ization work and
organization for guaranteeing products until other agencies can take
the work over. His obligation as community leader extends to the
encouragement of every phase of life that makes the country more
livable in the way demanded at the particular stage of development in
which he finds the community.

As stated before, his primary task in encouraging production is now
that of establishing contacts with State agencies and encouraging the
support of their work. In some sections of the country, as among the
colored people, for example, a country preacher might well be a
trained farmer capable of doing in a local community what a county
agent tries to do on a larger scale. But the State has now progressed
in most sections to the point where, if opportunity is offered, it can
assist in this work and relieve the pastor for other duties.

The rural pastor should be a leader in community economic
organization. It is accepted now that economic organizations along
cooperative lines should be independent of either educational,
religious, or social groups. After such organizations are well
established the pastor has met in this respect the challenge to the
church and to the pastor as community leader.

The church as a whole should have some form of organization whereby it
can register its influence in favor of State legislation making safe
the development of the cooperative movement, the better organization
of marketing, the proper control of land ownership, taxation, and
other business relations affecting the farmer. Many of these problems
cannot be solved by a minister working alone in a local community. He
can preach honesty, stability, loyalty to community organization with
all the fervor and liberty of a prophet, but so long as the tenant
contract remains an inducement to transient tenant population; so
long as class distinctions continue to become more marked; so long as
discontent over high rents, high prices of land, and other conditions
continues, he will not get far toward the establishing of the kingdom
of heaven in agricultural life. These problems must be attacked by the
church as a whole as the obligation of the general church to the
minister who is on the firing line of the great world-wide struggle
for the establishment of industrial peace.

One or two concrete illustrations will show the necessity of general
church action on these matters if the rural church is to be saved from
conditions now acu