3.0../^ ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^fi^ Presented byT?-o-\, \Af .^B. (3vns,fi.ne- , T3.3D BR 115 .S6 W3 1915 Ward, Harry Frederick, 1873- 1966. Social evangelism LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN PROGRESS Volumes Issued The Church a Community Force. By Worth M. Tippy The Church at the Center. By fFarrfn H. Wilson The Making of a Country Parish. By Harlow S. Mills Working Women of Japan. By Sidney L. Gulick Social Evangelism. By Harry F. Ward Cloth, 50 Cents, Prepaid ADDITIONAL VOLUMES TO BE ISSUED SOCIAL EVANGELISM BY HARRY F. WARD V ^^H,. NEW YORK Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada 1915 COPYRIGHT, 191S, BY MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I What Is Social Evangelism? . i II The Imperative for a Social Evangel . . . . ' '^S III The Place of the Individual . 45 IV New Times, New Methods . 6^ V The Nature and Content of the Message . . . . -91 VI What About the Results? . 131 WHAT IS SOCIAL EVANGELISM? THE social movement of our time is deeply influencing the life of the Church. Every department of religious activity gives evidence of being touched by it. It is in the field of evangelism that its trail is faintest. Here its main work is yet to be done. The activities and propaganda which have recently been organized in the churches under the head of ^'Social Service" are often con- trasted with the evangelistic function of the Church as though they were inherently an- tagonistic or mutually exclusive. This is largely because the terms social service and evangelism are both overworked. One has long been and the other is fast becoming a [I] SOCIAL EVANGELISM house of refuge for the crowd that cry "Lord, Lord, but do not the things that I say." The shibboleth is shouted but the deed remains undone, the fact unaccomplished. The crowd prefers the easy enthusiasm of the bleachers to the stern struggle of the field, would rather cheer the embarking regiment than seek the enlisting office. When the Church actually labors at the tasks of evangelism and social service, they are found to be interdependent. Social service is found to have definite evangelistic values, and evangelism to have genuine social worth. In fact, a social evangelism appears. The social service movement is far from being the superficial propaganda described by its superficial critics. It does not propose to make the Church a mere agent for social reform. Its purpose is the regeneration of the social order, and it promotes reforms only as they are the working out of social salvation. It has never sought to substitute a "soup and [2] WHAT IT IS soap salvation" for ^^spiritual regeneration," but it does believe that regeneration must affect the whole of life. Its chief concern is not with externalities but with getting the very dynamic of God into all human movements. When the regenerative purpose and power of the social service movement is recognized, social service and evangelism are seen to have a relationship even closer than that of parallel agencies of the Kingdom. One is the insepa- rable complement of the other. The social awakening in the Church is the culmination of evangelical Christianity, which replaced a formal intellectualism that had neither spiritual power nor ethical results. It is the completion of the movement to vitalize Christianity, which could not be contained in feeling any more than in creeds. A scientific world, taught to know reality, demands of religion ethical results. This puts an addi- tional task upon evangelism. It must secure the realization of God in the outer as well as [3] SOCIAL EVANGELISM the inner life, it must obtain the "witness of the Spirit'^ in the contacts of the Christian with his fellows. This is precisely the purpose of the social movement in the churches. This is also the test of its worth; and the future of our faith depends upon the ability to meet this test. If social Christianity cannot put more of God into human life than has been realized by the purely individualistic, emotional type, then our religion has no triumphant place in the ongoing of the race. Evangelism — that almost threadbare term — has come to mean something more than the aggressive promulgation of the gospel. Ifi its recent manifestations it has come to mean the aggressive attempt to secure individual ad- herents to organized Christianity. To confine its objective to individuals alone is a grievous limitation of the purpose and function, the power and the goal of our faith. To attempt to develop an evangelism which should seek the community life for Christianity but should [4] WHAT IT IS ignore individuals would be an error of equally grave importance. To insist upon the necessity for a social evangelism is not to contrast an evangelism that is social in its purpose with one that is individual in its objective. Indeed, such a contrast cannot properly be made, for an evangelism that is true to its gospel must be both individual and social. Says the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church : ^'In the social crisis now confronting Christianity the urgent need and duty of the Church is to develop an evangelism which will recognize the possibility and the imper- ative necessity of accomplishing the regenera- tion of communities as well as persons, whose goal shall be the perfection both of society and of the individual.'' The more thoroughly evangelism comprehends the dual nature of its task the more effective will be its work. The clearer it sees its relation to the social order, the stronger will be its appeal to the [5] SOCIAL EVANGELISM modern imlividual. The more it understands the individual and comes in comprehend his social nature, the stronger will be its grip upon the community life. The development (^f the social values in evangelism and of the evangelistic values in social service is one of the signs of the times. It forecasts the consequent amalgamation in a common effort of forces that have hereto- fore been working separately. The mightv evangelism of the middle of the last century created as one of its by-products the moral standards of the formative community life of the Middle West. It turned licentious, drunken, brawling people into folks who be- gan to organize their communities on the basis of purity, temperance, and a decent respect for the rights and opinions of others. The evangelism of to-day, even in the hands of its most individualistic exponents, attempts to exert a direct influence upon the community life. It brings its batteries to bear upon cor- [6] WHAT IT IS rupt government, the liquor traffic, the social evil. Here is an attempt to bring within the scope of the evangel the fundamental social relationships of sex and property. The most easily recognized perversions of these rela- tionships are vigorously attacked even though their subtler abuses pass unrecognized and their constructive ct^ntrol for the development of the Christian social order goes untaught. It is imperfect testimony, but still evidence of the fact that evangelism is necessarily social in its nature and results. On the other hand, the evangelistic values in the social service movement become in- creasingly apparent. This must needs be, for this movement is one of the developments of the great missionary impulse of the last cen- tury. It grew out of the passion to serve the neglected lives of our city slums which was forced, for the very satisfaction of its desire to save men, to develop an equal passion to save the social order in which men must live. [7] SOCIAL EVANGELISM Small wonder then that the social passion kindles the fading fires of a personal faith in the lives of men in both the group of intellect and the group of toil, who have turned away from the Church because it gave scant encour- agement to their great enthusiasm for human- ity, to their devotion to community welfare. Said the leading educator of a community to the social service speaker: ^'I have cut out the church for several years, but if it is going to do vital community service, count me in.'^ A social service meeting in another town was amazed to hear the leading socialist critic of the churches declare: '^If you churchmen really mean to take up this program, I'll go with you to the end of the road." There are sections of our cosmopolitan pop- ulation who have never heard the gospel of Jesus in its original simplicity, to whom its social interpretation and application is the easiest and sometimes the only approach. The Jews offer an impervious front to conventional [8] WHAT IT IS evangelism. Yet the younger Jews, partic- ularly of the Slavic group, are true to their prophetic ancestry in their social passion. They respond eagerly to the social teachings of Jesus and there are notable instances of churches which have been wise enough to approach them with this message and have found that it developed a response to the claim of the Carpenter upon the personal life. In every type of community — in city, town, village, and open country — the power of those churches which have united with a vigorous evangelistic effort to transform individual lives a powerful appeal to the heart of the community indicates that the evangelism of the future is one which purposes to accom- plish the redemption of both the individual and the social order. The justification for requiring evangelism to be conscious of its social goal lies in the organic nature of society. If our fathers de- veloped an evangelism that considered indi- [9] SOCIAL EVANGELISM viduals alone, it was because they lived in a world which was composed of individuals and little more. Their work was adequate for their day. It calls, not for imitation of its method, but for the matching of its adequacy in a very different day. We live in a time when sociology has revealed to us a world in which the individual, considered apart from his interrelationships with others, does not exist. We have a social consciousness ; we are aware of our relation to the organic world of humanity. We develop a social conscience and a social will to direct the common efforts of mankind. By these facts the whole world is changed for us, even as it was changed for the men who first became aware of the great fact that the physical universe is not a mere assemblage of atoms but an organized system, moving by definite laws. The fact that society is an organism must be reckoned with by reli- gious statesmanship. The extent to which the organic conception [lO] WHAT IT IS of society is valid is of course a question. The position of modern sociology may be fairly summarized as follows : The individual is not a dependent creature, completely subordi- nate to the group, as in many primitive communities. The individual is not inde- pendent of the group, creating the com- munity by his contacts with other individ- uals, as in the theory of the eighteenth century philosophers. The individual and the com- munity are interdependent. He is the cell in the social organism, and here, as in all forms of organic life, the cell and the organism live by and for each other. The individual is a member of a number of organic social groups, — the family, the Church, the state, in- dustry. These in their turn make up the wider social order, the organic world of which he is a part in and through these smaller organisms, even as the cell is a part of the bodily organism through its members or organs. Let it be freely admitted that the organic [II] SOCIAL EVANGELISM concept of society is not entirely adequate, for life is always greater than our definitions and explanations. Yet it is still the most appropriate and complete conception that can be used, for modern biology includes in the term '^organism" the spiritual aspects of life and does not limit it to merely physical phenomena. The organic conception of society holds that the social order is not simply a number of individual lives with their different inter- ests amalgamated. It declares that society has developed as a group life, in which the individual has developed as an organic part. It points out that the primary impulses of the individual — the impulse to provide food and shelter, the impulse to propagate his kind — are social impulses. They cannot be prop- erly satisfied without the cooperation of others. This fact requires their control for the common good, and herein are the begin- nings of the community life. First comes the [12] WHAT IT IS family, then the tribe or clan, then the state or nation. Finally a world-wide collective life appears. This collective life develops its own organs and functions, becomes capable of determining and realizing its own collective end in government, religion, and industry, and moves toward the brotherhood of man. In all of this collective development the individual shares. It depends upon him, but it goes beyond him. The life of any social group, for instance a church, is more than the life of the individuals who compose it. They live for it and sometimes they die for it, mak- ing its larger life, by which they are in turn strengthened and developed. In the wider social order this is increasingly true. The social will is very much more than the aggre- gate of the individual wills. The social con- science is different from the mere addition of the individual consciences. The social mind is something more than the sum of the individual intelligences. If any one wants to determine [13] SOCIAL EVANGELISM this difference, let him follow the delibera- tions and decisions of any group of educated men, for instance a college faculty. Let him observe the compromise of individual consciences in group judgments, for example the verdicts of an ecclesiastical court. Let him see "good citizens" carried away by a mob into a frenzy of barbarism. Let him watch the will of a nation set for war sweep individ- uals before it. Decisions are made to which the individual mind or conscience acting apart would never consent; acts are done which the individual will moving alone would never initiate. In this sphere of the different results between the group action and the sum of the separate actions of individuals, we trace the action of the collective mind, conscience, and will — something which does not exist apart from the individuals which compose it, but which is yet more than they. It is this some- thing more, this formation and product of the manifold interrelationships of individuals, [14] WHAT IT IS which is neglected in the evangelism that deals only with individuals. This becomes a fatal oversight if the purpose is to establish Chris- tianity in the organic life of men, to develop a kingdom of God on earth. Hence the neces- sity for insisting upon an evangelism that shall be directed at the group life of men as well as at individuals, that shall make the social mind alight with the truth of God, the social conscience quickened with the righteousness of God, and the social will in harmony with the eternal purpose of God. Such an evangel- ism will have authority in modern life, will gain a wider vision and a deeper intensity, will reach to the very heart of the world. As a matter of fact Christianity has always expressed itself in group terms, has always vitally affected the organic life of man. It grew out of a faith which tried to organize religion in community life and which expressed the intimate relations of the soul with God in group terms. It came naturally [15] SOCIAL EVANGELISM to speak of the Divine as Father, the race as children, the Redeemer as Son of man. Its great moments of spiritual potency have always been followed by significant group movements. The ever-living Christ has always come where the group is, — ^^two or three," the family, the Church, the nation, the race. Early Christianity attempted to organ- ize a fraternal community, the Reformation gave birth to modern democracy, the Evan- gelical Revival developed the desire for race solidarity and began those practical move- ments which will make it possible. All the great evangelists — men as diverse as Savonarola and Moody — appealed to the social conscience of their times, were social forces. The prophets did something more than rebuke kings : they appealed to the heart of the nation; preached social justice. Jesus came to Golgotha, not because his teachings disturbed the complacent orthodoxy of the rabbis, but because his great gospel of the [i6] WHAT IT IS Kingdom was in dynamic opposition to the utterly selfish lives of the chief priests and scribes, ''the rulers of the people." The apos- tles found themselves in prison, not because they taught a new doctrine, but because they ran counter to the social current of their time — "turned the world upside down." These all were social evangelists. With deadly precision they hit the individual with their message, but with the same effectiveness they struck home to the social conscience. The fallacy that an individualistic gospel would somehow work out for the social good never deceived them. They had not studied social psychology, but they knew that religion can move men individually without moving them in the mass, if it does not appeal to them in their group relations. As a matter of fact '^ the inadequacy of a purely individual evangel- ism is painfully apparent. It has not saved l^ our cities nor our corporations. It has presented us with the fact that many of the [17] SOCIAL EVANGELISM V men at the head of the unsocial forms of busi- ness are members in good standing in evangel- ical churches. It has shown us that you may save souls according to its standards, with- out saving men. Its very incompleteness pro- claims aloud the fact that an effective evangel- ism must make its definite appeal to men in their social relations. The gospel of the Kingdom insists that a man can have no rela- tion with God apart from his relations to his neighbor, that religion is life and is emphat- ically a family affair, which means that with- out losing any of its individual definiteness and effectiveness, evangelism must have a con- scious social aim and purpose. The contacts of Christianity with the group life of men have been mostly unconscious. They have been the indirect result of its inher- ent social nature and purpose. They have been its contributions to the slow process of social evolution. The time has now come to accel- erate this process, to arouse to consciousness [i8] WHAT IT IS and to organize for action the forces that are able to control the progress of the nation and ultimately of the race. This requires a direct evangelistic appeal. Just as the pioneer ministers awakened the forces that molded the growing community life in the Middle West, so must our modern evangelists still more consciously arouse and organize the forces that are to mold the world of to- morrow. Social evangelism, which has been the partially perceived fact of the past, must be the fully recognized fact of the present. This necessity is recognized in the changed conception of the relation of the church to the community. It is coming to be accepted that the church exists, not to build up itself, but to build up the community, that the good pastor is not the one who merely develops a good church but the one who makes a com- munity good. The strong churches are those which regard themselves as missionary out- posts of the kingdom of God in an environ- [19] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ment not yet Christianized, which are facing the dut}^ of evangelizing the community life, which have organized their membership to become a community force, which are living not for themselves, but are willing if need be to die for the saving of their community. The weak, dying churches are those which are struggling to hold on to their own feeble life, to retain the remnants of their original mem- bership in a changing population. Min- istering only to individuals and not to the community life, they slowly pass to their dis- honored death. The object of church endeavor then is to make the community religious. What then is a religious community? It is not a community that is full of churches, each seeking its own sectarian development, each cultivating its own peculiar formulas and practise. It is rather a community which has become aware of its organic nature, which has found its soul, repented of its sins, come to conscious realization of its powers and needs, [20] WHAT IT IS and is coordinating its forces, including its churches, in harmony with a power greater than itself, for the working out of its salvation. This process is actually being accomplished in many a community, sometimes by a single church, sometimes by the federated churches. It must everywhere continue until the Church has poured the life of God into every function of the community, until that city appears in which God dwells with men and they are his people, and in it there will be no temple, "for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof." The same process which has been going on both indirectly and directly, unconsciously and consciously, in the local community has also been proceeding in the social order as a whole. At times Christianity has directed its forces with conscious intent and purpose to the Christianizing of the social order in some particular, and always it has made indirectly for that end. The two fundamental relation- [21] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ships of society — sex and property — express- ing the instincts at the base of the social struc- ture, the one making for the perpetuation and the other for the maintenance of the race, have never been considered wholly outside the scope of the evangel. Jesus touched them with a direct message, and always the churches have had some teachings concerning them. Three social groupings organized around these fundamental social instincts are world- wide. Everywhere men participate in the family, the state, and industry. These make up the social order as a whole. Christianity first moved upon the fundamental social group, the family. It taught that the expression of the life of God in the family group involved purity, the protection and development of childhood, the elevation of womanhood to equality with manhood. The Church has always proclaimed a more or less definite social evangel in relation to the family. The result is the Christian family group, the fin- [22] WHAT IT IS est, freest, most ennobling form of social rela- tionship known to man. In the state the effect of the Christian evangel has long been manifest. Its concep- tion of brotherhood and service as the only valid form of social relationship is producing a type of government for the common good and not for the special privilege of a few. Wherever the gospel is proclaimed, despotism is destroyed, autocracy is replaced by democ- racy. While the Christian state is yet to be, its foundations are among us. This again means that Christianity has accomplished an evangelistic impact upon the social order. In the great w^ork process of life — the fundamental struggle for food, shelter, and clothing — the evangel is just beginning to be heard. It is carrying over into the compet- itive struggle of the industrial process the same principle of service and cooperation that has modified the strife of classes in the state and welded them into a government that is [23] SOCIAL EVANGELISM the mutual promotion of the common welfare. Already industry is being humanized and personalized. Its corporate life is being touched by the power of the gospel directed immediately to it, is feeling after the methods that will enable men to obey the law of neighbor love in the work process and, instead of working against each other for self-advan- tage, to work together for the common good. It now remains to carry these efforts and tendencies to their conclusion, to direct the forces of evangelism toward every part of the social order that remains unregenerate, to accomplish absolutely the Christian family, the Christian state, the Christian industry, and through these the Christian social order. To put the dynamic of God^s life into all the activities of man, to bring the social passion to a consciousness of its spiritual nature, to tie the social program to the eternities and fill it with the power of an endless life — this is the compelling task of the Church, [24] II THE IMPERATIVE FOR A SOCIAL EVANGEL THE imperative for a social evangelism is found in the mind and heart of Jesus. ''Thou shalt" — a social obligation binding man to God and his neighbor — stands at the entrance to the Christian life. It is a command which cannot be evaded, and the winsome fascination of its ideal is more com- pelling than all the prohibitions thundered from the clouded mountaintop. Its funda- mental obligation carries one, not simply into the new heaven w^here God is known as Father, but also into the new earth where man is to be known as brother in all the relation- ships of life. It was the gospel of the King- dom that Jesus preached, and all recent inter- [25] SOCIAL EVANGELISM pretations of the Kingdom find its expression in the vital contacts of the workaday world. It is to be expressed in time and place even though its realities transcend them. While the theologians were emphasizing the transcendent aspects of the kingdom of God, the statesmen of the Church were ever seeking to give it visible form. The great missionary program of Christianity is an effort to obey the imperative of the gospel and take the world for Jesus. The vision of making the kingdoms of the earth to be the Kingdom of Jesus has always inspired his followers. With splendid vision the Church early fashioned an imperial program. It sought to dominate the earth with one type of religious life, to establish everywhere one form of reli- gious organization. This plan of an imperial Church substituted for the purposes of Jesus the ambitions of the Roman empire. It stripped the Carpenter of his peasant garb, clad him in purple, put a sword in his hand, [26] ITS IMPERATIVE a crown on his head, and sat him on the throne of the Caesars. History shows no greater distortion of the spirit and method of a world movement. Promoted with superb skill and sacrificial devotion, it nevertheless was fore- doomed to failure. Before our eyes it now wastes away to its appointed end. Failing to subdue the world to its type, ecclesiasticism inevitably withdraws from the world. It seeks the mystic meditation of the cloister, the futile pomp of the altar, or the intellectual abstraction of the study. In either case it isolates itself from the great movements of democratic thought and action that are form- ing the modern world. The missionary program of the Protestant Churches is of another sort. It has not sought to subdue the peoples of the earth to the scepter of an imperial Christ whose delegated authority it claimed, but it has proclaimed to brother men of all races the power of a uni- versal Savior to be worked out in their lives as [27] SOCIAL EVANGELISM he and they might will. Its purpose has been to plant the flag of the cross on the last frontier, to proclaim the gospel to every creature. The accomplishment of that task is now in sight, and already the missionary forces are forming themselves for a more diffi- cult undertaking, as their leaders are compre- hending the full vision of Jesus. With the geographic world evangelized, there still remain new fields to conquer; there is yet the organic world to be made Christian. There is yet to be evangelized the social order in all its activities and functions, developing in each nation but rapidly fusing internation- ally into a world life. Because the mission- aries have seen the life-giving power of the gospel in the social order of the lands they have evangelized, and more, because they have gone to Calvary with their Master, mis- sionary statesmanship comes rapidly to the full world-vision of Jesus. It knows that what he wants is not territory nor numbers [28] ITS IMPERATIVE owning his name but the life of men doing his will. It sees him now, not as captain and con- queror with sword and crown, but as suffer- ing servant saving the race by virtue of his sacrificial love. So missions now add to their extensive campaign to preach the gospel to every creature an intensive purpose to carry the spirit of that gospel into the very heart of the world. It wastes no energy in the compe- tition of sects, but with all its militant spirit unites all its forces in the supreme endeavor to bring life to the whole world. This IS the sublime program of Jesus. His gospel is a leaven to transform the nature of life, not a form to which life must be molded. In the face of the might of Rome, across the splendor of the Caesars, the Galilean peasant flings his cry, proclaims a kingdom not of this world but in this world, held by love and not by might. It is the boldest word of human record. Small wonder that men hear the voice of the Eternal when this man without a [29] SOCIAL EVANGELISM country proclaims a world-wide empire of a content vaster than the dreams of the world conquerors, when this despised workman with no citizenship talks of transforming all the organized life of men. His religion is to be expressed, not in creed nor form, but in life; is to be extended, not by the acceptance of phrases nor repetition of rites, but by the leaven of life. Mohammed may win his mil- lions by the sword, Rome may hold hers with iron grip by the power of fear, but the Car- penter wins men and the world by a deeper compulsion and holds them by a stronger bond. His Kingdom is to come on earth by intensive conquest — by the power of a love, mighty to save the whole of life, a transform- ing leaven able to reach the heart of society as well as of men, to capture its motives and its motor powers. This was the purpose of Jesus, and his followers must consciously undertake the task of realizing his vision. An imperative to develop an evangelism as [30] ITS IMPERATIVE wide as the purpose of Jesus lies also in the self-interest of the Church. Though it may at times have followed evil counselors and sought strange gods, the Church has never wholly lost the vision of Jesus for the trans- formation of life. Its times of greatest power have been the times when it has poured the currents of God's life into all the associated life of men. Its days of strength have been the days when a new vision of God has driven men to new relations with their fellows : after Pentecost, a brotherly community life; with the Reformation, the stirring of the common people, the beginnings of modern democracy; out of the Evangelical Revival the human- izing of government and business. On the other hand, the days of weakness in the Church, the days of decay, have been the days of withdrawal from the vital activities of the world. Ancient monasticism and modern pietism have both proved fatal. Like every other organism, if it is to live, [31] / SOCIAL EVANGELISM the Church must find an end outside of itself. Unless it views itself as an instrument rather than an end, it dies at the top, its leaders become mere ecclesiastics, its evangelistic functions are atrophied. Without this larger goal, the Roman expression of Christianity is inevitable; the Church becomes one vast machine, consuming most of the energy it gen- erates in maintaining itself. It succumbs to the / perilous disease of all institutions, govern- mental and religious, the obliteration of the motive that gave them birth, the loss of the purpose that alone justifies their existence. It is a self-evident truth that the Church must either capture the w^orld for Christianity or be captured by the world. There is no neutral ground. The only chance of success lies in pushing the battle. This is the one shred of truth in the ancient contention that the Church must control the community. It must — but by animating its life with spiritual forces, not by an overlordship of temporal [32] ITS IMPERATIVE power. The Church cannot even hold its own in a community environment that is unchristian. If it deals only with individuals, while the forces of evil organize the commun- ity, they will destroy its youth and deplete its forces. If the whole powerful pressure of the environment upon the formative period of life is to be against Christianity, the Church will not be able to protect even the children of its own families. If it would build them into the kingdom of God, besides its direct provision for them, there must be massed on its side the indirect forces of the community life. ^'Stick to your job of preaching the gospel," said the leaders of the church to the preacher who was fighting organized vice in his neighborhood, and that very week a daughter of one of their own families was ruined in one of the houses he had been seek- ing to suppress! If the Church does not put its life to the hazard, as Jesus did, in carrying out his program for the whole of life, if it [33] SOCIAL EVANGELISM rejects his program, abandons the world to its fate and merely attempts to save a few souls from the wreck, it will'in the end be swamped itself and go down with the wreck. On the other hand, there is the possibility of a more tragic fate. The community may become more fully Christian than the church, at least in its desires. Then will the church, which has lost its birthright of community leadership, be left outcast in its poverty and weakness. Already in some sections of the community life this danger impends. The Church imparted the spirit and forecast the method of modern philanthropy. Shall it now leave it entirely to the professional social service group and attack them because their work is not spiritual? The Church has con- served a religious theory of government. Shall it now refrain from the dirty business of politics except to excoriate corrupt officials? The Church has always had some men who have fearlessly proclaimed the ideals and [34] ITS IMPERATIVE principles on which the modern labor move- ment is based. Shall it now refuse all aid and comfort to that movement and merely con- demn it for its violence? The community life is feeling after God in these days, and the church which does not lead it will inevitably be ignored and abandoned. God is moving upon the modern world through many agen- cies, and the pietism that insists upon ignoring the organized community life, that is deter- mined to keep the church apart from the other human activities in which God is working, is simply shutting itself off from God, now and forever. There is some glory in going down with the wreck in a vain and mistaken efifort; there is nothing but ignominy in being left a waterlogged derelict because the course for the desired haven was deliberately abandoned. It is of small moment to insist that the Church cannot live unless it finds a greater motive than its own life and a bigger program than gathering adherents. The more signifi- [35] SOCIAL EVANGELISM cant thing is that the Church cannot effec- tively do its work for individuals unless it also does its work for all the associated life of men. The very imperative to reach individual life with the gospel, which is universally acknowl- edged, involves also an imperative to reach the social order with the same power. Per- sonal evangelism in certain sections of the population is blocked unless it extends to the community life. Unless it deals with condi- tions as well as with people, it does but run its head into a stone wall. We organize rescue missions to reach the ^^down-and-out" men of the casual labor group, the bums and hoboes, and, while we are saving a few hundred, the conditions under which they live and work are wrecking them by the thousand. Every winter and spring they pour into our cities from the harvest-fields and construction camps, the ice fields and the lumber camps. They have been doing rough work, living on coarse food, in uncomfortable quarters. They [36] ITS IMPERATIVE can have no homes of their own, and their social nature has been starved and brutalized. To meet their social need there are but the cheap lodging-house, the saloon, and the brothel. As long as v^e do not develop an evangelism that w^ill minister to the social needs of these lives and then w^ill reach back into the conditions of casual industry and transform them also, the w^ork has only a frac- tional efficiency. In its approach to the most spectacular outcast groups the Church has already developed a social evangelism. In order that w^e may effectively save the drunk- ard, we add to the preaching of the gospel that can transform the individual the organ- ized effort to save society from the curse of the liquor traffic. We are no longer content to attack the social evil merely w^ith rescue homes, we begin to mass our forces against organized vice and against the underlying causes that produce it. As the Church follows Jesus in a ministry to the outcast, as it meets [37] SOCIAL EVANGELISM his judgment test of the reality aiui etFiciency of its disciplcship by service to the poor, the sick, and the prisoner, it discovers that the gospel of redemption is also the gospel of prevention. In the tenement neighborhood the mission Sunday-school and the church settlement are organized. Their point of contact is child life. They reach and transform a group of children, but while they arc sa\ing their hun- dreds, the slum is destroying its thousands with its high death and delimjucncy rate, with its development of weakness, ignorance, and inefficiency. Unless then an evangelism is developed that will Christianize the slum and all that makes the slum, both in industry and government, the evangel to the child life of the tenement district is but partially effective. Indeed, it was the practical realization of this fact which led to the social service movement in the Churches. It was born of the evangel- istic impulse in citv missions. Its program [38] ITS IMPERATIVE was hammered out on the firing line by the men and women who arc carrying the gospel to the darkest sections of our industrial cities, just as the Japanese perfected some high explosives in the field laboratories of the trenches before Port Arthur. Thus our city missionaries enlarged their message and their work until it covered the whole of the com- munity life and its underlying forces. Besides the imperative for a social evangel contained in the historic purpose of Chris- tianity and sounded in the present emergency in the Church, there is also that which sounds in the call of urgent need from without. The world which it is the purpose of Jesus to save, which the Church must save or perish, is a world which calls to us with the cry of dire and utter need. One source of the evangel- istic fervor of our fathers was their vivid real- ization of the needs of those to whom they spoke. They knew their world. They preached with flaming intensity because they [39] SOCIAL EVANGELISM knew thcv were [Mcachini; to >imuni; aiul living men. With the same certaintv must their sons lace the social order. Tliey must know their worhl and its needs, not the world of the arm-chair theologian or philosopher, hut the world of reality ; not the identic, refined world of the lihrarv and the church, hut the hrutal, harharic worhl of Wall Street and the tenderloin, of Ludlow and the Marne. Only when men see heneath the Li;av trap[iini;s of our culture the heart that is ''desperately wicked'' will they he consumed with the (ire that cries ''\\'o is unto me, if 1 preach not the gospel 1" Under the dominance of the evolutionary view of the universe we have slipped into the tacit assumption that evervthini^ makes for progress, that all we have to do is to watch the imfoldin2; of the purpose of God and the world will come t(^ its goal. This is an all too shallow optimism. The scientific view of the universe alhnvs us no such easv lot. It shows [40] ITS IMPERATIVE ii> a wurM which moves only as men push it forward with infinite to\\. All the improve- ment of nature has been accomplished by the arduous labors of men. If there be any prog- ress, it has been achieved as men liave discov- ered and utilized the forces that make for it. Leave nature to itself and there is no evidence that it gets anywhere. It contains w ithin itself the forces of decay as well as the forces of progress. The Power which can use one to overcome the other manifests itself only through human agency. So is it with the social order. Underneath all its achieve- ments there lie close to the surface the forces of decadence and degeneration. They tri- umpii, now in communities, now in nations, and again in civilizations. I'hey are averted only by conscious and sustained effort. The world to which we preach is seen under the white light of science to be literally and in fact a dying world, apart from the energizing touch of those who in their service and sacri- [41] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ficc briiiL^ to it the power of an endless lite. Into our shallow prattling about a Chris- tian civilization there needs to come a stern vision of the fact that there are potent forces at work for its destruction, which Tc /// destroy it unless tiiey are rooted out. On three counts the indictment of God is drawn ai^ainst our Western civilization. It is depleted by social waste. The forces that renew its strength at the bottom, the strong new groups of population, are being rotted away by poverty, disease, and vice faster than all organized philanthropies can check them! Unless these be reen forced by a great religious conviction of social justice that will remove the causes of this waste, the house of our civilization, weakened at the foundation, will fall about our ears. Again, the blood of the Western peoples is being contaminated by race poisons, the chief of them sex disease and alcohol, transmitting their destructive power with the very germ of [42] ITS IMPERATIVE life. Alcohol w c arc dct eating, but there remains tlie sterner death-grapple with sex disease, and, unless it can be driven from our midst, wc pass the way of the older civiliza- tions which became impotent from this cause. Again, our civilization is being torn asunder by strife. Its organization of militarism around the prificiple of economic aggression plunges it into a pit of carnage, and if inter- national strife be abated, there yet looms up all the hate and hell of class and race hatred, r.ilher we eliminate the principle of eco- nomic aggression or our social order goes headlong to its Armageddon. Here then, are the forces that make for death in the social order, and how near they are to its heart let current e\'ents demonstrate. W'itliout the transforming power (^f a social religion the race dies. Without God there is no hope for the worhl. This is after all the ultimate imperative for a social evangel — the absolute need for the gospel that has power to [43] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ba\c both man aiul the social onicr t'r<»ni their sins and to put lite into the dyini; worM. The savini; remnant is here, as Elijah tOinul in Israel. Those who compose it do not decry social work nor with fnolish sneers contrast eugenics and regeneration, but are striving to put (jod into the heart <»f our ci\ili/ation, to organize it according to his purpose, to inspire it with Iiis will. Has Christianitv lost faith and ardor? Has it become conventional and respectable? Is it becoming old and static? Here is the challenge of an unregenerate social order to call it to vigor and power. Here are the great mass needs of humanity, requiring the massed efforts of the churches to cooperate with all other agencies of good-will for their relief and removal. U trr is n race dridtJinuj fjf (I rii\i cdrth. ftu uui the r^justruc- tive efforts rerjuired to jjuike it, yet "lidituKj to be kindled -uitfi a (jreat dxruimir emotion tluit shall drive the collective mill to the ini;aii;;. \\{ his cniuiucl is ircach- cry to the ^roupi life, absolutely antisocial in its larger results. So the failure of outstand- ing Christians in their social conduct becomes antichrisiian. A nuiltimillionaire may create threat foundatinns for social welfare, but the word that reveals an unwillingness to face the rights of others condemns Christianity before the millions. Dives niav honor the atonement in his will, but his easy evasion of it in his own life, his willingness to let the toilers bear the social burdens while he carries no cross, makes his theology a by-word. "He is an angel at home," said the driver of a great ituiustrial magnate who had often felt his kindness, *'but he is a devil in business." A great giver to the church boasted that he could always hire his unskilled labor at iifteen cents below the market rate :\nA the exploited group cursed both him and his church. These arc tragedies of the dual conscience, and they abourhi in (jur [50] PLACE OF THE L\I)I\ IDl'AL churLlics. riic same tra^cii\ appcar> even in the ministry where the pressure of the com- petitive organization of modern life limits ami sometimes destroys hrothcrhood. The liual conscience is found in lives that are only partly Christian; some of their fiuutions are undeveloped and others are atrophieil. They are good Christians in certain relationships, in the family and in philanthropy, but in civics and industry they are antichristian. Recogniticni of the estimable (]ualities of in(ii- viduals must not blind us to their lack of other fundamentals. The world never can be saved bv men who recogni/e the authority of Christianity in only a segment of their lives. For such men Chris- tianity does not enter the business realm, and the proposal to Christianize industry appears to them absurdly quixotic. Without faith, what works can they produce? In this sphere they serve not Christ but Mammon, and there- fore their influence, instead of making for the [51] SOCIAL EVANGELISM saving of the industrial order from Mammon, is making for the extension of his power. Before industry can be made regenerate there must be a type of Christian who believes in that goal and consciously goes to work to accomplish it. This type is already beginning to appear. The practical failure of this theory of social salvation by addition is due to its assumption of a world which does not exist. It belongs to the individualistic period before the creation of the modern world with its social intelli- gence and will. It is the product of an incom- plete psychology. It never can accomplish the redemption of the social order by the addi- tion of saved lives, for the simple reason that the world is not that kind of a world — for the reason pointed out in the discussion of the nature of social evangelism, that the social organism is much more than the sum of its constituent cells. What we have here is a problem of life, and not one of mathematics. [52] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL Society is not the sum of individual units. When human beings merge together in a group the result is like that which follows the mixing of different elements by a chemist. As they fuse, a new entity appears to which he must give a new name. So do the fusing lives of men result in a new entity, the social organ- ism, which thinks and acts far differently than would its individual units. They all share in this composite action and they are all parts of this new result, but religion must reckon with this thing which they jointly are, as well as with their individual existence. Everywhere, as the social organism becomes more complex, its life becomes stronger and even as in the higher physical organisms its coordinating power over the individual cells becomes greater. With the development of education and the transmission and trans- fusion of thought, the social mind becomes stronger. With the increasing capacity for collective action, the social will becomes more [53] SOCIAL EVANGELISM powerful. The relation of this to the indi- vidual is presently to be considered, but the point is that the surplus of the organic life which is not in the individuals composing it becomes increasingly more. It becomes more and more self-conscious, more and more cap- able of action and self-direction. Therefore with the socializing of life the compulsion to reach this social organism w^ith the evangel becomes greater. Its institutions, customs, habits, challenge the control and direction of religion. But what about the individual? Does he drop out of sight? As the world becomes more does the individual wither? Is religion to mass its evangel upon the corporate life and neglect the person? That the tendency of social evangelism is to overlook the individual is the strongest objection brought against it. This charge, however, is based upon a total misunderstanding of the facts in the case. Those who make it impute to the advocates of [54] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL social evangelism the same fallacy which viti- ates their own reasoning. Because the social order cannot be transformed without the trans- formation of individuals, they assume that this latter process is all that needs to be under- taken. Then when others point out that indi- vidual transformation alone will not accom- plish the redeemed social order, they assume that therefore the individual is to be left out of consideration. In both positions they are thinking in terms of an artificial world. They are making a contrast which exists nowhere except in their own minds. Their favorite antithesis is whether the Church is to save the social order or to save souls from hell, whether we need the arousing of a new social con- science or a revival of religion, whether the world is to be saved by perfect laws or by redemption, by a new industrial system or by individual regeneration. The answer of course is ''By both/' These things are not in antithesis but are inseparable complements. [55] SOCIAL EVANGELISM There is no ''either or'; it is ''botJi and." There is no individual apart from the social organism, there is no social organism apart from the individual. The simple gospel on the lips of Jesus assumes this great fact and deals with both in all their relationships. The one way of saving the social organism is through its constituent parts, which are individuals; the only way the individual can come to full salvation is by redemption of the social organism in which he subsists. To accomplish this joint end, men must be evan- gelized as social beings. They must be saved in all their group relationships, not as indi- viduals abstracted from the world of reality, withdrawn from contact with their fellows and set apart in some arbitrary system of rela- tionships with God. The fundamental error of those who insist that an evangel which talks about social conditions is neglecting the funda- mental task of ^'getting the individual right with God" is that they are thinking of an indi- [S6] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL vidual who docs not exist, except in the realm of theology. Only when evangelism attempts to Chris- tianize the social order does it get a full con- sciousness of the place and worth of the indi- vidual. Facing the actual man in modern life, it discovers that when the world becomes more the individual also become more. While to- day the power of leaders to secure the blind allegiance of the mass grows less the power of the average individual becomes more, because his points of contact with others are more numerous, the radius of his influence is greater, he is a more effective social agent. The man who is made Christian in all his out- reachings and then set to work as a transform- ing social power is a vastly more effective being than the man who becomes Christian merely in his intellectual or emotional life. Therefore the acceptance of its social mission does not diminish but rather intensifies the personal impetus of evangelism. [57] SOCIAL EVANGELISM The acceptance of the social task of evan- gelism not only makes more compelling its need to reach the individual ; it also increases its results in the life of the individual. Per- sonality is enlarged and not lessened as it is related in service and sacrifice to the further- ance of the organic social life. As this is the method by which social evangelism proposes to accomplish the redemption of the social order, its result is therefore an increase in the value and effectiveness of the individual. It is the failure to perceive the interrelation of the individual and the social organism and more especially their effect upon each other that leads many social evangelists into later reaction. They find in their local community work that nothing can be accomplished except through individuals who have been made dynamic by personal religion, and they there- fore swing back into the fallacious conclusion that all that has to be done is to make individ- uals religious. They fail to see that this is [58] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL only true and efective when the individual they are dealing with becomes something more than an individual, when he is not a theological abstraction put into certain theo- logical relationships, but when he is a living person who through his touch with God touches also the whole world of humanity in which God alone is fully known, and there- fore becomes a transforming social power. Many folk raise the futile question of which comes first in point of time, individual or social salvation. Here is the same misconcep- tion of the nature of the individual. Some people see only the fact that with mankind as we now have it no better social scheme can be worked. Others see only the fact that the individual cannot be fully redeemed until the redemption of the social order is accom- plished. Therefore each group works for the bit of good that it sees and hurls recrimina- tions at the other for not quitting its job and coming over to work with them. Both fail [59] SOCIAL EVANGELISM to see that each of their desired and necessary ends depends upon the other, and that they can only be realized as they are realized together. To slur either part of the joint proc- ess is indefinitely to postpone the accomplish- ment of the other. To look upon social redemption as something that waits entirely ^ in the future until all individuals are ^ redeemed or to postpone efforts for individual regeneration until a better social order is real- ized, is to put asunder what God has joined together in life and what Jesus always co- ordinates in teaching. Individual and social salvation cannot be separated in point of time — they proceed contemporaneously. The re- generate social order is accomplished, even as individual salvation is accomplished, by forces that are consciously perceived and also by forces that operate unperceived. Like the wind or the thief in the night, some of them come, and others are produced by the con- scious labor of individuals. [60] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL There is an interacting development here, a coordinate process. Every time a man becomes consciously Christian his life helps the development of the Christian social order. Every time the social order becomes in any part Christian it helps to bring its constituent individuals into Christian consciousness. Together they ^^press on unto perfection." The regenerate perfecting individual helps along the regenerate perfecting society, w^hich in turn strengthens him and helps others. There are some men who see God first and then their fellow men; the flaming vision of the Eternal gives them the passion for brotherhood. There are some men who see their brother first and through him God; the passion for brotherhood gives them the consciousness of the Divine. Presently they hear ^'Inas- much — " and stand face to face with the Master whom they have followed afar off. With the Christianizing of the whole of life this group increases. As life contains more [6i] SOCIAL EVANGELISM of (jod tlicy sec Goei more clearly in its work- ing facts. There arc manv men wiio will work f(^r a regenerate social order before they are consciously regenerate themselves, just as manv men will \ote to prohibit the licjuor traffic even thouL^di they drink themselves. Jesus says let them alone, for while thev are working for him they are themselves getting closer to him. The more of God we get into life the more real he becomes. I'he accomplishment of the regeneration of any part of the social order helps all individuals; by so much as thcv live in accord with Christian standards, by so much is their whole life lifted nearer to the com- plete Christian life. If we can get children born in a godlike community, their whole ilevelopment will there be affected and shaped bv the right standards of life. The stronger the social intelligence and the social will be- come, the stronger is their power to influence and mold the mind and purpose of individuals [62] PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL aiul the more necessary is it tluit tlicir inllu- cncc shouKl be a Christianizing intlucncc. IHiiis we have an interdependent, coordinate process, eacii of its parts affecting tlie other, reiiLiiring an e\angel whose purpose it is to reach togetlier the indi\idual aiul the social order. \i it is true that ''society exists in the cooperation of in\ There is also the group of luxury, who by their manner of living deny the imperative of the gospel over their lives. They have heard the gospel of individual salvation through sacraments or dogmas or feelings and they are the living proof of its inadequacy. The only gospel that will penetrate the armor-plate of their self- righteousness is one which deals with their relations to men in the economic order and convinces them of social sin and of their need of God. Here then is the field — to reach the whole community' life and especially those groups which are now largely untouched by the gospel; to reach the whole social order — to Christianize the cooperative relationships which bind men together in the social struc- [69] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ture and especially those relationships which have not yet been brought into harmony with the ethics of Jesus. In reaching this field the methods of pres- ent-day evangelism will be useel, but certain of its processes wliich are now incidental will become central. To reach the community conscience and will as a whole, the mass com- munity meeting as used by tlie professional evangelist is available. The results secured by these meetings are largely due to the fact that they are able to concentrate so much of the community life upon their objective. They bring to bear upon individuals the full force of the great crowd. They are massing for one purpose almost the entire life of the town or city. They are unconsciously using the forces revealed by a study of crowd psy- chology to secure individual results. Most conversions, even educational conversions of children, are accomplished by this focusing of group influence. Some social results are [70] NEW TIMES, NEW .METHODS also consciously sought by current evangel- istic campaigns in the same fashion, notably a repressive attack upon liquor and the social evil. Some evangelists now bring into a cam- paign an associate to face the community with its social needs and to enlist converts for community service. But for the most part the tremendous social forces massed in these great union meetings go to waste and leave an inadequate constructive community result behind them. What does occur is usually a by-product rather than a consciously desired result. A year after a certain town had con- cluded a successful cooperative evangelistic campaign which filled the churches with con- verts, it still contained a segregated vice dis- trict unusual in extent and organization for a town of that size. When an entire community has for a month considered religion together, and there are still overwork, underpay, and occupational disease in its industries, or hous- ing that destroys health and morals, it is a SOCIAL EVANGELISM striking revelation of the fact that evangelism has failed to deal with those vital relationships betw^een men that make up the community life. On the other hand, attempts are being made to mass the forces of the community for con- structive purposes without either the religious sanction or a conscious effort to generate the religious dynamic. This occurs in welfare exhibits, community institutes, and various campaigns for local betterment. The two types of meeting need to be blended into one. No evangelistic campaign should be held which does not appeal to the social conscience, which does not face the concrete social sins of the community, which does not call the whole population to repentance and jointly to seek after the righteousness of the Kingdom. Every evangelistic effort should find its climax in calling men to dedicate their lives in concrete service to the community, to live the life of God among their fellows, to under- [72] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS take certain immediate measures to this end. No campaign for community betterment is fully effective which does not call men into the immediate presence of God to consider their duty to all other men, which does not develop a realization of the necessity of chang- ing the motives as well as the forms of com- munity life. Conversion is a fact for the com- munity as well as for the individual. There come moments when the entire community is touched from above, is given a new vision and a new motive, turns away from old sins forever and finds a new power for living. Such occasions have recently come to many communities in this country in their change of attitude concerning the liquor traffic or com- mercialized vice. The progress of the race to God is infinitely slow, but not infinitely regular. There come times when a nation can be born in a day, when a new world order may swing into vision over night. The more pos- sible it is to mass our forces of intelligence {7^1 SOCIAL EVANGELISM and will, the more we are able at times to accelerate progress, to put ourselves in touch with the Divine for the accomplishment of immediate results. The men who proclaim an evangelism which is the power of God for the complete transformation of the individual will also include in their ministry a like pur- pose for their community, and may confidently labor for this end. In patient toilings they will develop the community life toward Christian standards in certain spheres of com- mon action. At times they will see the com- munity come to consciousness in these spheres, accept the Christian ideal and highly resolve together to sustain the measures that will real- ize it. They will know then that life has permanently moved up to a new level. Another type of meeting now being devel- oped is the Open Forum. This discusses cur- rent social and community questions from the standpoint of religion. Its appeal is to the entire community and it gathers in its audience [74] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS all kinds of folk, in large proportion non- churchgoers. A high percentage of Jews and socialists are always present. The audience is given full opportunity to question the speaker. Religion may not take refuge in authority. It must prove its worth by the acid test of democracy. In many places such forum meet- ings have brought groups of men impossible to reach by ordinary evangelism into the per- sonal religious life. In all cases they have at least developed a common meeting-ground, a common understanding between groups that are alien, and consequently have made pos- sible the massing of the forces of the com- munity for common religious action. The outstanding characteristic of the forum type of meeting is that it emphasizes life, not dogma, bears down not so much upon what men ought to think as upon what they ought to do, aims not to pass resolutions but to get action. The same type of meeting needs to be used in the services of the church. A demo- [75] SOCIAL EVANGELISM cratic participation in worship ought to involve a democratic union for action. The church must develop more services which will call together all the forces of good-will to consider what ought to be done to make the community life better. Such meetings will develop genuine evangelistic power. ^^If this is Christianity, then I can be a Christian," said the keen, young, agnostic Jew after listen- ing to an exposition of the teachings of Jesus in relation to industrial life. Men of trained intellect have come away from recent national gatherings w^hich formulated programs of social welfare saying, ^'The atmosphere was that of the old-time revival meeting." The passion of the coming evangelism had touched them, they had felt the thrill of the new revival that is even now upon us. The fervor of most labor meetings is in striking contrast to the apathy of many church gatherings. Men say it is because the labor meeting is con- cerned with the vital bread and butter ques- [76] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS tion. It is, — but the religious atmosphere is generated only because the group need is con- sidered, and therefore love and sacrifice are developed. When the church will consider together all the common needs, as Jesus did, — hunger of body and hunger of soul, — then the spiritual temperature of its meetings will not fall ; it will rise. In carrying out a social evangelism new types of efifort will be developed. To reach the groups that have been specified the gospel must be carried to them. The day has gone when the church could sit down and wait for the unchurched sections of the community to come. They can be called by skilful advertis- ing, but this is only a temporary expedient. If its object is simply to enlarge the church, if it does not use its success in turning its crowds out to Christianize the community life, its last state will be worse than its first. The best advertising any church can have is the outreaching effect of its life upon the com- SOCIAL EVANGELISM munity. Moreover there are groups which no advertising can reach, because of their ignorance and prejudice. The church that really wants to reach the unchurched groups must go where they are. The poverty group, the immigrant group, must be reached in their homes and natural meeting-places by the con- versational method. The lay forces of the church must be organized to this end, even as the Roman Church developed its lay orders. The labor group can be reached in its own halls, which are usually open to any man with a vital message who has established a contact through friendship. A new type of evangelist must be developed who will go w^here men are and meet them on their own ground. An organized propaganda for the social aspects of the gospel needs to be placed upon the streets. The work of the preaching friars and of the Salvation Army must be renewed in modern terms. In Paris a Roman Catholic order takes young workingmen and [78] I NEW TIiMES, NEW METHODS trains them in classes in debate and discussion, sends them finally into retreat for a few weeks' definite education, and then sends them back into their workshops as conversational mis- sionaries to their fellow workers. It is an attempt to reach not simply workingmen but the working class with a Catholic view of economic and social questions. An effective evangelism must develop special methods to reach the self-conscious working class. The only way the gospel can be effectively carried to the self-conscious working class is by carrying it into life. When it is lived in the economic sphere it will indeed be for them the power of God into salvation. This process must start w^ithin the Church. If the Church knows not the power of such a full salvation, how can it ever be the leaven to save the world? The Church is now largely a middle- class group whose ethics, ideals, and forms of thought differ from those of the working class, and do not comprehend clearly the property- [79] SOCIAL EVANGELISM less mind of Jesus. If the group of toil is to be reached with the gospel it is certain that the Church will have to get the ''mind that was in Jesus" regarding property. They who would carry to the workers the mind of Jesus must also carry it to the Church. There is some justification for the trend of recent evan- gelists, from Moody on, to turn their batteries upon the Church, for the evangel that would carry the power of the gospel to the world of modern life is needed as much within the Church as without it. It must be continuous, not spasmodic, educational as well as emo- tional. The evangelism that is conscious of its social goal must also be an evangel of deed. Its aim, as previously stated, is to secure life, not conformity, to reach certain unchristian parts of the common life, and this can only be done by action. The gospel of life is most effectively proclaimed in actual, living rela- tionships. He who brought men life touched [80] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS them with the hand of service as well as the word of the Spirit. While he talked to them, he went about doing good. When he fed the hungry and healed the sick it was a most effective definition of the gospel of love. The gospel goes not one inch further than the evangel of life carries it. It is still a leaven. Christianity has carried the evangel of the Prince of Peace only as far as the results of Peace Conferences in the actual modifications of w^arfare. This is the evangelism that con- vinces men far more than the fine frenzy of a propaganda. Hugh Price Hughes said that in securing the passage of the Factory Acts Lord Shaftesbury had done more for the king- dom of God than if he had preached many gospel sermons, and it would be hard to find a more potent form of social evangelism than the manner in which the non-conformist con- science of England has influenced its political life. All the social work of our city churches, all the activities as well as the life of our [81] SOCIAL EVANGELISM settlements, carry the gospel in living form that men may see and touch as when the Word was made flesh. There has been no more effective evangel- ism in the history of Christianity than that of early Methodism, and English historians have long been telling us that its greatest results are to be found in the group life of the English people. It organized a ministry of service to all the needs of the people to whom it preached. Its methods are embodied in the instructions given by John Wesley to one of the preachers whom he sent to this country. ''I turn you loose, George, on the American continent. Publish your message everywhere in the open face of the sun and do all the good you can.'' One of the defects of modern church life has been the failure to recognize the evan- gelistic power of deed. Even a purely per- sonal evangelism is ineffective unless it organ- izes an evangel of service as well as preaching. [82] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS The Salvation Army found that out long ago, likewise every other agency that tries to evangelize the unchurched groups. ''You can't convert a man while his feet are cold,'* said John Wesley, and the misery group, dumbly driven by hunger and fear, are imper- vious to the larger meanings of the gospel. The life of God will not touch them through empty phrases, but only as it comes through ministry to their need. The preaching of the gospel to the poor involves both constructive and preventive philanthropy. These are phases of the evangel, and unless this be recog- nized both evangelism and philanthropy fail. The only effective effort for the misery group is that which brings spiritual forces to bear in practical fashion for the mending of broken lives. The best way to rehabilitate submerged individuals or families is to put them into the fraternal fellowship of a church that is flam- ing with the passion to realize the love of God in service to men. [83] SOCIAL EVANGELISM Those groups which are not starving but are suffering from the inequalities of life, desirous of higher standards of living and touched with a sense of injustice, are not to be evangelized by exhortations to be content and to remember that life consists not in the abun- dance of things. They will not find the life of God in the platitudes with which men bolster up injustice, but they will see God when men make his righteousness to flow through the midst of the land as a great stream. A labor leader died cursing the Church for its inac- tivity, but his fellows found the Church com- mittee at the legislature supporting the child labor bill and said, "This is religion." The doors that are shut and barred to an evangel of the word swing ajar at the knock of an evangel of deed. The hand of service is an open sesame. If the Church really wants to reach the unchurched, it must cease to stand aloof and to pass down its charities and its missions. In vital contact, with the fraternal spirit, it [84] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS must minister to all their needs. The churches that develop a powerful ministry of com- munity service are the churches that have the evangelistic approach to the entire commu- nity, and even by the unworthy test of church statistics are the churches that succeed. The living evangel cannot be denied and will not be refused. It is the gospel with power and its appeal is irresistible. When the Word be- comes flesh, then men see God. But the evangel of deed has a deeper power than even its capacity to carry the gospel into the lives now closed to it. The fundamental purpose of the social evangel is to put God into the life of the community so that its every function shall be energized by him. This can only be done by action. The community must work out its salvation. In a moment, in some great mass movement, it may come into a sudden consciousness of the life that comes from above for organized groups even as for individuals, but the power and efficiency of [85] SOCIAL EVANGELISM this life has to be developed in all the slow details of living. Here is where the com- munity work to which the social service move- ment calls the Church has evangelistic value. It would organize the philanthropy, the health, the recreation, the industry of the com- munity according to the will of God. In all these spheres it would develop those just and righteous standards and those brotherly rela- tions which alone can express him. It is a task of infinite patience and difficulty, but step by step it is being accomplished. Increasingly does the community where the church organ- izes itself for this evangel of community serv- ice become aware that God is in its midst. Increasingly do individuals become aware of him and put their lives into harmony with him. So do the standards of his Kingdom replace the standards of the world, until some day it shall appear complete among us. So does the city of God grow in our midst. The evangelism that will put the gospel into [86] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS the vital forces of the social order must be an evangel that applies it to conditions as well as men, that deals with the environment as well as with persons. This is the ultimate demand which the social movement makes upon evangelism. It has carried it to groups of men now inaccessible, in an evangel of deed as well as of word. It now insists that the environment which surrounds men must be Christianized ; that it must contribute to the spiritual life instead of detracting from it. It is quite obvious that we cannot Christianize men thoroughly unless we Christianize the conditions that so largely influence men. We must seek to remove the conditions that wreck men as well as endeavor to reclaim them. Those who study the effects of heredity and environment upon the development of children, recognize the latter to be the domi- nant factor. ^'The environment counts for ninety per cent," said Jacob Riis, after long and intimate acquaintance with the children [87] SOCIAL EVANGELISM of the slums, and later added, ''make it ninety- nine." Thousands of children of poor hered- ity rescued from the slums and transferred to a favorable environment have become good and valuable citizens. The boy in the court, the bum on the street, are the product of bad social conditions. To change those conditions will not accomplish the whole purpose of the gospel in their lives, but it will prevent them from becoming bums and criminals. To direct evangelism toward the product, without focusing it upon the cause, is a policy that is both futile and foolish. The preventive social work of our cities needs to be hitched up with our church program. City missions and pre- ventive social work belong together. They need to unite in a common effort the far-reach- ing program of the one and the evangelistic consciousness and passion of the other. To recognize the powerful pressure of environment upon persons and to insist that evangelism must deal with conditions is to [88] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS increase, and not to lessen, the personal em- phasis. As life becomes more complex the environment increases its pressure upon the individual in direct ratio, but man's control of the environment increases in the same pro- portion. Men are more and more dependent upon their environment, but it is now a social and not a natural environment, a man-made thing and not the inevitable decree of the uni- verse. The primitive man in his ignorance and fear was a slave to his natural environ- ment. He has conquered nature and made a social environment of his own, and if that has brought a new slavery it is his own fault. To recognize the pressure of environment in the forming of life is but to fling a challenge to man's spiritual nature, to arouse the commu- nity to master the environment until all its members shall become the free sons of God. It means the enlargement of personality, the permanent transcendence of the universe by the soul of man kindled by the soul of God, [89] SOCIAL EVANGELISM the turning of matter into spirit, the putting of all things under the feet of man, compelling the physical aspects of life to contribute to its spiritual development. This is the final tri- umph of the gospel — to make the new earth, which shall be the city of God come down out of heaven to be with men. The final distinction of the method of social evangelism is that it develops no hierarchy, creates no priesthood. It is a lay movement. It puts all to work in the task of transforming life. Its goal cannot be reached except by the cooperation of all. It knows no special priv- ilege in spiritual task or spiritual culture. It calls the men of action, the workers of the earth, to stand within the holy of holies and serve the most high God. It finds their place of ministry at the bench or desk. It puts the touch of the divine upon common folk at com- mon tasks, makes them coworkers with God in the redemption of life, and so illumines the daily duty with the glory of the eternal. [90] NEW TIMES, NEW METHODS The evangel that is to be wrought into deed in the transforming of life must find its apos- tles and martyrs in all the vocations of the w^orkaday world. The seers and the prophets may proclaim the vision and shout the trumpet call, but the new world is to be realized by the men of science and industry who will be its discoverers, explorers and pioneers. God must come again and again as a servant, must ever stand in the workshops of the world. The social evangel recognizes no special privilege of service or suffering. It sounds the call to heroism to all the sons of men. The men of toil and trade are not to be denied the heritage of the prophets. The Christ who went from the carpenter s bench to Calvary^ by way of the money-changers^ tables and the judgment hall, has yet to take both the men who stand in the place of toil and the men who sit in the seats of power with him to the cross-crowned hill. The world waits for its redemption against that day, [91] THE NATURE AND CONTENT OF THE MESSAGE WITH what message is evangelism to reach the group life? What truths shall it emphasize in order to develop its social effectiveness? As with the tongue of fire it kindles the deed of service and the task of renewal, what shall be the content of its preaching? The social aspects of the evangel must not be separated from its individual appeal. Since life is one — neither individual nor social but both, — since the gospel is one, — neither individual nor social but both, — the whole of that gospel must be continuously applied to the whole of life. Line upon line, precept upon precept, the social application [93] SOCIAL EVANGELISM of the gospel to our social life must be made along with its application to the personal life. Its demands for the regenerate life in the social order must be coincident with its demand for the regenerate life in the individ- ual. We need a preaching which w^ill cause the socially-minded outside the Church to see the necessity of individual religion, and will make the individualists within the Church to see the imperative for social religion. Times there will be when special sermons or series of sermons on the message of the gospel concern- ing concrete social issues will be opportune, but for the most part the most effective social preaching is indirect, the natural and continu- ous unfolding of the whole gospel. With mighty shoutings or the thunder of artillery the walls of some city of evil may now and again be brought crashing to the ground, but day by day the still small voice must reveal God and without sound of ax or hammer the walls of the holy city be upraised in the midst [94] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE of life. For both these endeavors, to sustain both the continuous preaching and the spe- cial appeal, the preacher must have a vivid sense of the particular needs of the group life and a clear conception of the fundamental, principles of the gospel which are to be worked out in collective action. The message of the evangel for the collec- tive life, as for the individual, must convince men of sin and righteousness and judgment. The call to repentance opens the gospel of the Kingdom and the first social task of evangel- ism is to show men their social sins that they may turn from them, to arouse and develop the social conscience. To men steeped in indi- vidualism, to a people hardened by genera- tions of tolerance of the idolatry of commer- cialism, must be brought home the exceeding sinfulness of unsocial conduct. One of the significant signs of our times is the stirring of the consciousness of social sin. This nation is being profoundly moved by the exposure of [95] SOCIAL EVANGELISM social unrighteousness. We have come to see the social sins of individuals, to realize that men may be good husbands and fathers and church-members and yet bad citizens and employers. But this is not enough. Far deeper than the sense of sin aroused by these particular local v^rongs is the feeling of the great injustice of modern society v^hich presses hard upon the finer spirits of our times. The waste of life in our industrial civiliza- tion, the inequalities of life, the hardships and deprivations of large sections of the popula- tion, the stunting of their lives, the attrition of their spirits — these facts cry aloud that v^hether it be in the social organization, or in the spirit of our life, or in both, something is fundamentally w^rong. We are all involved in it. Its taint is on the house that we live in, the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear. It is a fact, and not a theory, that we are all accomplices in the injustice of our civilization. There is no way out except by common action. [96] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE The individual protest is but the voice in the wilderness. To be effective it must reach the community and move the community. And the community will not be moved, the com- mon action will not be taken until together the people feel these social injustices, until there is a general conviction of social sin, until together we cry, ^^God be merciful to us — sinners." Social repentance must be no vague senti- ment that will permit the individual to escape responsibility. Men who are conscious of rectitude in their personal life must be made to feel their sinfulness because of the vast cor- porate wrongs of our time. As Rauschenbusch puts it: "As long as a man sees in our present society only a few inevitable abuses and recog- nizes no sin and evil deep-seated in the very constitution of the present order, he is still in a state of moral blindness and without con- viction of sin." As long as such things as war and poverty exist in our midst, every Individ- [97] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ual needs a profound sense of the fundamental unrighteousness of the system that produces or suffers them, and they will not be removed until this conviction of sin rests heavily upon the majority. One evidence of the failure of current evangelism to drive home a sense of our social sins is that so-called good people dis- miss these corporate wrongs as beyond their help or responsibility. The question of our indirect participation must be pressed on the conscience. A sense of the social sins in which we all share will lead back to personal respon- sibility. Do we profit by them? Could we lessen them? The men who drive home the conviction of social sin are the men who will drive home the truth, "Thou art the man," not by isolating some prominent persons, but by making universal a sense of individual respon- sibility. Only so will men be driven to God and to the heroic action required by true repentance. Without bitterness the work must be done. Again the cry must be heard, [98] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." It is a question whether the quickened con- science that perceives our social sins does not exist in greater force outside the Church than within its walls. Aside from a few leaders, the church group is still living in the indi- vidualistic moral code of an earlier age, a code of great force that will never be outworn and for whose strengthening society owes much to the Church, but a code which is inadequate for our complex modern life. A new social morality is touching the hearts of men. Will the Church recognize it or will it take refuge in forms and customs, remaining content with its past achievement? Those who condemn the vices of the publican and harlot and take easy comfort in the virtues of the Pharisee will find them a cheerless refuge in the face of the scientific revelation of the causes of modern vice. Too often the social sins and the social neglect of the church people are directly [99] SOCIAL EVANGELISM responsible for the vice they so virtuously condemn. Who profits from the conditions that foster vice and lower the moral resistance power of the bottom section of the popula- tion? When the whole relation of luxury to poverty, the amount of rent, interest, and profit that is drawn directly from vice and crime and indirectly from the environment which develops them is made clear, the word again is true that the sinners of the streets pass into the Kingdom before the scribes and the Pharisees. The church group enjoying the comfort and security produced at the cost of hardship and insecurity comes to judgment at the hands of man and God if its only prayer is one of thanksgiving that the vices of the streets have not touched its homes. Until it abandons the place of privilege and the attitude of self- righteousness and stands far off with needy folk joining with theirs its own cry for mercy, feeling its own responsibility of action and inaction for the great corporate wrongs that [lOO] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE press so heavily upon the lives of the weak and the poor, the Church cannot call a sinning world to God. By just as much as social workers and thinkers need to reckon with the sin of the individual, by just so much does the Church need to reckon with the pressure of social sin upon that individual. The evangel that would convince the world of sin must begin in a Church that will take the world by the hand and will together pray, "Forgive us our trespasses." The gospel of the Kingdom does not leave men enjoying the luxury of an emotional repentance, or the vision of a new-born faith, while wrongs go unrighted. The world life must be convinced of righteousness. It must bring forth the fruits of repentance. The idealism of the gospel is practical. It must be applied in local and general situations, in pro- grams for the community, in legislation for the state, in policies for the race. Here the evangel must point the way; it must indicate [lOl] SOCIAL EVANGELISM what are the real fruits of the repentant spirit. It must pronounce approval or condemnation of measures according to its vision of the righteousness of Jehovah. All declarations of the social function of the Church that do not marshal its forces for social action around the conviction of social sin and the desire for social righteousness arc futile. To arouse the hosts of the Church with the battle-cry of its social mission and to give them no program is but to march them into an impasse. To expound the social principles of the gospel and then to hold the Church back from social reform is to evade the real and difficult task of religion. It is not the business of the evan- gelist to marshal voters or to push the Church into the state, but it is his business to put reli- gion into the organized life of the community. And in these days of the growing uselessness and needlessness of party machinery, it is imperative to gather the forces of good-will in every community behind those measures [102] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE which in any degree realize the righteousness of God, so that step by step his Kingdom may come. Only so can it come, as it lives in men and is lived by men. But imperative as it is to support construc- tive measures which will organize the com- munity around the will of God, it is still more imperative to educate the community in those fundamental principles by which the people themselves may form the necessary measures that will represent the gospel in social action. The world must be convinced of standards of righteousness, not simply of measures. A social morality is being developed around the teachings of Jesus. It is creating a new code of personal ethics and inspiring the construe- tive social measures of the time. These are forming around the desire for social justice. The preaching of a God of righteousness has produced in society certain standards of jus- tice between individuals. It must now de- velop certain standards of justice between [103] SOCIAL EVANGELISM groups, to express the righteousness of the Kingdom. The beginnings of social justice are worked out crudely In the Hebrew national life, and the modern pulpit must finish that task. But before it can rally the people around the measures that embody and make concrete the ideal of social justice, it must inspire the people with a passion for that ideal. It must convince the world of the righteousness of a God who requires men to act justly in their group relationships. Social justice meant for the Hebrews the brave attempt so to organize life that no chil- dren should be born into poverty, in order that no inferior group might develop and become subject to the group of strength. This same goal must be raised before the eyes of the modern world, in order that it may adopt the measures which will realize it. There is a disinherited group developing even in this land of opportunity and democracy. Poverty, disease, and vice, which afflict the whole race, [104] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE take a bigger toll from the underpaid, over- worked group at the bottom of the industrial world than from any other section of the population. Deprived of the means of de- velopment, the children of this group are less able than others to fight against these foes. Succeeding generations become less efficient, more ignorant, and more delinquent until a degenerate group results. With the proclama- tion of the needs and rights of this group must the preacher of the brotherhood of Jesus shatter the complacent prosperity of the middle class and make concrete the ideal of social justice. "Shall the pulpit take sides?" is not a mere question of passing judgment between two organized groups in an indus- trial conflict. It is a question of where stands the preacher concerning the inarticulate struggle of the great poverty-stricken mass, the ten million folks in our land who have not adequate food, clothes, and shelter, who have no equal chance with the group of even moder- [105] SOCIAL EVANGELISM ate income to secure health, education, and moral development for their children. Dare the preacher of the evangel hesitate? The prophets proclaim God as the God of the poor. A part of the opening proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom is, ^'To the poor the gospel is preached." The gospel of Jesus is a great "whosoever w^ill," not merely for everlasting life in the world to come but for a more abundant life, even a hundredfold more, in this present world. The brotherhood that Jesus taught as the human expression of the love of God demands the removal of those artificial inequalities in our civilization that have been crystallized out of the natural differences of men by the laws of property that concentrate education and power in the hands of a few, and leave weakness, ignorance, and inefficiency as the lot of the many. Before the measures to accom- plish this ideal can be realized the people must be given the vision of a God who demands not [io6] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE mere temple worship but that justice shall roll down as waters in the midst of the land, whose Kingdom is to be found only as men seek its "righteousness." The pulpit will not need to , spend its time pleading for the support of measures of social justice if it can inspire the principle of social justice as the great domi- nant rule of life. For, when the people desire the Kingdom and its righteousness above all else, they will instinctively seek for and rally around the measures that embody it. To rouse the passion for social justice until it shall be the great emotion that shall move and control the collective will is the imperative duty of the modern evangelist. To convince the world of judgment is also the message of the modern evangel. The preaching of the law was the work of many a great evangelist. They reached the con- sciences of men by proclaiming the offended majesty of God, the terrors of his broken law. Now the Kingdom has its law as well as its [107] SOCIAL evangf:lism gospel, aiul it is the business oi social evan- gclisni to proclaim them both. The laws of the moral life arc not mere fiats on parch- ment or stone; they are written nn the heart of men, eni^raveil deep in human experience. So the law of the Kini^dom is inwroui^ht with the very constitution of human society. It is exact with the precision of scientific facts. The Kini^dom is ori;anizeil arounii tlie law of love, and the scientist confirms it, declaring that the social organism develops only as fast as the altruistic instincts tiominate the egoistic, — that self-preservation demands self-sacrifice. The consequences of the violation of this law must be proclaimed. This business of social evangelism is not a mealy-mouthed cant about love. There are stern facts Iiere, terrible as fate, resistless as doom. The continuance of modern social sins means absolutely and inevitably the destruction of modern civiliza- tion. When the heart of society has been eaten out with greed and selfishness, and its body [.08] NATIRE OF THE MESSAGE (IcstroNc^i wall sensualism aiui lust, legal aiui illcLi;al, then It will know that ''the soul that sinncth it shall die,'' social as well as individ- ual. The pulpit must call all of science to its aid ifi drivini^ home the truth that we have no i^uaranty for the permanence of our Western civilization; indeed, that its future depends entirelv upon the elimination of certain evils. Tnless we can establish what no other civil- ization has yet established, ri<;ht relationships of sex and just relationships in property, w^e shall add but another to the decadent races. Unless the principle of sex purity be estab- lished in the individual life and in the social code, the work of our hands comes to naught. Unless the principle of economic righteous- ness can be established so that none will take more than they create and each will get all that he produces, men's hands will be contin- uallv raised against each otlier, and there will be unending warfare. Unless we can put God [109] SOCIAL EVANGELISM into these formative relationships in life, reli- gion is not established. When this is done, it becomes the partnership of men with God, not for the gain and benefit of a select few, but for the good of all. Nothing less than this is the realization of life, and unless religion domi- nates the fundamental social relationships, it fails and life fails with it, — there is nothing left but outer darkness. The preacher who proclaims this standard will take his chance of being called a pessi- mist, but he will be of more value to his times than those who in the presence of the gross violations of the laws of the Kingdom by modern society raise no voice of protest or of warning. The voice that is "sent" must cry against the social vices that flaunt themselves openly before our temples and against the denial of the spirit of the gospel by so many of the practises and standards of modern society; it must demand that social and eco- nomic conditions shall be changed to conform [no] ' NATURE OF THE MESSAGE to the Golden Rule and the second great com- mandment of neighbor love; insist that the so- called natural laws which are supposed in the text-books to govern the production and dis- tribution of wealth shall be consciously con- trolled by the will of man working in coopera- tion with the will of God until they become the divine law of love and effective for human brotherhood. This is a function of social evangelism and it belongs in the business of the Church. We cannot live in the wrongs of society and think to get ourselves and a few of our neighbors to heaven by keeping the ten commandments, by mere ^'statutory honesty." We shall none of us get to any heaven that is worth while unless we bring it nearer to this earth and bring this human society a little nearer to it, by proclaiming and living by the great, positive, constructive law of the King- dom. The task of social evangelism is not ended when it has sounded the call to social repen- [III] SOCIAL EVANGELISM tance and proclaimed the laws of the King- dom and the consequences of their violation. Some men are driven from sin by the thunders of Sinai, but more are called by the gentle voice of the Son of Man, talking of the Father's house and love. Some men come to repentance by way of the terrors of the law, but more by way of the beauty of holiness. It is the call of the ideal that woos men to the life that is born from above. It is the business of social evangelism to proclaim the social ideal in all its charm and power so that men may not only see it but may rise up and follow it. When the voice of John the Baptist was stilled, no one sternly called the people to repentance, for Jesus was busy preaching the new life. Yet Christ called men from their sins with an authority that John did not possess, and even the publicans and the harlots followed him. This new life that Jesus preached was not for individuals alone, it was the life of the [112] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE Kingdom. In its human aspects, it was the historical development of the social ideal of Israel, which stands as the best piece of social construction attempted in ancient history. In the gospel of the Kingdom, which imparts a world horizon and an eternal content to the social ideal of Israel, Jesus gives the world a social ideal which is not a theory nor a dream. It has a historical basis, and embodies not only the hopes of humanity but capitalizes the experience of the race. It will achieve its goal because it has behind it not only the social achievement of the past, but also the uncon- querable impulse for perfection which is one of the strongest forces in the evolution of society, one aspect of the hunger of the race for God. The day when the social conscience stirs is the day of the ideal. The men who are crying the need of social reconstruction are all idealists. Whatever their social creed, they all stand for what ought to be against what is. And the ultimate statement of what ought to [113] SOCIAL EVANGELISM be is in the social ideal of the Kingdom which it is the supreme business of social evangelism to proclaim as an ideal to be realized in human society. In proclaiming the practicability of the kingdom of God, the social evangel makes its challenge to faith. The evangelists of an earlier day were no preachers of a negative repentance. They raised the cry, ^'Repent and believe." They voiced a positive demand and required the action of the will in the develop- ment of the new life. Even as the social note in evangelism deepens and widens the nature of repentance, so does it enlarge the content of faith. Men now know that the age of science is not the age of the decline of faith, that the ^^assurance of things hoped for, a convic- tion of things not seen'' now bulks larger in the lives of men than in the days of their ignorance of the nature of the universe. As science now directs man to the largest task of his career, as it summons him to use the [iH] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE powers which it puts into his hands for the conscious control of human progress, it raises the demand for a still larger faith. Without it this great task cannot be accomplished. The religion that was satisfied with the sav- ing of souls, that considered its task finished when it was but begun, inevitably developed a paralysis of faith. Without exercise faith became atrophied. The fatal unbelief is that which sits in church and doubts the power of God, which limits his purpose and so will not cooperate in the redemption of the world. Whether it does not believe in foreign mis- sions or in social salvation, it is alike the great- est menace to the Church. ^^Indifference in the Church'' was the answer of several hundred ministers to a question concerning the greatest obstacle to their success. The root of that indifference is a lack of faith in the program of God. The men who do not believe that industry and government can be organized according to the Golden Rule will not work [115] SOCIAL EVANGELISM for that end. 1 he men who subdued king- doms did it through faith. Such men do the things that other men say cannot be done. When God can get enough such men, tliey will make a world w^hich men now say cannot exist. The church filled with comfortable, satisfied folk that believe in conducting busi- ness and government as their fathers did, will never save its community. The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of Jesus only when men believe in that possibility enough to die for it. Not until men will die for the ideal of brotherhood as they now die for the national ideal will war cease, l^he pulpit of to-day must flash before the dull eyes of men, to kindle their weak faith, the vision of life redeemed to the uttermost, must make men see the deathless picture of the city of God coming dow^n out of heaven to be with men. Then will come the faith that ^4aughs at impossibilities and cries 'It shall be done.' " [ii6] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE There are three steps in the development of the faith that will transform the kingdoms of this world by the spirit of Jesus. The evangelism of the Evangelical Revival de- veloped a faith that, in the face of the great immorality of English society and the deadly formalism of English religion, dared believe in the complete transformation of the individ- ual life. The evangelism of the Missionary Movement, in the face of the narrow provin- cial pride, the entrenched prejudices, and the armed jealousies and ambitions of modern nationalism, dared believe in the redemption of all mankind, asserted the spiritual equality and the resultant temporal rights of the so- called inferior races. The evangelism of the Social Awakening, in the face of all the bru- talities and sordidness of our Christian civil- ization, develops a faith that here in this world of time and place, in the very muck and mire of life, with no other material than these weak human lives, the city of God can be built. [117] SOCIAL EVANGKLISM It IS then with an ideal, ami not a .s\.stcin ot life, that the modern evangel thallent^cs the faith and the will of the race. The task of the preacher of the gospel of Jesus is not only to proclaim this great ideal of life hut to get it realizeil. lie is not alone to announce the coming of the new life hut to secure its lie- velopment. I'herefore he nui^t point out the fundamental principles on which re^t the social ideal of jouv He nui^^t insist that the economic anii political organization of life must be based upon these principles, that they must control the whole of life, the nursery, the school, the workshop, the legislative hall, as well as the sanctuary. These principles touch the two root relationships from which the social order develops, from which spring all the other contacts of men that comprise it. One of these is the relationship of man to man in all the fellowships of life, the other is their joint relationship to things, to the external universe, to the phvsical resources upon which NATURE OF THE MESSAGE life dcpciuls lor its maintenance and develop- ment. Around these two relationships arc organized the family, the state, and industry, and Jesus declared tiie ultimate principle by which each of them must be governed. Concerning the relationship of men with each other, he taught that they must be brothers bound by the bond of mutual service. I'Wcn as the Son of man was the sulfering serv- ant, so those who wouM follow him were to take his cross anil to be the servants of each other. He found a world which had organ- ized itself around the [Principle of selfishness, which declared that the right of the strong to rule and to use the weak for their advantage was the central principle of the state. He challenged this and proclaimed another kind of world. He told his disciples not to be as the (jentiles, with their lords and rulers, but to organize a brotherliood of service, and around this principle is to be developed liis world-wide kingdom of brotherlKJod, justice, [■•9] SOCIAL EVANGELISM and peace in place of the kingdom of selfish- ness, oppression, and strife. The principle of the right of the strong to rule for their advantage has continually divided men. It has ever given the world two conflicting groups at the extremes of society — tyrants and slaves, aristocracy and serfs, plutocracy and exploited wage-earners. It has developed the great military empires of the past and inspires our capitalistic indus- trialism. Most of the world can see that mil- itarism is outworn, that the right of the strong to inherit the earth and to take their will of their weaker neighbors is no right at all, but the very essence of wrong, yet the world does not yet clearly see that industrialism is the embodiment of the same principle, and that the destruction of militarism, the loosening of its grip from government will not bring world brotherhood and peace. As long as the work life of the race is left organized around the principle of aggression — the right of the [120] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE strong individual, the strong nation, the strong race to take and to keep what it is strong enough to get and to hold — the world will still be involved in hatred and strife. In place of the right of the strong to rule, Jesus insists upon the duty of the strong to serve. In place of using their strength to secure special privilege, he demands that they use it to secure equality of opportunity for the weak, to get a place in the sun for all. This is the challenge of the Carpenter to the battle spirit of man. He would harness it to the arduous tasks of brotherhood. His empire is the reign of love, the triumph of the spirit of cooperation, the enthronement of the will to serve. When men insist that this is the dream of an impossible millennium, they must be reminded that the foundations of the city of God are already laid in our midst, that aris- tocracy is gone in government and priestcraft banished in religion, because free grace and democracy together have been preached. [121] SOCIAL KVANGELISM When the nations ha\c l)ccii iiuloctrinatcil with the teachings of Jesus as they liave been with the rights of the strong, then the brother- hood of service will come. It is the only organization of life tiiat can endure. Only as men are nio\ed by the spirit of brotherhood will they seek together in mutual service to establish justice, and w ithout justice there can be no peace on earth. The strugu;le for pri\ilege and power, for the right of the strong to rule, rends life asunder. 'Idle effort of service binds it to- gether. The organized life of any species develops only as natural individual selfishness is overcome by the need for cooperative action. One of the sins of those beings who ha\e eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is that, having subordinated the prin- ciple of selfishness in the development of the social life, it comes again to dominance in the struggle of separate groups to control life for their own selfish ends. That great student of [.22] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE insect life M. Fabre says, "i know of no instance, not one, excepting man, of parasites who consume the provisions hoarded by a worker of the same species.'' Man is the only animal that uses his strength to live off his own kind. This is the law of death, and Jesus would replace it with the law of life. The development of his principle of brotherhood means the abolition of all ruling classes. Be- fore it must go not only pride of caste, the sel- fishness of special privilege and vested inter- est, but also pride and superiority of nation and of race. This principle of brotherhood which must be proclaimed by evangelism not as a sentiment but as the controlling principle of social organization, will lead us into race solidarity. When it dominates the hearts of men, it will establish the whole world in jus- tice and righteousness and therefore in peace. There is also a fundamental teaching of Jesus concerning the relation of man to things. It has been strangely deleted into trivialities [123] SOCIAL EVANGELISM of tithing, but how central it is in his religion may be seen when he puts the prayer for bread in the same breath with the prayer for healing from sin. Mammon is Antichrist with him; the arch enemy of God — ^'ye cannot serve them both." To seek things is to destroy the soul. So hard it is for the rich to enter the fel- lowship of the Kingdom, because the desire for goods, or the possession of them, tends to enthrall the spirit and to separate it from those fellowships with man and God in which the Kingdom consists. Almost does the Car- penter pronounce against property in his stern warnings against the danger of its grip upon the soul. To him all the wealth of the world is as nothing compared with the soul of one child. The heart of his teaching concerning it is that things are a means to life and not its end. The supremacy of man over goods, of the soul over the world, was his teaching, and no age ever needed more to hear this message than ours, in the midst of its prosperity. To [124] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE the times when property has more protection by the state than humanity, when men are enslaved by the very power of the wealth they have created, when men are held in bondage by the very machines they have made and which ought to set them free from economic fear and want, when human life is sacrificed upon the altars of commerce and industry, with a wanton cruelty unsurpassed by heathen rites of blood, there must be brought the mes- sage that men are of more importance to society than wealth, that the soul is more than the world. It is because men have made property an end instead of a means that they fight for its possession. The worship of Mammon, like that of all false gods, is the dance of death. To rescue life from the destruction which threatens it from the building of the house of our civilization upon the shifting sands of material values is an imperative task for modern evangelism. The last conflict of the [125] SOCIAL EVANGELISM soul is to secure its freedom from the external universe, to shake ofif the dominion of things. This must be fought out in every life, and in our civilization. And the Carpenter who won the fight himself holds the secret and the power of victory. He teaches men that the goods of life were not meant to make a prison-house for the wast- ing away of the souls of men, but were meant to fashion the house of the spirit in which man and God might dwell together. He taught that they were to be used as a means to the spiritual development of life, and when men approach them from this point of view, bound together by his other great principle of brotherhood and service, then shall they find the measures which w^ill so establish the com- mon control and common use of them that the Kingdom of good shall come. The evangel that is to herald this Kingdom must teach a spiritual view of property, its nature, its control, its use. It must make [126] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE men see that property is stored-up energy, that into it have gone the lives of men, their labors and their ideals; that before men developed it, God's life was put into the natural resources out of w^hich the labor of man makes it; that therefore this concentrated energy, divine and human, may not be controlled and appro- priated for selfish individual or group ends; that if it be slavery to attempt to control the lives of men for personal ends, it is blasphemy and sacrilege to attempt so to control the life of God. To such a vision of the flaming presence of the divine in the physical resources of life must the pulpit call men, that feeling their sanctity they may sacredly use them together in the development of the common life. It must call men to free their own souls from Mammon and then to help set others free. It must demand that men organize the work process of life around these two great prin- ciples of Jesus, that in brotherhood and service [127] SOCIAL EVANGELISM together they make the things of life the means to its highest development, that so they may realize in their midst the life of God which the prophets declared to be justice, righteous- ness, and mercy and which Jesus declared to be love. With such a message evangelism reveals to the world a bigger and a closer God working with men at the great task of making a godlike humanity. It aims at a greater goal than the evangelism that simply brings men in touch with God and leaves them in an arti- ficial relationship with him apart from the world. It abandons no part of life, but claims it all as the territory of the soul. Thus also it gets a stronger grip on men, calling them to a task that demands their deathless powers. It finds expression, not only through voice and pen, but also in the vital ministry of deed, in the actual contact of human relations. In the face of the social sins of the times to thunder the call to social repentance; to make [128] NATURE OF THE MESSAGE vivid the outer darkness that waits upon the civilization that fails to realize the ^^righteous- ness of the Kingdom'' ; to challenge the faith of men to the building of the city of God upon this earth; to show men how in all high serv- ice together they may use the things of earth for that house of the spirit — this is to herald the social evangel; this is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus for the redemption of the world. [129] VI WHAT ABOUT THE RESULTS? WHAT results may be expected from an evangelism which proclaims the word of life for the social order? Where shall the eflfect of such preaching be seen? Social evangelism insists that this question is secondary. It demands that the Church shall concern itself first with the truth of its mes- sage, shall make its program, not with an eye upon possible results, but seeing only the necessity of getting its message to the people and into life. To bear the Word is the supreme commission. To sow the seed is the primary task; to see the harvest is not essen- tial. One reason for the decadence of evangel- ism has been its over-emphasis upon results. Religion has become commercialized until it [131] SOCIAL EVANGELISM is content with small profits if only it can get quick returns, until it reckons the cost per head of its converts, until it compares cam- paigns as to the number obtained the most quickly and the least expensively. By such a test the ministry of Jesus in his lifetime would be counted a monumental failure. His suc- cesses will not be ours until we are as careless of results as he was. His method was to fling out the word and the deed into life and let the leaven work. He put pressure on no man, invaded no man's sanctuary. He was content always to sow the good seed, knowing that in God's own time the sheaves would come. Those who would do the work of the King- dom must be as finely careless of results as was Jesus, must be willing to find them in his way. No followers? The cross to carry? Life lost? Yet the Kingdom draws nearer, the day of men that are brothers and a world that is God's becomes possible and he that loses his life saves it and saves the world with it. [132] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? In this matter of results it is enough for the Church to-day to be as her Master. Among the immigrant and labor groups, the evangel- ism that is looking first for adherents that it can count is at once put under suspicion. It fails to reveal the Christ because it w^ants something for itself. In this respect the settle- ment has the advantage. The Church seeks members. The settlement serves God for naught, it will save life by the infusion of life, and if need be by the loss of life. Too often the reason that the Church cannot save its own life is that it will not lose it. Sometimes with sad fatuity it puts the barrier of itself between it and the very people it would reach, and sometimes, alas, between men and the King- dom. It is time to manifest supreme faith in the truth that God's Word cannot return unto him void. The chief concern of the Church must be to discover what is the word of God for to-day; for that word will still be spirit and life, and being dynamic it will clothe itself [133] SOCIAL EVANGELISM with form and institutions. To put that word at work to-day, even though the result appears not until the long to-morrow, is the first duty of the preacher. The evangelism that carries the whole word of the Master and follows his method will not stop to consider results to the Church. Its results cannot be measured in terms of church gains. The value of the social ministries of the Church can never be determined by what they do or fail to do in bringing more people into the Church. This is no fair standard to apply to them. Their purpose is social, and while they will open points of contact for indi- vidual, personal ministry, their main results will be social, — to be seen and felt but not to be counted. A city missionary society put a man at work among the Jews and then wanted to dismiss him at the end of the year because he had not built up a self-supporting church. What results would be secured in China by such a policy? It would dismiss even Jesus [134] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? as an incompetent blunderer, an unprofitable servant. The Church must demand and secure efficiency in its efforts, but efficiency is re- vealed inadequately and sometimes not at all by the figures that show gains in converts and income. The love of statistics possesses the modern churches as an evil spirit and unless it be exorcised it will presently carry them far from the path of Jesus and run them headlong into the oblivion in which the world of to- morrow will bury those religious organiza- tions that can find no bigger goal than the development of their own ecclesiastical life. The Church will find neither the true mes- sage nor the true method in evangelism until it fashions both with a complete independence of results to itself. The avidity of a certain type of rescue mission to count its converts produces what the underworld knows as "mis- sion stiffs" who are quite willing to furnish the supply for this demand in order to get the perquisites in food and shelter that go with it. [135] SOCIAL EVANGELISM The institutional work that is developed merely as a free lunch counter to swell the numbers of the Church, pauperizes both the social and the religious life of the people. If the Church approaches the conflict of labor and capital with an eye upon the crowd on one side or the money on the other, it presently earns and deserves the contempt of both sides. Not only will the Church fall in saving others, it will in the end even lose its own soul unless it is delivered from an undue desire to see and count the results of its labors. The preaching of the social gospel to the immigrant and labor groups has actually in many places put the power of the whole gospel into the lives of many individuals and brought them into connection with the Church, but to attempt it for the latter end alone is to fail miserably of the larger result. Men tell us the labor crowd will fill the churches if social and industrial justice is preached, but it never will be preached if the attempt be made with [136] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? the sole motive of securing such results. The justice of God will be preached only when the preacher cares not w^hether any respond. One of the perils of the pulpit is the love of the crowd, the tendency to count success in the size of the congregation. It causes the ex- penditure of vast amounts of energy in the effort to get people to come to church with no proportionate labor on the uses to be made of their coming. The great evangelists all went to men ; they did not try to get men to come to them. They did not exhaust themselves on the mechanics of a service but in the dynamics of the result. Seeking his results in the mov- ing of men to live by the principles of Christ and the power of Christ in all the functions of life, the modern evangelist will go wherever men are gathered in these functions — in the labor hall and the political meeting, not to get men in touch with the Church, but to speak the word of life; in the banquet hall and the club, not as the court chaplain, still less as the [^37] SOCIAL EVANGELISM court jester, but as the prophet of the living God. When the word of Jehovah is a fire in the bones of men, it w^ill get out, it will not wait for the crowd to gather, it will care little whether the crowd is there or not. The voice that cries in the wilderness, sounding far out across the desert wastes, reaches back to the crowd behind it that has come from the city, reaches back beyond them into the city itself and touches and molds all the throbbing life of men. Evangelism must move the mass to-day, for Christianity is to be put into the group life, but the gathering of the crowd can never be counted as any result at all; it is simply an opportunity. The evangelism that has the independence of Jesus for the crowd will de- velop the results that followed his preaching. The crowd followed Jesus, and he sought God in the lonely places. The crowd deserted him, and he set his face toward Jerusalem and death. The disciples fled, and he walked [138] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? lonely to the judgment seat, in his last agony finding only a thief for comradeship. Thus he lifted the world up to himself and to the Father. Those who preach the social message of Jesus, together with those who are working it out in action, may, however, properly attempt and expect certain practical results in the amelioration of the community life. The preaching that produces a conviction of social sin will succeed in eliminating some of the unchristian features in the community life. Organized vice, bad housing, grossly unjust conditions of industry, ought to be immedi- ately removed. The preacher who does not attack these evils, who does not insist upon the removal of the stumbling-blocks from the paths of weak children, upon making secure the bread and the rest of the worker, will be no workman approved of the God who careth for the poor. The proclamation of the social evangel and the personal influence of the [139] SOCIAL EVANGELISM preacher does develop some constructive re- sults in welfare work in the community and in industry; and sometimes directly produces such improvements as better wages and profit- sharing, and helps in securing wide-spread permanent results of this sort through legisla- tion. Also such preaching diminishes the antagonism between classes, and at times sug- gests and promotes measures of cooperation that lessen and help to stop the war and waste of industry. While such results may be sought and found, yet even of these the evangel must be completely independent. It must shape its effort for the larger goal which the social imperative of the gospel demands. It promotes and accepts reforms only as steps to this goal, while its aim is the complete trans- formation of the social order until it shall embody the very life of God. If the pulpit becomes engrossed in immedi- ate results, in the securing of practical meas- ures, its vision of the ultimate goal will lose [140] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? sharpness, will tend to fade into the mists of the impossible future. It may even permit men to be satisfied with mere half measures, with reforms that are simply profitable to the group of property without calling their souls to the last hazard in the sacrifice that will es- tablish justice whether it pays or not. If the pulpit cares too much for the credit and the joy of the peacemaker in the industrial situa- tion, it may find itself in the easy path of com- promise, crying peace when there is no peace, adjusting differences without the fundamental readjustment of the causes of diflference. And if none of these things happens, yet to look ever for immediate results may lead into dis- couragement and despair when these visible, tangible results are not in evidence. Here, too, the preacher of the gospel of Jesus must be as his Lord, must possess with him some- thing of the patience of the Infinite. As one of our prophets has reminded us, he who works for social progress must learn to think [141] SOCIAL EVANGELISM with the geologist and with God — in eons, not centuries. Because a socialized evangelism is set to realize the most daring dream ever dreamed of men, its larger, truer results are indefinite and intangible and lie in the far-off future. It puts the leaven of new life into the social organism to work its fundamental transforma- tion. It is a process of growth, a sloughing off of old imperfect members, a development of new organs, and the processes of interact- ing death and renewal which constitute or- ganic growth are not easily perceived. The value of such work is hard to be under- stood by ecclesiastical organizations whose tendency is to demand immediate results in the increase of adherents, and to want to harvest the crop immediately after the sowing. These have small patience with the slow and silent evangel of the leaven of life, whose effective- ness can never be estimated by the standards of men possessed by the demon of statistics. [142] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? The results of a social evangelism are not easy to catalog. The development of spiritual forces, the Christianizing of the motor powers of the community are not things to be meas- ured by statistics. With what instrument is spiritual power to be gaged and with what figures will you express the growth of the life of the spirit? Sometimes the social leaven may be seen at work and its results perceived. The evi- dences that the community life yields to the evangel are now and again apparent, and changes in its structure may occasionally be noticed. There are laws upon the statute books of Illinois that represent different stand- ards of value and a changed temper of life, much more fundamental and far-reaching than these expressions of it, all because two women some twenty years ago put the leaven of their lives, in the Christ spirit, into a neglected community on the West side of Chi- cago. [143] SOCIAL EVANGELISM Yet the results of the social evangel in word and deed pass ever beyond the power of per- ception. The voice and the life that puts the gospel of the Kingdom into a community extends the ripples of its influence beyond vision, multiplies its power beyond the cal- culations of the mathematician, awakens forces that other generations will name and organize. When a preacher gets individual men in touch with God, he starts results in human life which cannot be cataloged in tables of church statistics, and when that same preacher gets a function of the community life in touch w^ith God he is doing something which may not be written into reports. He is not simply a community builder using its materials for highest ends, he is an imparter of new life, developing and guiding the forces which not only mold the form but change the very nature of the social organism. He lays hold of the creative will and puts it at work in the community life, and what it there does [144] WHAT ABOUT RESULTS? is presently felt in the whole social organism. The preacher and doer of the social evangel — it may be in some small village or neglected section of a great city — is in reality a world builder, A creative and redemptive fellow worker with God, he stands where time began^ touching the primeval force, and reaches out to where time ends in the ultimate accomplish- ment of life. Whatsoever he accomplishes makes for that eternal Kingdom which is to be the outcome of all our shadowed endeavors and twilight strivings, the justification of all our hopes and dreams. All that he does is not now to be known. Its full value can appear only when the work of men's hands is seen without the veil of time and sense. 1 145] 1 1012 01235 9313 Date Due ■-' 9. 1 ii til ; - i ' m 'i -^ 1 >,k . 1- I " •?' rsrotri' — -^^^^^^^M iH 9