ral families look
upon a minister who calls frequently as a personal asset of great value.
He supplies opportunities not otherwise available for the discussion of
matters of general interest or of deep personal concern. He calls
attention to the things otherwise forgotten, and brings, or should bring
with him, the inestimable advantage of intimate contact with a wise and
well-trained mind. Moreover, a man full of good will to all going from
house to house, sympathetically trying to help and understand, will
inevitably modify the uncharitable and unjust public opinion which either
exists or is believed to exist in most rural communities.

Equally effective are the incidental contacts of a minister engaged in
community service, such as work with boys, or the promotion of welfare
enterprises. Thus engaged he will inevitably get in touch with his
parishioners, and supply the needs of individuals and of the community, at
least as fully as the minister who devotes most of his working hours to
pastoral calls. In such work less time is spent in the long drives or
walks between houses which are necessary in systematic calling, while the
minister gets to know the men better and bothers them less.

Without pastoral calling and community welfare work, the country
minister's service is sure to be ineffective. But as a matter of fact the
country ministers of Ohio for the most part do very little of either. The
country people as a rule, receive very few pastoral calls, according to
the almost universal testimony of the country ministers themselves as well
as that of other persons who live in the country. In Delaware County, for
example, a prosperous county in the center of the State, there is an area
of 82 square miles, with more than 2,100 people, in which only one
minister makes any pastoral calls, and he makes very few. Half the
townships of this county have no resident ministers.

Mr. Gill found one township in the north-central section of the State in
which the farmers' families probably had not been called on once in five
years. One woman had not received a call from a minister in twelve years.
When finally called upon she became a regular and happy church attendant,
though she had not been to church since her childhood. Another family was
found in the same region whose house no minister had entered for nineteen
years. In an Ohio River township, the members of a family testified that a
minister had not called on them for twenty