Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ...selfish denominational purposes. Some of these churches were better dead, and they would have died of natural causes but for Home Mission aid. There are good and bad instances of denominational help. One denomination has aided three churches for thirty years, but has not helped any one of them for the last ten years. They had reached a self-supporting status. But, when a denomination lavishes $18,000 of Home Mission aid in keeping alive a church in a village of 150 population, where there is also another church, and when the village is situated near to a large, well-churched center, such aid is wasted. The same denomination fails to give with liberality to a far needier case, the only Protestant church in a small village, a railroad center, located fairly in the center of a large unevangelized area. In one of its valleys, a resident recently remarked that they had heard no preaching for twenty years. This instance of neglect is in Montana, and the territory has been allocated to this denomination since 1919, so that other churches are keeping their hands off. Yet this church, which had a resident pastor until two years before the time of the survey, is now being served by a pastor of a town church living thirty-five miles away who preaches there on a week-day night. No preaching on Sunday, no pastoral work, obviously no community work in the village and no touch at all on the districts outside of the village! How well could the lavish aid of $18,000 have been put to use in this churchless area! This desperate condition needs as much aid every year as all the Boards give all forty-one aided churches at present. Instead, this church has been allocated to one denomination, and is now getting less attention than before. This case constitutes...