The Church Without the Message
SINCE 1844, when the Christian churches heard and rejected the message of the hour of God’s judgment, they have been drifting, like a ship at sea which has lost its chart. That message presented to the church the definite purpose of God for that time, to the realization of which the church might and should have bent all her energies. This would have brought cohesion and spiritual life. But the church turned away from the Word that came from heaven, disconnected herself from the purpose of God for the world in this generation, which was to preach the gospel of the kingdom in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and since that time has been drifting about in mist and darkness. The result has been such a spiritual declension and uncertainty of purpose and calling that the query is now being raised in the church as to whether the church will continue much longer to exist, and whether the church ought to try to continue her existence. This is strikingly set forth in an article recently contributed to The Independent by an ex-clergyman, telling “why I gave up the ministry.” A perusal of some of his statements may help Seventh-day Adventists to appreciate more the clear, definite work committed to them, with the definite and mighty result to be realized by it, and to engage with greater zeal in its advancement. We quote:— It is simply a fact that among the Protestant clergy there is an ever-increasing obscurity of conception regarding the very task itself they have before them. In the past dozen years alone that task has shaped itself differently in different periods, and is perpetually shaping itself differently to different men. Once the evangelistic method claimed the best of their attention; then great missionary enterprises found all emphasis laid on them; then came the study of sociology as the sole means toward the desired end, and then the building of parish houses, the doing of institutional church work, the raising of money for the endowment of hospitals, schools, asylums, etc. Now, to what does all this lead? It is at this point that my doubt takes its deepest plunge, for this I believe to be the most important point of all. It shapes itself into the question, Will the church continue to exist at all? Of course, there are those who answer this question affirmatively, and that dogmatically, and find the reason for their answer in their conception of the church itself, its origin, and its nature. They believe that origin to be divine, and they concern themselves but little for the future of it, confident that that future will take care of itself. I wish I could be so complacent. I can not. I can find no reason for believing in the church’s perpetuity apart from its mission, and the duration of its mission I conceive to be determined by its utility. If the church proves to be worth perpetuating, it will stay; if not, it must go, as have gone before it other institutions created in the service of religion, and even certain forms of that very church’s own worship, such as that in monasteries and that subsequently in cathedrals. Nothing is more idle than to employ statistics to prove whether people are or are not attending church more generally to-day than they did a generation or a century ago. Perhaps they are; perhaps they are not; that is a simple question of fact. The question of more importance is that regarding the enthusiasm which they manifest in what they do when they are there. It is not so hard to see that this enthusiasm is not great, indeed that it is so trivial as to be inconsiderable. Nor is it hard to see that, while the figures representing church attendance, reckoned absolutely, may still be large, relatively the number of young people is appallingly small. This being the case, the question arises, Where is that adherence and support to come from in the next generation? Will it even come at all? And that in turn raises one other point, embodied in one other question, Should the church persist? Is it not possible that things have changed even in the past quarter of a century alone, and that they are changing to-day with such accelerating rapidity that we have come to the point where it is seriously to be doubted whether the church, with its pulpit, is the best medium of expression for religious or any other opinion? The press, the public platform, and a dozen other agencies have so widened their scope and so broadened their sphere that any one, not to say all, of them have become dangerous competitors. I know, and that right well, that at this point there are those who assert that even the preaching, teaching function of the church is not its chief function, and that, therefore, even though this one should be superseded, it has a larger, a more vital and a more peculiar function; namely, that of administering spiritual comfort and counsel and developing spiritual energy and power in the lives of individuals who are its wards. Well, just what are the facts here? To what extent do the church’s members themselves to-day look to the church’s clergy in their official capacity for such service? The pastor of one of the largest congregations in New York, a congregation whose nominal “membership” is reckoned in four figures, and himself an earnest, godly man, tells me, in confidence, in perplexity and despair, this. Says he: “I keep, five days in the week, throughout the year, an ‘Office Hour,’ partly in order to economize my time, but in larger part to give to any one who wants to see me upon any matter ample opportunity to do so freely and yet privately. In one year alone I have been interviewed by a thousand different persons; yet in only six cases, by actual count, have these callers come to me regarding spiritual matters. They have asked for money, for influence, for advice in worldly affairs, in short, for everything under the sun—except for spiritual counsel!” What, then, is the result of this decline in both these functions of the church? Is it not this? The church, thus driven by competition to widen its field, has sent its clergy out, or at least has allowed them to go out, to do many things in the6name of religion which have nothing whatever to do with it. The clergy to-day are busy?—Yes. But busy doing what?—Not things they ever were ordained to do. They are busy as managers of institutions, as members of committees, as representatives on boards, as trustees of asylums, orphanages, schools and hospitals, dispensaries and colleges, and builders for themselves of parish-houses, where they organize and execute affairs of clubs and guilds, societies and institutes. They were not “ordained” to do these things, nor did they need years of professional training to become able to do them. Thus it would seem that those men who are busiest in the ministry to-day are busy only doing things which lie wholly outside of that especial sphere, so far as there ever was a special sphere for work in which they were especially trained, in so far as they ever were specially trained. For my own part, I must either find for myself some work in the church which is sufficiently unique to justify my continuing in the unique position of a “calling,” or I must abandon the latter here, to find the former somewhere else. . . . I differ not at all from dozens like myself, some of whom have left the church already, others who will leave it soon. . . . I feel that there is nothing dishonorable in the step that I am taking. I have simply lost my mission and my message, and have found the courage necessary to give up a lucrative position without present hope of finding even one in which to earn a living. Far has it been from my desire to say anything that may by any possibility sound flippant. On the contrary, these pages record a veritable soul’s tragedy. L. A. S.