it is
decadent. In most places it is easily criticised for its meager successes
in this age of progress; but it is still essential in spite of its
defects.

No amount of unfavorable criticism can refute the fact that a
community-serving church is the most essential institution in country
life. Criticise it as we may for its inefficiency, it is to the country
church that we must look to save the country. Even though it may be
usually a struggling institution, inadequately equipped, poorly financed,
narrow in its conception of its mission, slow in responding to the
progressive spirit of the age, wasting its resources in fruitless
competitions, and often crude in its theology and ineffective in its
leadership,--nevertheless it is blessing millions of our people, and
remains still the one supreme institution for social and religious
betterment. It may be criticised, pitied, ridiculed. It has not yet been
displaced.

Because the rural church is absolutely essential to the rural community,
it must be maintained, whatever be the cost. Let _surplus_ local churches
die, as they ultimately will, by the law of the survival of the fittest.
The community-serving church must live. The man who refuses to sustain it
is a bad citizen. Dr. Anderson rightly claims "The community needs nothing
so much as a church, to interpret life; to diffuse a common standard of
morals; to plead for the common interest; to inculcate unselfishness,
neighborliness, cooperation; to uphold ideals and to stand for the
supremacy of the spirit. In the depleted town with shattered institutions
and broken hopes, in the perplexity of changing times, in the perils of
degeneracy, the church is the vital center which is to be saved at any
cost. In the readjustments of the times, the country church has suffered;
but if in its sacrifices it has learned to serve the community, it lives
and will live."[33]

To condense diagnosis and prescription into a single sentence: _The
country church has become decadent where it has ceased to serve its
community. It may find its largest life again in the broadest kind of
sacrificial service._

_Stages of Country Church Evolution_

In this rapidly growing country, particularly in the past century of
empire-building in the great West, four rather distinct stages of
development may be traced in the history of the country church. As the
railroads have pushed out into all sections for the development of our
natural resources, th