A Sorry Day

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 5, 1914

It will be a sorry day for the church of Christ when it has no competition from the world. That will not be until the church has lowered its standard to meet the world's level, and reaches out for unhallowed fellowship. Speaking of this spirit which exists on the part of the great Christian church, Peter Clark Macfarlane, former secretary of the national brotherhood of the Disciples of Christ, in a recent address in Toronto, gave utterance to these poignant words:—

The church today is ambitious to be popular. It wants the crowd. It has built great churches to contain the crowd. Within twenty years we have doubled the seating capacity of the churches of the continent; we want these large auditoriums to be filled. The question I raise is whether the church can fill them and remain true to her mission. The people want to be amused. You can replace your choir by an opera, and perhaps fill the church. You can replace your preacher by Mr. Edison's talking “movies,” and perhaps draw a larger congregation. You may swing the doors open on week nights for all sorts of social and cultural things; and it is surely far better for these groined arches to echo with the happy laughter of youth than with the rustling wings of bats. But all that will not prove that yours is a popular church. It may prove that it is a popular place of amusement, of entertainment, of resort. But that which would be a success for a theater may be a failure for a church.

The church cannot permanently compete with a theater as a means of entertainment; it cannot compete with the university as a means of education; it cannot compete with the newspapers as a source of news; it cannot compete with the clubs in the dissemination of artistic and cultural knowledge.

There is one field alone in which the church is supreme, and that is in its legitimate field — in its message to the soul of a man; in its revelation of the character of God; in its capacity to pull aside the curtains of material life, and sit down with a man in the chambers of his inmost being and reason with him of righteousness and repentance and the judgment to come.