"Effective Church"

Besides being a famed statistician, Roger Ward Babson is a pious Congregationalist who presents a Bible to every new employe in his organization at Wellesley Hills, Mass. He wrote Religion and Business and numerous other books on similar subjects. Last week in South Hadley, Mass. 1,500 Congregationalists and Christians at the biennial meeting of the General Council of their now united Church unanimously elected Statistician Babson their moderator for the next two years. In so doing they not only approved a growing Congregational-Christian feeling toward more lay control of the Church, but drafted for full service a wiry, white-goateed 60-year-old whose hard head buzzes with practical ideas for religious management.

As chairman of his Church's commission on Church attendance, a pioneer in investigating the simple matter of how many pews are filled on Sunday, Roger Babson has reached the conclusion that U. S.

Protestantism is "running downhill" (TIME, May 11). Well informed as he is, the new Congregational moderator was doubtless aware last week that in the July Christian Herald would appear the annual church statistics prepared by Dr. George Linn Kieffer; that these show an increase for all U. S. religious bodies of 670,801 members in 1935, or 1.08% as compared with the total U. S. population gain of .71%; that according to Dr. Kieffer "this refutes the statement often made that the Church is declining." Nonetheless Statistician Babson believes that people in general and Congregational-Christians in particular stay away from church, and last week during the South Hadley de liberations, which were broadly planned to focus on "The Effective Church," he arose with some ready ideas on the matter.

Declining interest in church work, said he, is largely due to laymen who "pretend to run the churches," and to a declining birth rate. "A willingness to sacrifice to have more children and to give them home Christian training is fundamental to an efficient church. . . . We old fellows can go to hell without affecting posterity, but the habits of our children are of the utmost importance. A parent begins to take his child to the movies when the youngster is 4 years old and then wonders why the child is queer when reaching the age of 16. . . . We must encourage our mem bers to be more virile, spiritually, physically and mentally. This requires taking a firm stand against liquor, gambling, late parties, questionable movies and other things that are sapping the life of our churches. We must expect to be different from the world, if we are to lead the world. We must again be willing to be laughed at and called 'queer.' "

Businesslike Mr. Babson advocated al locating work as follows: a Church At tendance Division would gather statistics on the state of the church by "sampling" questionnaires; a Family Responsibility Division would keep tabs on the number of children born to church members; a Personal Habits Division would "record the percentage of church members who are strictly temperate and who shun harmful habits"; an unnamed Division might "record the homes where the Christian flag is flying." Finally, "without taking any part in politics, our Congregational-Christian Churches should strive to get out a 100% vote of our church members."

Other work done in South Hadley last week included dropping the "irritating and needless" word "obey" from the marriage service used by Congregational & Christian ministers; consolidating seven home missionary, church building, ministerial relief and religious education boards into a National Board with $23,000,000 assets; electing Dr. Mary Emma Woolley, retiring president of South Hadley's Mount Holyoke College, to be honorary moderator of the Church, the third in its history (others: Calvin Coolidge, Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman). Gently shunted away from the active moderatorship which friends had hoped she would get, Miss Woolley was nominated thus by a Holyoke minister: "She has sought with thrilling earnestness to know whatsoever things are true, honorable, pure, lovely and of good report. Having formed her convictions, she has stood by them with a kind firmness. We would have the nation realize that this woman of world influence is the daughter of a Congregational minister and that she herself is a loyal member of our denomination."

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