THE PROBLEM OF THE RURAL COMMUNITY, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE RURAL CHURCH.
THERE are many problems confronting the American people today. Some are as complex and as cruel as that propounded to CEdipus by the Sphinx of Thebes. Men with warm hearts and a stern sense of responsibility are struggling with the riddles of the degenerates and dependents, of labor and capital, of the negro in the South, and of the urban community. But no enigma is crying more for solution than is that of the rural community. Says one of the keenest thinkers of our day: "If no new preventive measures are devised, I see no reason why isolation, indigence, ignorance, vice, and degeneration should not increase in the country until we have a rural peasantry, illiterate, immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties."
The traditional approach to this problem is from the reli- gious side. Indeed, the great majority identify the problem of the rural community with that of the rural church. While I am compelled to follow the beaten path, it seems to me that this identification dwarfs the horizon. The rural church is but one phenomenon of the varied social structure of the rural com- munity. It has a problem and a grave one ; but it is only one of the problems which are bound up in the more complex one of the community at large. Even from the religious approach, moreover, one has no right to narrow the religious forces to the four walls of a country church. This is an unscientific assump- tion. The home, the school, the vocation, the social life are all mighty forces for the molding of men.
Vague and conflicting conceptions of the definition of a rural community give rise to much confusion in the discussion of this problem. It is variously conceived as a mere farming neighbor- hood, a rural village, everything outside of cities characterized by genuinely urban conditions, i. e., cities of 20,000 population and over. Some of these conceptions are too broad and others
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