RIVAL OF CHURCH

Taranaki Daily News, 6 November 1934, Page 8

RIVAL OF CHURCH

the cheap motor-car. “NO LONGER CONVENTIONAL.” That cheaper cars will compete more and more with the churches was the frank forecast by the Rev. T. T. James, Manchester, in his presidential address to the autumn assembly of the Congregational Union of England and Wales at Croydon, reports the Daily Telegraph. “The fact has to be faced that our numbers do not grow,” he said. “It is no longer the conventional thing for anyone to attend worship; it rather tends to become an unusual thing, so would be looked upon in many quarters as strange and unaccountable. “The raising of the standards of lite, the increase of leisure, the infinite multiplication of amusements and pleasures, the increased facilities for travel by road and rail, the popularising of the motorcar. have reduced the church with many people to one of many competing interests in life, or have ruled it out completely. “The long-established attitude towards Sunday in England has suffered decay and disappearance. There is now a geneiation to whom the words, ‘The breaking of the Sabbath,’ have simply no meanPointing out that civilisation would become still more prolific in its inventon of attraetve external methods for spending leisure; that motor-cars would become cheaper, roads more congested, and airways ■ come within the reach of democracy, he added: “Our churches will have more competition in that sense to lace in the future.” Nor would Sunday be regained as a Jay of worship on any legal basis. The business of the Church was to make its worship so attractive and compelling that it would hold its ground by reason of its answer to man’s deeper necessities.

If the churches could not evoke a response from the people in the critical days in which we lived, the response would be given elsewhere. The outstanding fact about Communism and Fascism was that they appealed to men with the force of religion. The opposition to women ministers was mentioned by Dr. S. M. Berry, at a meeting arranged by the women’s guild of the union. “I was a minister at Carr’s Lane, Birmingham,” he Said, “and when the project for women’s ministry first came before the Church, many of the older people were quite openly and scornfully antagonistic. Yet when we had two or three women deacons the whole church saw the great advantage a few months after their appointment. “For one thing,” added Dr. Berry, amid loud laughter, “for the first time in my life I had a clean vestry. Women are supposed to be divided into Marthas and Marys, but my experience of them is that they are a marvellous combination of the two."