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THE CONGREGATIONAL HOME

MISSIONARY SOCIETY

Seventy-five years ago our church was organized at Oregon City, the first church west of the Rocky Mountains. A fitting celebration was recently held commemorating the event.

Are you studying Christian Americanization? If so, you need the Congregational Supplement which tells of the Congregational work among our foreign born citizens. Send for it. Price twenty cents.

Rev. P. W. Jones, formerly pastor of City Park Church, Denver, more recently with the Pilgrim Memorial Fund, has accepted the position of General Missionary in Colorado and is at work.

Rev. A. J. Moncol, of Holdingford, Minnesota, has been released for six months to go to Siberia as chaplain among the Czechoslovak soldiers. His wife will care for the pulpit during his absence.

Every home missionary can be a booster for a club for THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY. It takes but little effort to secure a fine list of subscribers. Five thousand of our six thousand churches do not take the magazine. Hurry up with your list for 1920, as great things are ahead.

Rev. Malcolm Dana, Director of Rural Work, is in Colorado, assisting Rev. James F. Walker at Collbran in developing comprehensive plans for a community center and larger parish. The activities of the church will reach the entire valley, including about ten school districts.

The committee appointed by the National Council on the forward movement recently met in Chicago and among other things formally adopted the name, "Congregational World Movement. "One of the most important actions taken was the decision that the drive in the spring of 1920 in connection with the Interchurch World Movement shall be on the basis of one year pledges. Rev. Herman F. Swartz, D.D., was elected Executive Secretary of the Move

ment.

Rev. William S. Beard has been leading the remarkably successful campaign in Connecticut for the Pilgrim Memorial Fund. We had anticipated that he would return about the first of the year, as he is sorely missed at headquarters. Now comes the request that he be loaned to head the drive for the Pilgrim Memorial Fund in Oregon and Washington during six weeks beginning about January 1st. The Home Missionary Society has loaned many ministers throughout the country to this Fund and is glad to assist by releasing Secretary Beard for this important task.

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"THE COMPELLING MOTIVE." By Rev. Frank L. Moore, Secretary of Missions HAT holds the home missionary to his task? A survey of the constantly changing yet fairly constant army of men commissioned by our National and State Societies shows that we send forth annually in the neighborhood of 1,700 men for this home missionary work. Changes are constantly taking place, yet the work goes forward with reasonable degree of stability. No one of these men is compelled to remain at his post. Our simple organization makes it easy for men to come and go, yet surveyed from year to year this army of workers presents a fairly solid front.

meant comparatively little to them.

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We classify the task to which these men have set themselves. We talk about home missions on the frontier and in the rural field, in the city and among the foreign-born, but when we survey each field minutely we discover that the various groups will not stay classified. The churches in a given region will not all fit into the same mold. A rural church in Connecticut, Michigan or Wisconsin cannot be compared to what is called & rural church in Oregon, Idaho or Montana. In one rural church there are traditions which run back directly to New England and the Pilgrim Fathers. In such a church Plymouth Rock is an asset. But there are men commissioned by our Society who never refer to the Pilgrim Fathers, and to many of our members the name Plymouth Rock suggests a variety of speckled hens. I once made an ad dress in a home mission church, in which I spent a quarter of my time telling the story of the Mayflower, of beginnings in New England, and the influence of the early Congregational churches on our national life. Afterward I awoke to the fact that practically all of the membership of that Congregational church had come from below Mason and Dixon's line, and the beginnings of Congregationalism in this country of course

The tasks confronting the home missionary are so varied and perplexing that they are enough to task the ingenuity, patience, resourcefulness and energy of any man. It is not uncommon at all to hear a man who has served a home missionary church and later found himself pastor of a large going organization in town or city, say that the easiest work he had ever done was the largest and best organized. His hardest problems were those of some little mission field.

Our home missionary work during the past century has been honored by the leadership, at some time during their experience, of many of our greatest preachers, administrators and leaders. In the small church they acquired the tact and diplomacy, the courage and patience, which made their later work possible.

As a rule, the men bearing the commission of the Home Missionary Society are not honored by the church as they should be. Too often a man who has served all his life in some hard missionary field goes back to his old home church, finds his place in a seat near the door or under the gallery, and slips away without being seen or heard. The membership of such a church considers that his life has been a failure. He has served only home missionary fields. Such incidents make us believers in "Life Commissions for Home Missionaries," with adequate pay from beginning to end.

To the foreign missionary has been accorded high honor and justly so. Would that we might have a service for the home missionary equal in solemnity and dignity to that of the American Board when commissions are issued to a group of young men and women who are starting across the seas.

Of necessity it has seemed that the only way possible in the commissioning of a home missionary was to con

duct negotiations by correspondence -more rarely by personal visits. After graduating from the seminary, a young minister may turn his face toward some special and particularly difficult work, with no one beside the superintendent to wish him well, and with little in the circumstances to make him feel the greatness and the honor of the work to which he is now dedicating his life.

But we have not yet answered the question, "What holds the home missionary to his task?'' There are many things in the home missionary task that would drive him from it.

First, there is insufficient support. As a rule, the home missionary is grievously underpaid, and in these days he confronts steadily mounting prices with a stationary salary and a constantly shrinking dollar. How he makes ends meet is more than we can tell. Taking specific cases, we find that many are so fortunate as to live where they can have a garden and a cow. But not all are SO fortunate. There are regions where, far from having a garden, living conditons are more difficult than in a great city. This is especially true in the mining camps and certain mountain districts in the great West.

The problem is rendered still more acute when there are children in the home, and the question of their education presses. It is no wonder that many slip out to other occupations and try their hand at all sorts of things in order to attain the desired end.

During the difficult days just past, we have one home missionary whose son, fifteen years of age, during the summer vacation drove an automobile truck and hauled coal, work far too hard for one of his years. Another sent his daughter into a department store where the wage was all too small. Still another sent his young children to the beet fields, where instead of the play that should have been their lot in the growing years, they were compelled during the long hours of the day to toil at the hardest kind of

work, but it was the only way to make ends meet.

More difficult still is the lot of the home missionary whose children have reached and are passing the school age and are not able to attend. These are not isolated cases, for as we think of the wide field, home after home rises in memory where problems such as these and more difficult still have been endured. There is also the isolation. In this far-flung line stretching across our country from Florida to Alaska, there are many places where for months at a time the home missionary rarely meets another minister. Because of inadequate salary he lacks books and magazines, and because he must do all of the work of the church, including that of the janitor, he lacks leisure to read and study.

So we ask again, "What holds the home missionary to his task?" The answer to this question may be briefly put as follows. It need hardly be stated that the fundamental reason is the same for all. He has heard the great commission to "go and preach the Gospel to every creature. But to the true home missionary the call comes strongest where the need is greatest.

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I. We say, therefore, that the compelling motive in home missions is the call to the heroic. At the close of the Civil War, Rev. J. D. Davis went back to Chicago Seminary to complete his course. He had entered as a private and risen steadily from one position of responsibility to another, until at the close of the war he bore the rank of Colonel. At the end of the year, he graduated. He then sent word to the Home Missionary Society that he desired to be sent to the hardest and the neediest field in the United States. They sent him to Cheyenne, Wyoming. There he organized a church, built a house of worship and began the work of establishing religious foundations in what was then the wildest and most boisterous frontier city of the entire West. He and his wife built a parsonage almost

entirely with their own hands. The house is standing to-day. After two years of laber, Dr. Davis heard the call to go to Japan, where for forty years he rendered heroic service in the mission field. It was the call of a great need.

So all through the history of our home missionary work, the great need has urged men on. The neglected, the far-away, has acted as a Macedonian cry. Our hearts are stirred as we realize the abandon with which men have thrown themselves into the home missionary cause. The minister and his wife make their home among a group of people it matters little where, whether in the needy section of a great city or on the remote frontier. Immediately there grow up the warmest of personal relations which constitute some of the most valued experiences of life. They get interested in particular children, in a class of neglected boys and girls. Hardest of all, but most compelling and perplexing, they discover parents who have little care for their children, who themselves hold low ideals.

We hear much of those ministers who shift from place to place; we hear little of those who remain

at

their task year after year. That pastor who has really experienced the joy of bringing the Gospel to homes that have been isolated and deprived of the spiritual touch which comes from the visit of a true minister, has experienced some of the richest joys that earth can yield. The home missionary's life becomes rich in memory. He can look back upon many a home where, were he permitted, he could go to-day and find the warmest kind of welcome. I have in mind, in particular, one home seventy-five miles from a railroad, across the ranges in Colorado. With the home missionary on that field, I drove toward that house one hot summer day just as the sun was dipping toward the western peaks. We saw children playing near the flat-roofed adobe cabin. Then the father and mother apeared. We received the warmest

kind of a welcome and I noticed how the two little boys, perhaps eight and ten years of age, followed their minister about as he took care of his team and walked through the garden and into the orchard near by. That father and mother, both educated people who had had the privileges of relig ious services in a city across the range, counted the visits of the minister as simply invaluable in helping their children to form the right ideals. The pull in the opposite direction was so strong in that frontier community that no one can estimate the value they set upon the visits of this home missionary. Their little church could not exist were it not for the Society which had sent him there. About them were settlers representing many types of character, but among them all there were only a few who placed a real value upon matters of religion. Such a home as that is typical. It can be found in practically every sparsely settled section of this land. It is doubtful whether the church in that valley will be self-supporting within another decade. Possibly it will always be a home missionary field, but it is that type of work that calls the loudest. Where the need is great, the challenge is great. The home missionary becomes. the "seer" who, looking into the future, realizes what the church will mean as the seasons come and go.

Home missionary societies always wonder how it is that men will stay in states where conditions are especially undesirable, where the winters are long and cold, or where exposure to heat in summer and cold in winter is severe. Yet, facing such unfavorable conditions, we discover that there is a loyalty on the part of the home missionary to the state in which he has found his work. He does not readily break away. It is the same loyalty that was in the hearts of the members of the Iowa Band, and later that held the men in the Washington and Montana bands faithful to their tasks. Such men have repeatedly refused calls to larger fields of labor.

Toiling through the years, they have built themselves into the fortunes of the entire county and state. Two brothers went to a new state, and after investing their lives there for several years one was called to a larger work outside. The inducements were great and the call insistent, but he decided to remain on a smaller salary in the needy field, that he might carry out his one great purpose, namely, to put his stamp upon a growing state.

Recently I met a group of ministers from beyond the Missouri River in South Dakota, who have been facing the discouragements and difficulties caused by the severe and long-continued drought. These men, with their wives, came to the association meeting with faces browned as from many days spent in the scorching sun. They had seen the water holes dry up, and even the springs had failed.

Cattle had been shipped out of the country, and many families had been forced to move away, yet not one of these men

spoke of leaving his work. They said, "If my people ever needed me, they

need me now."

II. The Call to the Heroic appears not only when we view the individual field, but when we get a broad vision of the task as a whole.

(1). Not every home missionary goes up on the mountain top and views the kingdoms of the earth before he selects his particular place of labor; but increasingly in these days there are those who, thinking in world terms, realize the importance of the whole mighty enterprise. These splendid men are bearing heavy burdens without complaint. They are seeing visions and dreaming dreams like prophets of old. They are on the lonely prairies and in the sordid cities. They come from the schools as the young men look out upon a world in in turmoil. They view the complexity of our civilization with its perplexing problems of city life and modern industry. They look upon the changing world and re

alize that unless its industrial and social problems can be solved in the light of the Gospel, the world has no hope. The members of the Iowa Band looked upon a continent to be explored, a wilderness to be subdued. Trails had to be made in the desert, streams had to be bridged, and the call to the pioneer spirit was clear and strong. Why should not home. missionary bands be organized today? They would look out upon a nation with problems even more difficult than those heard of old. The far-flung line of our home missionary work today constitutes a most challenging frontier. Our large and self-supporting churches do not touch the most perplexing problems. The church in action against the forces of ignorance and evil in all its varied forms

is the church working through its missionary boards.

The home missionary today who sees this larger task believes from the depths of his soul that the missionary post is the outpost in a battle that must be won, that we must He believes that he is engaged save America to save the world. in the most crucial task of this or any other day in America. The call of the heroic rings in his soul. Responding, he offers himself for home missionary work. It may be in an industrial center where many races meet and mingle. It may be in an isolated mining town of the far West or in a mill town of the rapidly changing South. Wherever it may be, he feels himself a part of the great whole. He finds himself dealing with a church, perhaps, that has small vision and little appreciation of its true mission. It is his to organize it, to give it vision and lead it to its task.

(2). The Community Church. It is hard to face the difficult challenge unless there is real hope of success. When the minister sees one after another of the agencies of community life in the hands of or being absorbed by those who oppose a religious program, he despairs. It is at this point.

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