so then the question comes: how can we foster this life? how can the church 27continue, through a succession of generations and amid manifold changes of circumstance and thought, not merely its name and organization, its tradition of the fathers and its orthodoxy of language, but a living body of christ, which shall embody him, as he would make himself known to each age?
that is the supreme question. unless the church does that, it misrepresents its lord and hinders the coming of his kingdom.
everything must be thought of in terms of vital relation if we are to see our way to an answer. we are dealing with life, and it is life, a unity of life, that connects the individual christian with his savior and with his fellow-christians.
i know vital relations are costly things; it is comparatively easy to preach and profess; it is not easy to give ourselves. but vital relations are abundantly fruitful, and that supreme giving of life which we associate with the sacrifice of jesus christ is, we know, the most fruitful vital relation that has ever been exhibited in history. 28“he, the son of man, gave his life a ransom for many”—for the whole world.
dr. hort has finely said:
“in the times when christianity owed nothing to custom and tradition, and when all the ways of ordinary society tended to draw men away from it, what drew them to it and held them to it, despite all persecution, was the power of its life.... life calling to life was the one victorious power which mastered men and women of all conditions and all grades of culture.”2
we cannot commend the kingdom of god to the world through institutions that are starched and stiff, but only by the living, warm, expansive touch of human hearts reaching out in fellowship to others.
men substitute tradition for the living experience of the love of god. they talk and think as though walking with god was attained by walking in the footsteps of men who walked with god. there has been a great deal of that in the quaker church.
they substitute authority for leadership, 29the authority of the men of the past for the inspiration of men who have vision and first-hand experience of truth to-day. they substitute conventional methods—we have had a great deal of that, too—for the natural arrangements which a living fellowship of disciples would make and modify from time to time and place to place. they substitute a cold organization for a warm fellowship, an outward profession for an inward experience, priestly agency for personal responsibility, dogmatic teaching for education, almsgiving for personal social service, sectarian ends for the great purposes of the kingdom of god.
there is no end to the cheap substitutes offered for the use of the church. almost all of them are methods for running the christian society with the minimum of spiritual energy, seeing how little spiritual life you can manage with, whereas our aim ought to be to generate and use the maximum in the illimitable service of the kingdom of god.
a religion of life must devote itself to vital processes and vital relations. these 30are the things that concern our truest welfare. take the chief:—loyal discipleship, inspired leadership, warm fellowship, loving service, steady spiritual growth; every one of them vital processes. look at them in order just sufficiently to get them well in mind.
jesus christ, so far as we know, wrote nothing, he organized no religious society, he formulated no creed, but what he did was to gather around himself a band of disciples, men and women, who received his spirit, and in turn would bring others into touch with the life which had redeemed them. his life, springing up in the lives of men, was to be fundamentally that which should regenerate the world.
the act of discipleship was following jesus. it began with personal adherence to the lord, and it continued through personal communion with him. in art and in learning we know how stimulating the daily contact of teacher and disciple proves to be—the disciple’s spirit kindled by the enkindled spirit of his teacher, the coming together of teacher and scholars 31into a common life and a common purpose. that is why the colleges of american quakerism have been such great forces. still greater, vastly greater, is the discipleship which is ours in the school of christ. it calls for the fullest dedication, the closest following, the daily taking of the cross, but it gives us him who is the way, the truth and the life.
discipleship then is the first vital relation that must be always energizing the church, but next in order comes inspired leadership.
the great initial success of quakerism was due, beyond all else, so far as human means went, to the traveling “publishers of truth,” as they called themselves, who carried their burning message far and wide; they were like rich life-blood circulating freely through the body. they were for the most part men and women of competent bible knowledge and religious training, men with intense sincerity, with a great experience, who were talking about christ because they knew him. they went out on a devoted service, which no privations or persecutions could daunt, and many of 32them were young men in the prime of their ardor and strength, who would follow the movings of life rather than the counsels of prudence—and we want those in the church. the church must be prepared to take a few risks with its young men. after all, the hearts of the young are burning for a crusade.
in the days of persecution which came upon the quaker church there was a great mortality among these leaders and unfortunately the supply of new leaders was small, indeed, ever since that glorious morning of quakerism, the equipment of the quaker church with inspired leaders has been a pressing problem. it is our business to raise up not priests but prophets, christian men and women of trained intelligence and wide outlook, who know god and have a sure insight into the great social and spiritual needs of humanity, whose lives have been redeemed, whose hearts have been touched with the live coal from off the altar. there is no place in vital religion for the vested interests of a clerical caste, nor the dead hand of tradition, nor the 33compulsion of conscience by the authority of the expert; but there is every need for a leadership, which continues the past in a living experience and educates and inspires and illuminates. a democracy requires leadership, not the leadership of authority, but what we may call, to use the constitution of the five years meeting, an advisory leadership, moving along channels of inspiration and personal influence. “for lack of vision the people perish.”
the third great vital relation that the church has to be fostering is warm fellowship. a few degrees of temperature may alter a climate and introduce wonderful possibilities of new life. change the climate and you change the kinds of growth which may come into the world. it is very much the same with the church. i remember a story of a little girl who was taken into a cold church one winter’s day. she got in at one end and could scarcely hear what the preacher was talking about. after church she went home and her mother asked her: “nellie, what was the text to-day?” she answered, “i couldn’t hear 34it very well, but i think it was ‘many are cold but few frozen.’”
i think congregations have sometimes preached that sermon. it is oftener preached by the congregation than by the minister.
quakerism at times has suffered from a frigidity of climate which has repressed and repelled. in the first centuries christianity became a great power, because it was a great brotherhood. surely we need to warm up our church organization so that it becomes quickened into a living fellowship. we want a christianity with the brotherliness left in and the starch taken out. i remember seeing an advertisement, “catlow’s preserves, boiled in silver pans.” what it meant was this: you got the sugar, you got the fruit, and you got nothing else. that is what we want in our christianity. we want the sweetness and we want the fruitfulness. we don’t want much else. we don’t want frigidity, we don’t want starch.
group life with a strong fellowship about it has always been a quaker characteristic. 35in the early days it was groups of seekers who embraced the message of fox, and in england we still find friends settled in groups over the country. i notice, in the expansion of quakerism in the far west, that it is colonies of friends you get. you cannot have a diffused quakerism diffused over the whole state of nebraska or california, but you can have a few groups of friends at particular points. but group life means a great deal more than the collection of persons within the four walls of a particular building. it means a life in community and comradeship, because the members are joined together actually and vitally in a common lord and a common discipleship. it means, as with the limbs of the body, that the gifts and activities of each are freely used for the service of the whole. it means that each shares in and contributes to the larger life of the whole.
then there is the need for loving service. a church is not an end in itself, not a club where we sit at ease in zion; it is a means to an end. it ought to be, in the phrase 36of our early friends, a “camp of the lord.” it needs to have the purposes of the kingdom of god ringing in its ears all the time. it needs to be vowed to the great redemptive work of seeking and saving the lost. it will be rightly judged by its output of service for the kingdom of god. i fancy that the weakness of modern christianity is very similar to the besetting weakness of civilization. we grasp our privileges and shirk our responsibilities. the healthy church fixes each member with personal responsibility for using the life which he has received. it finds work for all to do. it knows that activity is the natural expression of life, and that the torpor of any part spells atrophy and death.
last of my list is what i have called steady, spiritual growth. the vital relations which are the wealth of the church not only bring about a unity of life with god and with one another, but produce that progressive development of personality that we call growth.
these are the questions we need to be asking ourselves all the time: are our 37church members bigger men and women inwardly than a year ago?
are they stronger in faith, more radiant in hope, warmer in love?
have their spiritual senses developed? do they see more of truth, hear more readily the divine voice, respond more quickly to the guidance of the spirit?
are their consciences alert, their loins girt, their hands eager for sacrifice and service?
here surely is what we may call the intensive work of the church, the making of men and women not after the pattern of the world, but after the pattern of jesus christ, who shall go forth in his power and spirit to serve the kingdom of god.
now, we might well enlarge on these five important vital processes—discipleship, leadership, fellowship, service and growth. but my purpose will have been served if i have said enough to bring home to you the fact that these are the things that matter, the things that are of vital importance in the church. methods and machinery, organization and church discipline have a 38value of their own, but only a subordinate value to these prime factors of health. if these lesser things are accepted as a substitute for the vital factors, the church becomes weak. if they are allowed to limit the development of the life, the church may become dwarfed and deadened. their true function, the true function of organization and discipline and these other matters, is surely large enough—namely, to provide means with which and through which the life can readily work.
