h building.

Furthermore, it must be recognized that the standards of rural people
have changed as regards the church in the same way that they have
concerning the school. When all of the people have had a common school
education, many of them have had high school training, a few have been
to college, and many of them now and then visit the larger churches of
towns and cities, they are no longer satisfied with the occasional
preaching of an uneducated man, however religious and earnest he may be.
The Sunday school has become an established part of the work of the
church and as people have appreciated the value of education in secular
affairs, they have come to place more hope in the religious training of
their children than in merely saving them by sudden conversion. The
church is becoming more and more an institution for the training and
expression of religious life rather than only a place for preaching.
Moreover, the church now has to meet the competition of other
institutions and interests which did not exist in the earlier days. The
grange, the lodge, organizations of all sorts, moving pictures,
athletics and automobiles, furnish means of association and command the
interest and support of the people, where formerly there was only the
church for the righteous and the tavern or the saloon for the convivial.

All of these and other factors have conspired to weaken the relative
influence of the church in our rural communities and the situation has
become so serious in many sections that it has challenged the attention
of denominational leaders. During the past fifteen years there have
been a series of careful studies of the condition of the rural churches
in various parts of the country. These studies have given indisputable
evidence of the conditions responsible for the decline of the rural
church and of the measures which must be taken if the religious life of
the rural community is to be adequately fostered; and they have clearly
shown that the problems of the rural church must be solved from the
standpoint of meeting the religious needs of the rural community rather
than that of the interests of the individual church. In the older parts
of the country, and--alas--far too frequently in the newer sections, the
most serious obstacle to the religious life of the community is an
unnecessary number of churches, which divide its limited resources both
of funds and leadership. Overchurching is more largely responsible for