m a joint organization for the employment of a minister and
use the same building, or use two buildings in common--sometimes one for
church and one for Sunday school services or social purposes,--and the
church is a community church for all practical purposes. In the long run
this usually results in a federated church finally affiliating with the
denomination which is preferred by the large majority of its membership
and which is least objectionable to the minority.

Denominational leaders, on the other hand, hold that neither "union" or
"federated" churches will be permanently satisfactory, but that the
community church, though organized on the "federated" principle, should
be definitely affiliated with some one denomination, and that a single
denominational church which effectively serves the whole community may
be truly a "community church."

Whatever the outcome of this movement may be it has forced the
recognition of the fact that the religious welfare of the rural
community should be the first consideration and that denominational
relations must be conceived as a means rather than an end, as has
commonly been the case heretofore. When country people have learned the
advantages of consolidated schools and of cooperation in marketing, and
have developed the ability to work together in these and other phases of
community life, they are no longer content to waste their energies in
maintaining feeble churches, whose differences no longer command their
loyalties, and they very naturally desire to bury their religious
differences and to cooperate in the maintenance of a single church which
will give that inspiration and dynamic to all the life of the community
which can be furnished only through the religious motive. So in religion
as in other phases of life, the community idea is replacing the older
individualism.

We have already noted the change of emphasis in the work of the church
from that of merely holding a preaching service for the personal
salvation of adults, to a greater reliance upon the power of religious
education through the Sunday school and other organizations of young
people. When Sunday schools were first started, a century or more ago,
they were bitterly opposed by many of the more conservative church
people. To-day they are a recognized part of all protestant churches,
but oddly enough their advancement has been due more largely to the work
of the laity than to that of the clergy, although there c