Thought of the Week

Teddy Roosevelt on Church Attendance…

1.  In this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.  It is perfectly true that occasional individual or families may have nothing to do with church or with religious practices and observances and yet maintain the highest standard of spirituality and of ethical obligation.  But his does not affect the case of the world as it now is, any more than the exceptional men and women under exceptional conditions have disregarded the marriage tie without moral harm to themselves interferes with the larger fact that such disregard if at all common means the complete moral disintegration of the body politic.
2. Church work and church attendance meant the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength which presents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.
3. There are enough holidays for most of us which can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday making… Sundays differ from other holidays – among other ways – in fact that there are fifty two of them every year… On Sunday, go to church.
4. Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church.  But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself.  If he stays away from the church he does not spend his time in good works or in lofty meditation.  He looks over the colored supplement in the newspaper.
5. He may not hear a good sermon at church.  But unless he is unfortunate he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing and humdrum and important task for making hard lives a little easier.
6. He will listen to and take part of reading some beautiful passages from the Bible.  And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered loss…
7. He will probably take part of singing some good hymns.
8. He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good, quiet neighbors.  He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard church-going as rather a soft performance.
9. I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.
10. The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

Thought:  What would St. John’s be if our Generation attended church like we gave?  Not only would be generous, we would set an example for the next generation to follow.