think of the whole Christian Body as a living [ p. 148 ] Temple composed o£ individual personal temples — “each several building (i.e., temple) fitly framed together groweth into a holy Temple in the Lord for a habitation of God in the Spirit.” It is difficult for us to pass in imagination from a temple as a structure of stone occupying space somewhere in a city to a human person who has become a revealing place for God and then to many such persons fused together through love and service to form one mighty corporate Temple which is God’s new habitation. Just that is St. Paul’s bold conception — the new Body composed of persons is to be the dwelling place and the revealing place of the Spirit, the organ of Christ’s Life in the world.
But ideals, however lofty, are bound to be tempered and transformed by the stem requirements of the human environment through which they get expressed, and the more lofty the ideals are the more certain are they to be brought down to the temporal conditions of human life on earth. The student of Christianity in the early centuries of its history sees as in a mighty laboratory the operation of the processes which wove together as into a seamless robe the strands from the Jewish inheritance, the strands from the immense Hellenistic contribution, and the strands supplied by the organizing genius of Rome. The imperial historic Church is thus the most awe-inspiring creation of the combined genius of the greatest races the world has seen. No man reared it and no human mind built it. It is the [ p. 149 ] coiporate work o£ many centuries, of many minds, and of many races. It is august and it rightly moves men’s minds with powerful emotions.
But with all its greatness and uniqueness the Church which emerged fell far short of St. Paul’s ideal, and it has throughout its historical stages revealed characteristic and structural weaknesses as an organ of the spirit of Christ. It has become entangled in political aims and ambitions and policies. Secondary considerations have crowded out primary ones. Processes of adjustment to external situations have involved compromise and lowered ideals. Concern for preservation and promotion of the organization itself has carried along more or less irresistibly the surrender of the spiritual treasure for which the organization existed. Temporal expediency has run its course without due regard to the business of transmitting eternal realities. It has proved extremely difficult to maintain an organization with august authority without smothering out the fresh insight of individual souls, the free and spontaneous vision of truth, and the prophetic spirit which are essential to the life and growth and progress of a Church of the Spirit. A heavy hand has fallen with crushing weight upon the tender germs of new life. Conformity has been counted more important than growth and transformation. The tragedies of suppression, the machinery of control and power, the ingenuities of casuistry and political maneuver have left a [ p. 150 ] dark trail across the centuries. The spectacle of truth on the rack and of new-born faiths on the scaffold has shocked all who have sympathetically explored the history of the Church in its periods of power.
That beautiful dream of the Body of Christ composed of many individual members, and that vision of a habitation of God in a living corporate Temple composed of many temples seem remote and far away. It is no wonder that the spiritual prophets of the sixteenth century, supposing as they did that the Reformation meant the break-up and terminus of the historic Church, should have proposed the creation of an invisible Church to take the place of the visible one, whose days, they assumed, were over. The Reformers, however, especially the main-line Reformers, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, had litde thought of passing over from a visible Church to an invisible one. They were as hostile to “the spiritual reformers” with their dreams and visions as they were to the Church of Rome with its imperial organization. They set to work, each in his own way, with rare creative, architectural skill to rebuild the visible Church. They turned to the New Testament for their model plan, for their pattern in the mount, but each builder came back to his task with a [ p. 151 ] different model plan. The contemporary Anabaptists had still another one, uniquely different. They all found it difficult to reconcile the accounts of the Church in Acts with the picture presented in the Pastoral Epistles ascribed to St. Paul. In the one elders, that is presbyters, held the preeminence and in the other, bishops, that is, episcopally ordained leaders, were the pillars of the structure, while the Anabaptist scholars could find in the New Testament authority only for a democratic Church, governed and managed by the total membership. It was disturbing to have so many models, and peculiarly disturbing to peace and harmony when each one of the builders insisted that his model was definitely given and infallibly the only right one. The second and third generation after the birth of the Reformation far surpassed the first generation in this air of infallibility. It grew to be almost a mental disease. And with the increase of infallible certainty came a corresponding tendency to division and to the formation of new sects.
It is strange that these infallible readers of the New Testament who had such miraculously keen eyes for Church models should have failed to have noticed St. Paul’s exaltation of love over speculative knowledge and his cautions against the pride of infallibility and that they should have missed his emphasis on the Church as an organic body, a Temple of temples, growing and expanding with the life of the Spirit. They [ p. 152 ] found, as has happened in all ages, what they were looking for, and they had no eyes for what did not fit their own mental climate.
Unfortunately the glorification of speculative theory and the fiery positive attitude of infallibility had a very long run in Protestant circles. The nineteenth century was marked beyond any other century, except possibly the seventeenth, by the tendency to form new seas through a process of the division of existing Churches. The large Protestant denominations split into fragmentary parts and the parts again divided into minuter parts. The small denominations caught the contagious habit and wrecked in many cases their very existence by the peril of separations. Each separation produced an atmosphere of theological hate and bitterness, and as fast as the spirit of infallibility spread the spirit of love and grace — the true and essential marks of Christianity — waned away and died.
That dark eclipse has passed, one hopes forever, and a new era of comprehending love has dawned. There are far too many denominations in existence in this new era, and some of them at least have very little significant ground for separate continuance. Time will no doubt remedy that defea. There is a principle of survival of the fittest which operates in the social and spiritual sphere as certainly as it does in the biological. Ideas and ideals are severely tested by the processes of history and they are sifted and sorted in the mighty winnowings of the ages. It is so, too, with religious [ p. 153 ] sects. They meet great days of judgment. No archangel’s trumpet is blown. No visible assizes are set up in the sky. But the day of judgment moves on none the less in its siftings, and lo, the sea that has no significant mission for humanity disappears. Its crown is removed and its name is forgotten. The process is a long, slow one, but it is irresistible, far more so than inquisitions and heresy tribunals. It can be taken for granted that all useless and petty sects with their infallible certainties about airy nothings will be weeded out by laws which execute themselves, if men can be patient to let these laws work.
The profounder and more significant denominations that will survive the sortings of time and history will in most cases be needed as purveyors and transmitters of some special aspea of Christian truth and life. The fullness of life and truth, as Christ has revealed it, is too vast and varied to be compressed to a single point of view. There is, and one may assume there always will be, need of variety of expression and presentation. The entire Family of God will need many diverse households of faith, the complete Body of Christ will need many differentiated members, each with some unique function.
There will almost certainly always be many persons in the world who feel the need of a Church which [ p. 154 ] possesses august authority. For- persons of that type the Church is a Church precisely because it is something more than a collection and aggregation of religiously minded persons. It is something more than an empirical congregation of truth-seekers. Its authority to their minds is due, not merely to its antiquity and its immense service to humanity through the power of its message and ministry, nor alone to its array of saints and martyrs. They think of it, and feel bound to think of it, as a supernatural institution, divinely inaugurated at a specific moment in history, miraculously endowed from above with efficacious sacraments and with a Godgiven ordination for effective ministry. Its power and authority are dependent not on a haphazard succession of able leaders whose wisdom and intelligence steer it through the crises of history; the authority and power are rather derived from an apostolic succession invisibly transmitted by a special gift of God from Christ and His aposdes to the successive recipient of a like enduement. The Church is thus thought of as an immortal Communion, composed both of living and dead, and speaking with authority to each age as out of eternity. Membership in it confers some peculiar grace, and participation in its sacraments brings not only joy and comfort, but mysterious saving effects as well. This faith and attitude is found not only in the historic Roman Catholic Church. The so-called “High Church” conception is a widespread [ p. 155 ] state of mind confined to no one communion, and it is not likely to disappear from the world. Men and women in the midst of the mysteries of life and death, with the pitiful limitations of knowledge and the tremendous importance of saving help and healing, long for God-given certainties and for a voice of authority that reaches beyond the fringes of space and time. Unless the human mind discovers some way of penetrating through the hidden secrets and mysteries of life and the beyond by a method of knowledge now wholly unpredictable, there will continue to be persons who lean heavily on the comforting pronouncements and the awe-inspiring ministries of an authoritative Church.
But just as certainly there are and always will be persons who feel assured in their own soul’s experience that there is a divine light planted in man’s inmost being which makes it possible for persons like us to have direct intimate communion and fellowship with God here and now. Those who live and work in the joy of that faith and experience look for and desire no other kind of authority than the authority of inner light and the demonstration of life and love and truth. They do not feel like aliens and foreigners here in the world of time, who need special ambassadors commissioned to speak for a distant Sovereign. Their hearts bum with the consciousness of a living Presence here and now. They live their lives and do their work with a sense of unsundered correspondence with their [ p. 156 ] Great Companion. For them a Church is a Fellowship of those who believe in, live by, and share in this presence of God. It is a “blessed community” of persons joined together in the life of the Spirit for the service of Christ and His Kingdom. Life and organism, union in the spirit of love, are for such persons more important and more essential than are great organizations and imperial institutions.
Persons who share that oudook for the most part welcome fresh light and the advance of knowledge. They expect more truth to break forth under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth. They welcome, too, the social and ethical tests of group-experience by which what is capricious and erratic can be weeded out and the precious gold be recognized and preserved.
This mystical position, which in substance is the Quaker position, is far more widespread than the membership of the Society of Friends. That Society has gathered up and transmitted a mystical attitude as old and as continuous as the Christian Church. The Society of Friends has never been a wholly adequate organ of these ideas and ideals, and at its best it has had in its membership only a fraction of the persons who are of that type of mind. The Society of Friends as a separate body may decrease, and may even cease to exist as a bearer of these ideals. But even so they will find a new incarnation as they have done many times in the past, and there will continue to be what [ p. 157 ] may be called a Church of the Spirit — a body of persons who are satisfied with a very simple organic form of organization and who find their spiritual life inwardly fed by the bread and water of life.
These two types of Church are strikingly unalike, but neither type alone would ever satisfy all those who are religiously minded and who want to belong to the Household of God. Neither one has any right or claim to set itself up as God’s only channel of love and grace or as the only way that men can find their spiritual needs met. The varieties of human need are great and the aspects of divine truth are so multiform that the Great Church of which Christ is the Head must include these two and many more characteristic family types.
These two have been selected for comment only because they represent two extreme examples of diverse family types, not in any sense because they are held to be supremely important over other types.
There are many other denominational families which are the bearers of highly significant aspects of Christian life and faith and practice. The whole inclusive truth of Christianity would suffer loss if any denomination, or religious society that has a peculiarly significant mission in the world or a special phase of life and thought to hold up to the light, failed in its obedience to heavenly vision and allowed its unique contribution to be missed. These denominational families, appealing as they do to special needs and aptitudes [ p. 158 ] in individual minds, minister to such persons more effectively than any other organized form of Christianity could do and consequently arouse in them a keener and more glowing loyalty than could probably have been produced in any other way.
One of the most important sentiments is that of “belonging.” There are hosts of persons that have membership in Churches who yet never attain to that adjusted state of mind which makes them feel the joyous thrill of “belonging.” The relationship is casual, more or less accidental and formal. The moment one “finds his life” in and through a Church family, discovers that it speaks to all his deepest spiritual longings and aspirations and at the same time needs him as an organ of its work in the world, he becomes thrilled with a sense of “belonging.” That experience is an epoch in one’s life and with that awakening comes the feeling of expectancy without which religion remains a dull affair. That sense of “belonging” and that feeling of “expectancy” might conceivably come to birth for the individual and often has done so in a great Universal Church, but it has just as certainly also happened in a smaller denominational family, definitely adapted to the individual’s peculiar needs and tastes and close and friendly enough to draw him into its warm and enveloping fellowship.
Nobody is ever going to be an important member of any branch of the Church until he does something for [ p. 159 ] it Lives are formed and character is built by motor-effects. So long as one remains at the stage of ideas or emotions or fine sentiments; these unused states of mind will ooze away, dissipate and leave no permanent moral fiber behind. It is when they stimulate muscles into action and plow paths of habit and change the molecular structure that character is made. If a Church member does not get beyond the stage of a pew-sitter — a “hearer of the word” only — he has missed the full meaning of membership. He must discover that his personal contribution is needed to carry out the mission of the Church and he must feel the joy of service before his loyalty can be truly fashioned. It seems pretty clear that the opportunity for the motor-effect type of loyalty is most likely to come to a person through a compact and intimate religious fellowship of the denominational type, though that would not always be the case, for it is undoubtedly a fact that some persons feel themselves to be more truly found and shepherded in a vast, imperial, awe-inspiring Church of the universal type, than in a smaller group.
But there is not, and there cannot be, any defense of denominational families of the old infallible sectarian order. Even those who count most on the importance of august authority must learn to reco gnize that other branches of the Church are as certainly members of God’s great household and family as their own beloved one is. The atmosphere of rivalry, the insistence on [ p. 160 ] exclusive possession of truth and salvation, the hardness of heart which goes with that state of mind, and the holier-than-thou attitude, defeats the very aim and function of a Church of Christ. There can be no true and legitimate place for denominational Church families unless they can be genuine organic spiritual members of one unified Body of Christ builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit. Such a consummation seems no doubt like a dream, a far-off event that could come only by miracle. But something very much like miracles have had a way of happening in the course of Christian history. All that would be needed to ensure this consummation would be the actual answer to the prayer of benediction which all churches pray each week: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy spirit be with you and in you all.”
It has seemed necessary to dwell at considerable length on the nature and unity of the Church. But its mission and function in the world are even more important. The central issue to-day in every Church is the discovery of a mission and a function that will rally the allegiance and arouse the loyalty of the youthful forces of this age. Many things have been tried with- [ p. 161 ] out much success. The Church cannot go forward on its old momentum. It cannot pass this crisis unless it can do much more than just “pass it.” In order to conquer it must “more than conquer.” It must rise to a type of leadership which thrills and challenges this present generation. There can be a moratorium for debts, but there cannot be a moratorium for the faith and mission of the Church. If it is to live, it must be continuous. It must possess this generation if it is to have the one after it. That means that those who are the responsible leaders and the influential guides must understand the times and know how, or at least learn how, to kindle the liv& of the youth of to-day with a fervor and a passion which will result in a new line of march, a new conquering spirit.
The first essential aspect in the mission of the Church is bound to be its power to produce a sense of die reality of God in the lives of those who come to it for help and inspiration. There are many platforms for contemporary problems. We have forums enough. But there are very few places outside the Church where persons can be helped to find and feel die real living presence of God. The art of worship has for multitudes of persons become a “lost art.” Worship has become a word of little meaning. It is much easier to lecture than it is to take the lead in the way of wonder and in the practice of the presence of God. It is an art, a way of life, the culture of which for the best [ p. 162 ] results needs to begin early in life, when the feeling of wonder, awe and reverence is a natural, spontaneous trait. And that means that it must become an important function of the Church to train its children in this noblest of arts, so that they shall not drift on into a state of secular-mindedness where nothing is real except what can be touched and handled. This educational aspect will be considered further in Chapter VI. The focus of attention in the Protestant Churches for many generations was on doctrine. That seemed so essential that far too little stress was given to those more illusive and subtler aspects of worship through which the interior depth of life is gained. There exists now a quickened interest in this intimate and central feature of religion, and the time seems to be thoroughly ripe and ready for a new advance in this highest art of life.
One reason why worship in its highest aspects has been neglected in our busy world is that the practical demands of life have pushed the Church all die time in the direcdon of what is called “efficiency.” The “results” of worship are not easy to appraise. The period of worship looks to a mere observer like a period of lost motion. It is difficult to link it up to the obvious tasks waiting to be done. If it is to take its true place of power, however, we must learn to discover that increase of depth in life, formation of interior resources, the creation of subsoil wealth in a person’s life, may [ p. 163 ] prove to be of vastly greater importance than is getting a few more things done. It is a right idea in the main to keep attention pretty well focused upon the creative and constructive side of the mission of the Church, but we shall do well to remember that worship is one of the most important preparations for creative and constructive effort. The way of wonder, through worship, is a richer preparation for the way of action to which we are called.
Christianity is in any case a kind of life that is to be lived here and now. “This day this is to he done,” is the way Christ finished his first sermon, as he “closed the book and sat down.” The program of life outlined in that first sermon, which Jesus felt was laid upon him by the Spirit of the Lord, was a gospel for the poor, the proclamation of good tidings of release and liberation, recovery of vision, enlargement of the scope of life, and the realization of God’s creative plan for man’s life on earth. It was not an ideal intended for a post-mortem realm; it was the interpretation of a way of life which would restore man — the co mm on man of toil and labor — to his full rights and privileges as a man and as a potential son of God.
If the Church is to recover its commanding place of influence in the life of the world to-day it must give a larger share of leadership to those who are young. The entire Church must be penetrated with a new spirit of adventure, and that spirit is peculiarly a character- [ p. 164 ] istic of youth. To-day those who are young seek their adventures in the air. They climb Himalayan mountain peaks, they go out on dangerous expeditions of exploration or of hunting big game. They would turn thi s spirit of adventure into new channels and carry the glowing ideals of their young lives into the creative work of the Church if they were summoned to it and were given the freedom and responsibility which are essential to real adventure.
There is fortunately already a youth-movement in the Church, but it has too often tended to become a thin g apart from the Church itself. Instead of being taken up into the organic life of the whole body, the religious-minded youth find their interests and their life in and through a sub-organization and carry on a parallel line of activity. They still do not make their fresh contribution into the life and work of the Church; they form a society with its own separate functions, so that they fail to bring their powers and capacities into play in the Church itself and they fail to have the life and power of the larger community fellowship flowing through them. It is an advance over what prevailed in former times, but it is not quite good enough. The genuine step forward will be taken when the leaders clearly see that the Church must be brave enough to let its youth share completely in shaping the onward reaching progress of all the spiritual forces of the age.
It is obvious that great changes are to come in the [ p. 165 ] social and economic order in which our lives are lived. It is a crucial question whether these changes are to be led and guided by sheer secularist aims and brought about by external forces, or whether they are to come through wise transforming methods and are to be interpreted by a spirit of understanding love and cooperation. The world with its burden of agonies and injustices is always in grave danger of being hurried into too easy and superficial solutions of the deepseated troubles of society. There can be no real solution so long as the changes that are made are on a merely secularist plane, and have to do solely with external re-adjustments, though it is just as futile to talk piously of changing man’s inner life without changing the social and economic environment into which children are to be bom.
But it is as certain as the procession of the equinoxes that no world which will be recognized as a good world can be built without the liberation and the culture of man’s spiritual nature. He must learn how to love with greater depth and wisdom. He must be stirred with profounder reverence and awe. He must be lifted above himself and above his secular interests through a quickening relation to an invisible environment which enlarges and exalts him. The greatest epochs of advance in the life of the race have been periods when the spiritual realities of the universe have broken in on the soul with new certainty and with increased power. It [ p. 166 ] is the business of die Church to be the transmitter of these higher cultural forces. Here once more the Church must catch the bold and adventurous spirit of its Founder and must be ready to take his way of life seriously and share his idealism toward man’s divine possibilities. In all these matters as also in the intellectual issues of our time the function of the Church is not to dogmatize or impose a ready-made conclusion on others, but to lead, to illuminate, to inspire, to infuse a healing and creative spirit into the heart of humanity and through the entire social fabric. It must keep the demands of personality in the primary place above the claims of property. There are immense areas of the social world hardly touched by those springs of life and light and love that are peculiarly committed to the Church. We used to talk of regions in foreign lands as “zones of darkness,” but we are awakening to discover that there are darkness areas and twilight zones here where our own flag floats and where our school houses proclaim culture. We have not learned how to treat other races, and peoples of other colors as they should be treated. We are still backward in the possession of skill and methods of dealing with crime and criminals. With all our outlay for education we somehow fail to produce, in multitudes of cases, the expert mind, the righdy fashioned life, the solid, disciplined will, that are essential for a wise and stable democracy.
It would seem as though we had problems enough [ p. 167 ] at home to absorb all the powers and capacities which the Church possesses. There are challenges and tasks awaiting it at every turn of the road. And yet the mission of the Church must never be confined to the home land where it has its abiding place. As an early Christian writer beautifully said: “Every land is a Fatherland for the true Christian.” The Church in any region is a colony of the spiritual realm [3] with a citizenship far beyond its home boundaries. Its own life and health, even if one were to think of nothing more, can keep strong and sound only as it pours its streams of life out for the help and refreshment of those who are in need of light and love and enlarged life. The primary occasion for the writing of this book, in fact, was the consciousness that there must be new and greater spiritual resources for the coming tasks in foreign fields. The fields of service can no longer be marked off in terms of imaginary lines on a geography map. A live Church, awake to its full privileges as an instrument of the spirit of God, will spontaneously overbrim with an outflow of life and power.
When the Church becomes fully awake to its mission of spiritual interpretation and leadership in the world it will quickly see that it must have a new type of training for its ministers, its leaders, its “cures of souls” and for its mission workers. Their functions have altered profoundly. Their task has taken on a new significance [ p. 168 ] and it must be done through new methods. The world is full of books and those who make up modern audiences have frequendy been reading the latest ones. It is not information they want from their ministers; it is prophetic leadership, the kindling of their moral nature, an interpretation of their spiritual possibilities as men and a reinforcement of their hopes and aspirations. It is the impact and stimulus of a rich dynamic personal life that counts most, a friend and adviser, a man who “has been there” before us when we travel through the deeps and when we meet the waterspouts of life.
Many persons who are laymen in the Church to-day feel the need of concrete and specific guidance. They do not want a “father-confessor” of the old type, but they do need a sympathetic and understanding counselor to whom they can freely go for wise advice on the complicated problems of life and conduct. Then, too, if the lay-members are to make personal contributions to the social tasks of the Church, and if they are to work out their own faith in constructive ways of service they must have intelligent leadership from a man who can not only preach the gospel but can practice it as well in the world where our tasks and duties lie.
If the emphasis can be put on mission ‘and function rather than on in f a l lible possession of exclusive rights and privileges, if the Church can be thought of as an organ for the expression and manifestation of the Life of God here in the world of men, then we shall see at [ p. 169 ] once that many types of organization will be required to give full expression to the vast variety of ways through which human nature prefers to express itself. Every mother knows that she cannot fit each one of her varied children into a mold or system which happily happened to work well with her first-born offspring. There is something unique about the traits of every child and each one must have his chance to find himself in ways that fit his aptitudes. It is equally true in the Church which Christ is building through the ages. Still less possible is it for all minds to be satisfied with a single interpretation of truth and life. Such i nfinit e realities as truth and life have multitudinous aspects and facets. One person wants one peculiar aspect brought into prominence while another puts the emphasis at a different point.
A Church composed of several denominational families, each one giving peculiar expression to some important aspect of truth or to some special way of giving scope to life and activity would seem to fit the divine method as it is everywhere revealed in creation. But it is essential to any divine plan that all the varying den omina tional families shall be cooperative members of one whole Body, not rival parts claiming mon- [ p. 170 ] opoly of rights and privileges. This organic Church of many members may be a remote ideal at the present moment, but until humanity changes beyond recognition no other type of Church unity seems to be within reach of intelligent faith and hope, nor does any other form seem feasible or desirable.
There is a steady maturing of the human mind and as the mind of man matures it prizes intensely its own personal freedom of thought and action. The free individual wants to find scope for a rich life and opportunities for self-realization and self-expression in and through a congenial group-fellowship. Some minds will be best satisfied in self-governing communities and others will wish for the prestige and splendor of an august overarching historical system into which the individual fits his life. They are not inconsistent ways and they need not cancel one another out.
God fulfills Himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
But this must not be a static idea buried away in the pages of a book. If it is true it is a burning challenge to adventure. “If thou dost not act thou hast done nothing,” is the glowing word of a noble soul in the seventeenth century. Nothing amazes the beholder more than the enthusiasm and the dedication with which the Russian youth have faced the endurances and the sacrifices involved in building into reality the [ p. 171 ] vision and hope o£ a noncapitalistic society. The thing we lack to-day in our spiritual undertakings is just that enthusiasm, that passion of expectancy, that dedication, that spirit of sacrifice which moves mountains and achieves miracles. There has flamed up in our time in a few souls a kindled passion for Church unity. Two saintly men, Bishop Brent and Robert Gardiner, burned out their lives prematurely in work and struggle for the union of all Christians; It will perhaps not come finally along the line of their hope and expectation, but it will come sooner or later along some line which preserves the uniqueness and the precious peculiar mission of each family type in the larger inclusive Family of that Father after whom all families in heaven and earth are named.
In any case, however the organization and unity of the Church may eventually come to fuller perfection, it may be taken for granted that the Church of Christ is not fulfilling its mission on earth and cannot fulfill it unless it takes up the task of reshaping the basis of the civilization to which it belongs from generation to generation and of rebuilding the social order of which it is a part more nearly into conformity with the ideas of the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of a more completely realized humanity. This “more completely realized humanity” can be seen and judged under two major aspects. (1) Christianity wherever it reveals its true scope and power raises the spiritual level and value [ p. 172 ] of personal life. Somewhat as the invisible attraction of the moon raises a central plateau of water in the ocean far above the surrounding waters, so there has appeared in all Christian centuries a lifting and transforming power in Christ to raise men and women who are reached by His attraction to a new level of life and character. The simplest tests of the transformation are to be found in the “fruits” that appear in character and action — a heightened spirit of love and grace, peace and serenity, in the midst of difficulty and frustration, the formation of a sympathetic and understanding mind, a courageous heart and a magnanimous purpose and withal a joyous and radiant life.
But (2) a good life can never be attained in isolation. It is like the second part of a return ticket, “not good if detached.” And within limits the goodness of a life is largely determined by the relative goodness of the social group in which it is imbedded. If the individual reaches on ahead too far beyond the social group to which he belongs the aims of his life are apt to be frustrated and the purpose of his life defeated. He is bound, therefore, if he would be effective to dedicate himself to the task of raising the whole quality of the social environment to which he belongs. The mission of the Church will thus always be twofold, the perfecting of personal character and the transformation and rebuilding of the social fabric. The “coming” of the Kingdom of God involves both aspects as much as physical life involves breathing-in and breathing-out.
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In any case the utilitarian motive of rewards and punishments must fall away and be replaced by a glowing passion for a redeemed and purified inward self and a no less glowing passion for a redeemed and morally ordered social world. There will be little place in the future for a Church whose main function is conceived to be the securing of a summum bonum for a favored few in another world beyond this one where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. A Church which accepts the mission of being a peaceful refuge or an ark of safety for a chosen remnant of the race is doomed like Noah’s ark, to come to an end on some lonely, barren mountain top, apart from the actual lives of the men who toil and suffer.
The true Church of the future will be recognized as Christ’s Church, not by the purity of its speculative dogma, nor by the validity of its claim to have preserved unaltered the genuine apostolic ecclesia, but by an unmistakable demonstration, in spirit and power, in love and service, that it is an organ in the world for the revelation of the Life of God to the lives of men, and by its brave and fearless championship of those social and economic ideals of life which in the best and truest way enlarge the scope of human freedom and enable men and women and little children to fulfill their divine possibilities, not in a world beyond the stars, but here in this checkerboard world of black and white, which man is to subdue and conquer for spiritual ends.