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Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5j: The Rummage Sale Ad

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.

“This paean of praise sweeps into a great crescendo, closing on a ‘seventh’ which is immediately followed by the dominant chord – the first syllable of ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,’ in which everybody unites. Then the minister and the congregation sit down.

“Mr. Blue understands that his projected service of worship has now arrived at a very critical moment. Shall the doors be thrown open now, while the tardy tramp to their seats? It does not appear so. At this moment, the choir, without prelude or pause, bursts into its ‘praise anthem’ – ‘bursts’ because that is the way it must go into it! There must be no fussing for the place in the book, no tinkling introduction of a dozen measures; the choir must plunge into its praise anthem. And surely we have been richly endowed with such musical blessings! This should be one of the great events of the service – this anthem of praise. When it is done, the choir is seated. The service of worship – strictly speaking – is ended. Now let the tardy in, while the organist plays some incidental music, probably an improvisation of the score of the next hymn to be sung immediately before the sermon.

“Here follows the Scripture Reading, and after it the solo. Unless the solo is good, it should be left out. Until we can have inspiring solos, let us have none. Let us not permit our children to compare our church music with that of the moving-picture show, to our discredit. Then, the prayer.

“Blue has now arrived at the ‘announcements.’ Mentally he reviews the customary performance. Belated messages, turned in after the bulletin had gone to press, are now to be read: ‘The Ladies of Group Five have a very fine eggbeater for sale at the small price of Fifty Cents.’

“Here the preacher smiles foolishly and comments thereon. It is assumed, he says, that whenever Group Five – goodole Group Five – goes on the market with an eggbeater, it is some eggbeater – a veritable world-beater of an eggbeater, etc. (For shame!) He continues reading:

“‘These eggbeaters may be had from any member of Group Five or by telephoning Mrs. O. D. Liverus [Douglas means for us to pronounce this, “O deliver us!”] at her residence – number 9191-x.’

“It is this sort of drool from the pulpit that makes the intelligent and devout want to crawl under the seat, just through abject humiliation! But what is a man to do – Blue asks himself – when Mrs. O. D. Liverus comes down to the study before the service and hands me this note, saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t do this, but oh, Mr. Blue, Mr. Blue!’ Mr. Blue resolves that he will stand pat, hereafter, on his decision. ‘Positively no announcements will be read from the pulpit!’

“And suppose Mrs. Liverus gets angry! Well, it’s time the saints were getting over their touchiness. Christianity shouldn’t make people so edgy as all that. And when it does, there is something the matter with it.

“This brings us up to the church ‘offering.’ And, because the time is all gone, it brings us also to the close of this story. The writer hereby invites the editor to urge him to a chapter on ‘Church Finances’ – which is a live matter, and needs discussion.

“Oh, we’ll make a preacher out of this Blue fellow yet! For one thing, he is getting over his timidity. He has found out that he has a very important work to do and must not be influenced too much by traditions and customs, especially when said traditions and customs are bad.

“It is a red-letter day in the preacher’s experience when, after somebody has said, ‘Oh, but – Mis-ter B-loooo – we just nev-ver do it that way!’ he is able to reply, smilingly but confidently, ‘Oh, yes we do – from now on!’ There is excellent psychology in that. Instantly the preacher becomes worth more to that particular parishioner. Oh – there may be a little sulking; but it all comes out right in the end.

“It is a high spot in the discouraged preacher’s life when, after the choir director has looked over the projected order of worship and has remarked, ‘We simply cannot do it!’ – the minister is able to reply, ‘Well, we’re going to, nevertheless!'”

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5h: The Call to Worship

by Ronald R Johnson

“To render this effectively will require a great deal of patient rehearsal by the quartet; but Blue knows that when these four men begin to realize the inspirational possibilities of this part of the service, they will gladly spend the time.

“You and I have a great deal to say about the wickedness of the stage, and doubtless there is even more that might be said on the same subject; but we should be ashamed when we remember that the stage is able to grip the public’s imagination because of the indefatigable zeal and patience with which the actors school themselves in their parts. Why, before a performance is actually presented, and during the last few days of rehearsal, these people toil for uninterrupted hours, pausing neither for meals nor sleep, that they may work together to produce the desired effect at certain psychological moments! And, sometimes, preachers go into the pulpit and try to read a hymn on the spur of the moment and bungle and fumble and haggle at it until the sensitive want to cry out in mingled pain and disgust. No less often, they do not know what the Scripture Lesson is to be until the opening hymn is being sung; and they get up and read it without any advance preparation whatsoever. More frequently, they haven’t the vaguest notion what the pastoral prayer is going to consider, or how it is going to consider it – a terra incognito, both as to form and content!

“Any preacher who in his practice of ophthalmology tries to remove the mote from the eye of the actor, while himself guilty of such blunders of indolence and indifference, had better desist until he is able to extract the two-by-four which interferes with his own vision. But that isn’t get on very fast with Blue’s new order of service, is it?”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5g: No Laughing Matter

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just described the kind of folksy praise hymn that a lot of churches were starting to adopt by 1920. He continues:]

“Well – this was the sort of ‘praise hymn’ with which Broad Street church had tuned itself up to worship for some weeks. It was a shame; and we do wrong to laugh. It is no laughing matter. When one considers the welfare of the honest stranger who may have gone into that place on such an occasion, almost frantically starving for something that would nourish his soul, and had sensed that surge of revulsion which sweeps over a sensitive spirit forced to witness glaring indecencies and blasphemies, one understands that this is too serious to be taken lightly.

“Blue is to have no more of this. His first hymn will be a hymn of praise, in fact as well as in name, and conditions are going to be created to make the congregation sing. Then comes silence – after the ‘amen’ with which the hymn closes – and Blue means to see to it that the ‘amen’ is sung with vigor and volume, remembering that most of the ‘amens’ sung in his church are rendered as if two-thirds the congregation and half the choir understood that there were to be no ‘amens’ that day. Either do it or quit it! What must be the thought of the keen-witted man who sees the church committing exactly the same blunders and running amuck in precisely the same places in the service, Sunday after Sunday? Perhaps he thinks the manager of the institution is too stupid to have noticed or too lazy to have mended.

“The new order of service for Broad Street church begins, properly, with that impressive silence following the first hymn – not a long pause, but one full of meaning. And then the minister is to say:

“‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.’

“Immediately following the reading of these words, a male quartet is to sing, unaccompanied and very softly, a beautiful setting of the sentence:

“‘Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.'”

[Douglas’s essay will be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5f: Old Friend Blue Again

by Ronald R Johnson

“Readers of these articles will have noticed that whenever the writer would ease his mind of something a bit too rough and radical to be fathered with the first personal pronoun singular, he solemnly imputes the burden to one hypothetical D. Preston Blue, who serves in the capacity of official goat, and sends him forth into the wilderness. How do you like that ‘wilderness’ idea? Well – that’s where the goat went, did he not? But, we’re getting derailed here. Lend a hand, won’t you, and let us jack this thing up on the track again.

“D. Preston Blue, on vacation, has been suffering of severe misgivings over his ‘order of service.’ He has resolved to plan a brief ritual with some inspirational possibilities. After much careful and prayerful study, he has made a service which proceeds somewhat as follows. It will be recalled that Blue proposes to have the opening hymn sung without other announcement than is to be found on the printed bulletin. There is a great deal to be said about the bulletin for which no time or space is provided here – how it ought to be made, what purposes it should serve, and the excellent service it may render as an advertising medium.

“This opening hymn is frankly announced on the bulletin as ‘The Hymn of Praise’ – and it must be exactly as advertised. Blue reflects upon the time when a peripatetic tent-preacher had taken all Centerville by the ears, and a great (as to numbers) chorus nightly sang at the top of its lungs such doggerel as distinguished the singing evangelist’s own hymnbook (which was to be had at the opening of the meeting and during several impressive intervals thereafter, for the absurdly low price of forty cents) – that he, Blue, had temporarily adopted the book in his own services, at the request of a warmed-over brother who, in the tent, had found again something he declared he had lost (and never missed). So – for several weeks Broad Street began its worship on Sundays by singing ‘Brighten the Corner Where You Are’ or ‘You in Your Corner and I in Mine’ and several other ‘corner’ hymns which appear to have been produced, as to libretto, by Mr. Uriah Heep in collaboration with Pollyanna; the music brought forth by somebody who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to compose the score for a jazz opera, and had marketed his rejected offspring for the purpose indicated above. (If any blame attaches to these remarks, see Blue.)”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5e: Off-Hand Prayers

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just claimed that “non-conformist” churches have gotten too far away from beauty in their worship services, and he acknowledges that any attempt at making worship beautiful again might lead to the accusation of being “mystical.” He continues:]

“Yet this problem must be solved somehow. ‘Evolutionary momentum’ has been at work again. The service became so ornate that it met disaster and made an open bid for gross paganism four hundred years ago. Now it has become so denuded of its beauty that its stark ugliness repels. We preachers have become dreadfully poor psychologists. There is an instinctive heart-hunger for the mystical in worship that we have been unable to satisfy with our crude, bungling attempts at ritual and the rasping dissonances of the alleged music rendered by our untrained choirs. There has been entirely too much extemporaneous and ill-considered matter introduced into our ‘services of worship.’ Our ‘free’ pulpit prayers, for example, have been so very free that they jar unpleasantly on the sensitive ear of the naturally devout. Indeed, our public prayers are filled with impertinences that are only saved from being blasphemous by the fact that we know not what we do. We pick up disgusting tricks of addressing The Absolute in terms of a contemptuous familiarity. How often one hears preachers mouthing that raucous phrase whose vogue the reverential fail to comprehend, ‘Now, Lord, just send us’ – whatever-it-is – in the same inflection one uses when telephoning the butcher, ‘Now, Sam, just send us a few lean pork chops, this time, can’t you? No; no sausage today, thank you. Yes, that will be all, Sam. Thanks very much!’

“Now, this will not do! Some of us have been wondering what is the matter with our churches, and some of us have been berating the generation for its godlessness. Many of us may find, upon investigation, that we have disgusted our potential constituency with our unwitting want of reverence. Many a sensitive man would greatly prefer to take a book of essays with him to a shady bend in the river on Sunday morning than attend our church, whereas his whole soul cries out for a much closer contact with the divine than he can achieve by his communion with nature. But – it is a great deal better for that man’s spiritual welfare that he should go out Sunday morning and watch the river than to go to some church where the music is so ugly it positively frightens one, and the preacher talks to the Great Unseen as if he were chaffing with his next-door neighbor over the back fence. Let it be repeated: This will not do! We who have been committing these serious blunders must mend our ways!”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5d: Evolutionary Momentum

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just said that the problem with most churches is that they ignored “the ‘incurably’ religious passion in men’s hearts for a beautiful, reverential, dignified and consistent means of church worship.” He goes on to explain:]

“There is a curious phenomenon in nature known to biology as ‘evolutionary momentum.’ A certain animal develops a tusk or a horn or a set of spines, for purpose of defense. By natural selection, only such members of the species survive as are best equipped with the peculiar protection. But, after an interminable length of time, this thing upon which the animal’s ancestors had relied for defense has so increased in length and weight that it becomes a serious menace. After that – Nemesis! By a process of ‘evolutionary momentum,’ the weapon becomes the machinery of his defeat who carries it. What was once a safeguard becomes a shackle. The virtue becomes a vice.

“When our forefathers repudiated the Vatican, they decided to pitch out of the church everything that was loose at both ends. True, many a dingy old tenet which might have been more honored by the breach than the observance was permitted to remain – but everything that had any color, form, or beauty was enrolled on Protestantism’s index expurgatorius. Gradually, the service of worship was denuded of its vestments, its historic symbolism, its awesome solemnities, its majestic music, its stately grandeur, its subtle appeal to the mystical quality of the human mind.

“Doubtless the whole business of ceremonialism and symbolism had been grossly exaggerated. One suspects that it was this overdevelopment of the ritual that had as much as anything to do with the great protest which sent such a flock of awkward fledglings fluttering out of the old nest. It was a typical case of ‘evolutionary momentum.’ Generation after generation, these embellishments had been added to the service of worship until the accretion of ornate rites toppled of its own weight. Thereupon, new tendencies arose, pledged to have no more of such nonsense. They kept the faith. At this point, they kept the faith!

“Our so-called ‘service of worship,’ in such churches as employ you and me to serve as their pastors, surely ought to satisfy the most exacting of our colonial fathers who had come to hate the sights, sounds, and scents of ritualistic worship. It is only rarely that the service of worship in a ‘non-conformist’ church excites a feeling of reverence. To be sure, many churches have not failed here. I am just talking about your church and mine. We know very well that our ‘service of worship’ needs the breath of life put into it! But how are we going to manage it without being accused of ‘mysticism’ or something else a very great deal worse?”

[Douglas’s essay will be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5c: Failures and Their Causes

by Ronald R Johnson

“Regarded specifically, it is true that many churches have been unable to present a very attractive portrait of his life and love who spoke of a social commonwealth of souls in that gripping phrase – ‘The Kingdom.’ Possibly such failures may be traced to a large number of causes. At least three of these causes stand out rather prominently. One type of failure may easily be accounted for on the ground of an overemphasis upon some minor point of doctrine which has been permitted to grow so huge as to drain the very life of the cultus that produced it – like a monstrous sarcoma. It may have gone in for feet-washing as a necessary and important ceremonial rite, for example. At first, this performance may have had some real symbolic beauty – though the imagination of the writer is far too sluggish to understand what beauty could ever have been thus expressed to the occidental mind; he merely assumes that such may have been the case, at first. But once the ceremony had lost its pristine spontaneity, it must have become a heavy load to carry. The sect could not relax its grip upon its burden, however. What it had written, it had written! Presently, so far as that body of believers is concerned, there is nothing much to Christianity except to get one’s feet washed, and so large a volume of effort is required for the persistence of this rite that there is very little energy left for the main task. It is the old case of the tail wagging the dog. It is also like the steamboat of Lincoln’s story that had a ten-foot boiler and a twelve-foot whistle. Every time it whistled, it stopped. I fancy that the sacrament of feet-washing is now nearly enough passe to be safely mentioned as a case in point to cover a great many similar pathological conditions still present with us. Such deflections from the main task of the church account for part of her present discomfiture.

“A second type of failure may be explained on the ground of an untrained and ineffective leadership in the pulpit. No church can get on very well or for a very long time which willfully does violence to human intelligence. To endure, a church must be able to command the respect of thoughtful people. But this is a truism requiring no argument; at least not in this presence.

“The third and by far the most prevalent type of failure may be accounted for on the ground that the churches of this order have almost completely ignored the ‘incurably’ religious passion in men’s hearts for a beautiful, reverential, dignified and consistent means of church worship.”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 5b: The Disappointed

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas has just finished telling the story of an American tourist – one of the new rich – who goes to an art museum in Europe and is disappointed with what he sees there. The old verger tells him his disappointment says more about him than it does about the old works of art. Douglas continues:]

“There seems to be a general rumor to the effect that Christianity, as expressed by the church, is failing to please this generation. Almost everybody, both within and without the church, is either announcing blatantly his firm belief that the church confronts a crisis or waggles his head solemnly when somebody else asserts it. Some people view the situation with alarm. Others, unable to add a cubit to their own spiritual stature, are glad enough to think that the norm and standard of the soul has been lowered, and poorly conceal their satisfaction over the general chatter relative to the failure of the church to maintain her grip upon the mind and heart of our age.

“Prominent among the doleful, who are sincerely disturbed over this matter, are many members of our own profession. We have permitted ourselves to be stampeded by all this idle chatter. Really – it is mere impudence for our country, whose most permanent works still reek of green lumber, hot rivets, wet plaster, fresh paint, and perspiration, to grow hysterically concerned about the fate of an institution that was ancient and venerable more than a millennium before civilization was apprised of the fact that this continent was in existence!

“The church has quite passed out of the experimental stage. She does not happen to be on trial. The spectators are, however; and when they presume to express their fear that she may not survive the temporary flurry of our present restlessness, they but advertise the vasty depths of their unplumbed ignorance of history, and the almost incredible lengths to which naive bumptiousness can aspire in a land of unbridled and unsupervised gabble. So much for the church – generally considered and spelled in caps.”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 4j: Encouraging Meditation

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship,” in The Christian Century, 9/2/1920.

[The following is from the fourth installment in Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation!” in the summer and fall of 1920. This installment, dated 9/2/1920, is titled, “Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship.” The series is about the Reverend D. Preston Blue, who is on a campaign to enlarge his congregation. This episode takes place after he has begun to succeed in building his audience. He is telling his wife about his plans for improving the order of worship…]

“‘That organ prelude,’ soliloquized Blue, ‘ought to begin quietly. People come in from the racket of traffic on the street. They should be given some incentive to calm their spirits and meditate without being overwhelmed and distracted with a thunderous noise. It should be understood by the ushers that the seating of the people should be done with a minimum of confusion. From the moment the prospective worshipper steps inside the door, he should be impressed with the fact that this is the House of God. He should be given a chance to think, to pray, to sense the divine Presence. Therefore, the organ prelude, which helps him to that mood, must not be a big ‘show piece,’ but rather an impassioned tug at the heart-strings. And then it should grow, almost imperceptibly, at its close, until it seems to be building up toward some definite action. The people must be filled with a desire to express themselves.

“‘Without a pause,’ continued Blue, thinking aloud, ‘the organist will modulate into the score of the opening hymn. Just think of the thrill of it, my dear,’ exclaimed the minister – ‘the organ piling harmony upon harmony, higher, richer, fuller, until, in one great, triumphant chord, it peals out the majestic measures of ‘O God, the Rock of Ages!’ – and the choir comes to its feet – and the congregation rises, not hesitatingly, by squads, but spontaneously, immediately, because it can’t sit still another moment – and then they will sing! Fine – isn’t it?’

“Blue remembers a wonderful service he had attended, in which the organist had begun with an impassioned prelude, rising to a martial mood, and, because the minister was going to preach on a patriotic theme, brought the congregation to a stand with the strains of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ – after which he swept his choir and the audience into the first verse of ‘Lead On, O King Eternal,’ which happened to be in the same key and therefore required no introduction at all. True, the congregation didn’t know for a moment what was afoot, but it was not long in finding out, and the genuine thrill it experienced shattered every vestige of indifference and tuned the heart for a thorough appreciation of that great militant hymn.”

[Douglas’s story will continue in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 4e: Back to the Invoice

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the fourth installment in Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation!” in the summer and fall of 1920. This installment, dated 9/2/1920, is titled, “Fourth Phase—The Service of Worship.” The series is about the Reverend D. Preston Blue, who is on a campaign to enlarge his congregation. This episode takes place after he has begun to succeed in building his audience. He is on vacation with his wife, taking stock of the recent improvements.]

“Now, there comes a time in the experience of every minister who has been party to such a resurrection of the dead, when his new responsibility makes him very humble. He does not come by this sensation at first. Just the sheer wonder and delight of witnessing the miracle occupies his whole attention. His feeling of gratification knows no bounds. He had always wanted a live church and a magnetic congregation – and now he is getting it! Hallelujah!

“Every Sunday there are many more new faces before him, and he is spurred to his best efforts by their challenging expression of an appraisal that seems to be saying, ‘Well, we’ve heard about it, and here we are; wonder if it’s as good as advertised!’ Yes, there is that period to be gone through – a time of delirious excitement over the hitherto untasted joy of seeing the pulpit actually function.

“Then comes, with a shock, the almost terrifying sense of responsibility to do something more for these eager people than merely preach to them. D. Preston Blue had now arrived at that stage. As he sat gazing wide-eyed but unseeingly into the night, his heart was very heavy. He had wanted a congregation. His dream was going to come true. People would come to his church in increasing numbers. But why did people go to church? Why should they go? To hear a sermon? Was that all? Was there not another – indeed, a primary – function of the church that he, Blue, had almost completely ignored? Was he helping to satisfy that irresistible heart-hunger of the normal human soul for a closer contact with the Infinite? Was he doing anything to deepen the desire and increase the capacity of his people for worship? After all, wasn’t this the main business of the church – to offer a service of worship so reverential and inspirational that it would serve as a spiritual tonic to souls in desperation to escape the tyranny of material things, almost frantically eager to catch occasional glimpses of an intangible heart-kingdom where the youth of the spirit is renewed until it mounts up on eagle-wings?”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]