There are at least two manifest reasons that the Church is not attracting men today as some purely secular and man-made organizations are. One of them is that the Church is not sufficiently stressing its mission of humanitarianism.
Humanitarianism is not Christianity, to be sure, neither is service godliness, but both of them are the evidences of Christianity and the spirit of service on the part of the Church is in direct relation, as an obligation, to the spirit of the founder and the great Exemplar of the Church.
If the Christian churches of today were stressing this business of unselfish service, were going about doing good, were performing miracles of social alleviation, were rescuing the delinquent and the wayward, were interesting themselves in the purely physical and moral betterment of the race, there would be no need nor opportunity for the springing up of so many human devices to gratify the aspirations of men along this line.
We are of a notion that the spirit of service has never been so intense in the heart of men. There are evidences to this effect on every side. And one of the most outstanding indications is the rapid multiplication of agencies and associations of men that are stressing this matter of human helpfulness. Well, that is the business of the Church.
All too often, instead, it is passing by with the priests and levites on the other side of those left founded along the highways of life. All too often it is condemning those taken in sin, turning them out and casting them adrift. Christian people shudder at the thought of men profession religion falling into vice and making mistakes, and the stern fathers of the church are often pointing them to the door outside.
It is primarily the business of the church, regarded in this connection as a human agency dealing with fallible men and women, with frail and imperfect humanity, with people who fall into need and who demand sympathy and encouragement as well as material comforts and help, to minister unto them, to give them a cup of cold water, to visit them in prison, to clothe their nakedness and to help them in every emergency into which they are thrown.
And of the Church was performing this mission as it should, these many other clubs and societies and organizations of varied sort would have less to do in the way of offering men an opportunity to gratify this spirit within them. And that is the big opportunity of the Church in this generation, to invite the men of the world to release through it, as the channel, their energies, their wealth, their services for the betterment of the world.
Another reason that the Church is not more attractive to men, to business and professional men, and to laboring men as well, is that is disposed to live too far in the past, to regard the things of other years as heritages which must not be violated under any circumstances. We do well to reverence the faith of the fathers and we do well also to stick close to Bethel, but there is such a thing as so insistently attaching ourselves to the past that we become antiquated. Paul has a great word as indicating the duty of Christian forces to keep abreast of the time. “Be instant in season” was his counsel, which is only another phrase for becoming contemporaneous and up-to-date, to clothe the Gospel in today’s language and make it fit today’s needs. Ancient verities will remain. They are in no danger of being uprooted. We don’t need to stay back with them in order to surround them with fortifications. The truth that has lived will continue to live, but it will breathe through new forms and new organs in these changed times. And the truth of the Nazarene is in no danger of being vitiated if men seek to apply it to the conditions of humanity today and seek to make it a practical formula for the regulation of their own conduct and for the regulation of their industry.
It is commonly consented that industry must be brought under the scope of Christian ethics in this country if it is ever to be held within workable and reasonable bounds. It is distinctly the task of the Church, therefore, to take its message to the gilded offices of business and corporations as well as to the machines and boiler rooms and apply it to the conditions in the industrial as well as in the social and moral atmospheres of the people, to proclaim a religion today for today’s need and emergencies.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Aug. 14, 1921, Julian S. Miller, editor.
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