ted and narrowed till it does not
include half the territory nor half the people embraced in its
responsibility. Many ministers are content to tramp around in the narrow
confines of their own village, with an occasional excursion into the
country, while there are scores of families living a little more remote
for whom they are attempting nothing. Some ministers look upon their
churches as their field rather than their force--a field to be cultivated
rather than a force of workers to be led out into the widestretching
fields that lie beyond. This is a serious mistake. Such a limited
conception of the extent of its work and such an inadequate idea of its
real responsibility and of its best opportunity will certainly condemn a
church to comparative uselessness, and in the end to failure. When all the
village churches get the vision and see their work in its fulness, the
country problem will be solved.

Country evangelization belongs primarily and practically to the village
church. The village church is the only one that can really take it up and
deal with it in a successful way. It is in the power of the churches in
the villages and small towns to change the whole aspect of things in the
country, religiously, morally, and socially.

For some years the pastor and church of this story had been trying to do
something for the outlying regions, but they had not grasped the idea that
all the people for many miles around who were not cared for by some other
church were in their parish--that for them they were responsible and to
them they had a mission. They began to see that they were not doing half
the work they might do and ought to do; that there were scores of
families, and hundreds of people, to whom the church was nothing, who
should be made to feel its force in a stimulating and uplifting way. They
began to feel the pressure of that obligation that had rested on them all
along, and of which they had been unconscious or unheedful. The voice of
God began to sound plainly in their ears, "Go ye forth into these ripe
harvest-fields, and gather sheaves for the Master." The conviction became
so strong that they ought to take up the wider work, and the duty grew to
be so plain that they wondered that they had not seen it long before.

5. The conviction became strong that, if the village church would fulfil
its mission, it must be a community church. I used to think that the
church had simply to do with individuals; that its work