The Church on the Changing Frontier

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om all over the East, Middle West and Southwest. Many families live far from their neighbors. Leadership is the challenging need and it is primarily the task of the Church to furnish and develop it. The initial handicap is that here people, from a matter of habit, do not yearn for church

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on the job. But the preachers have come and gone along with the rest. Three of the forty-five churches organized for ten years or more have had the same preacher throughout the period, and five more churches have had only two pastors. But seven churches have changed pastors three times, ten have changed four, seven have changed five, six have changed six, five have changed seven, one has changed eight and one has changed nine times during this period. About half of the country and vil

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e been vacant 2.5 per cent. of the ten years, town churches 6 per cent. of the time, village churches 11 per cent. and country churches 17 per cent. of the time. The churches organized

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re time to the ministry. Eight have some other occupation in addition to their church work. One is a student, and the rest are ranchers. These eight men serve eleven churches in the four counties and eight churches outside. Thirteen churches were without regular pastors at the time of the survey, but five churches were only temporarily pastorless-transiency caught in the act! Four of the thirteen were being supplied by local or travelling preache

ble. The sixteen preaching points and missions which these same men also serve are not in

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twenty-two, or two-thirds, of these churches are located in centers which have other resident ministers. More than half of the churches with resident pastors are town or city churches. Only nine communities have one or more resident ministers serving a single church on full time. One of these communities is the city, three are the towns, one is a village community in Beaverhead, one the mining town with the two social workers, and three are country communities. Only e

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sonages. Of the forty churches with buildings, thirty-four have parsonages and one country pastor ha

or the evangelistic success of the church. If a pastor is non-resident or has too large a territory to serve, his personal contribution i

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ss among the ministry. Salaries vary as the minister is on full or on part time, as shown in the following table. Th

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baby has a house but no church building on h

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$2,650 $1,550

lary 600 8

,835 1,19

average salary of the Y. M. C. A. county secretaries

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are graduates of colleges and theological seminaries; six others are college graduates, three are graduates of seminaries or Bible