The Small-Town Effort

There are three words that might well be the motto and watchword of one who conducts a small-town effort—courage, persistence, and adapt­ability.

Courage. It takes courage for a minister and his wife to go into a strange community where there is no Seventh-day Adventist church to back them. Frequently he will have to be his own song leader, his wife will play the piano, he will offer his own prayers, he and his wife provide the only special music that there is, and any other special features. As he approaches his first meeting, he does not know whether to expect a hundred peo­ple, or a half dozen scattered throughout the hall.

Perssistence. Many ministers go into a small town to hold a series of meetings, but they see that only a few are coming and their small audience is rapidly dwindling ; so they decide to quit while quitting is good. No one was tempted more to stop than I when we started meetings at Newell a year ago. The first Sunday night we had fifty people, and during the week nights between twen­ty-five and thirty. The following Sunday night we again had almost fifty, and that week our crowd fell off sharply. Night after night we went with but few in attendance. The temptation was strong to go back to Spearfish, where we felt there were greener pastures, but we prayed, and the Lord gave us courage to stay by.

During the next week or two we called on the people who had requested literature on the sub­jects previously presented, and my wife succeeded in organizing a small Bible class. After a while we succeeded in organizing another, and then an­other, until we had forty people attending some­where in one of these classes. Not all these peo­ple accepted the message, but enough accepted to make this type of program abundantly worthwhile.

It took quite some time before we fully realized why it was that our audience at Newell had melted away. The second week had marked the official opening date of the sugar-beet harvest in that area, and young and old were engaged in this work early and late for almost a whole month. If we had given up holding meetings at Newell after this first disappointing experience, our work would have been all in vain. But the Lord helped us to persist during these first few discouraging weeks, and we had the joy of seeing thirteen new believers who had no former connection with Adventism baptized into the advent message. It pays to persist and hold on.

Adaptability. Every community usually has its own type of people. We do well to study the class of people with whom we are to deal and the religious set-up of the community. Are the ma­jority indifferent to religious things? What are the language problems of the locality? Where we are working the people are largely of German descent. Though I do not preach in that lan­guage, I offer German literature. We have Ger­man booklets and Bibles for prizes. We also^, provide German Bible studies and encourage the people to bring their German Bibles and react from them. I encourage the people to ask ques­tions in their own language; then we in turn trans­late them for the benefit of the others and answer the questions in English. Now let us consider a few principles that are important in small-town-evangelism.

Meet people on their own ground. I be­lieve it is a good idea to meet people on their owns ground. If you find a man out in the field pitch­ing hay, roll up your sleeves and give him a lift.-Spend a day with some prospective Adventist,. helping him with some of his humble, everyday labor. Show him that you are not ashamed to help him with the things he is doing. I spent parts of four days helping a man with his sheep, while in the evenings we had a Bible study. Some time ago we witnessed this man, together with his fam­ily, uniting with God's family by baptism. Time spent in that way pays rich dividends.

Study the Terrority. In planning an effort in a small town, study your territory. My wife and I like to work a town with the Ingathering first. Especially is this revealing in the residential section. This will give an idea whether the place is ripe for an effort, whether the people are in­terested in Bible prophecy, and whether they are concerned about the signs of the times. It is well to find out whether your prospective territory has been covered with our books. Of the thirteen people baptized in Newell, five had our truth-filled books in their homes. One reason why we chose to labor in the little town of Vale is that it has been well worked by our colporteurs in the past.

Let me relate one incident to show the value of following this plan. Twenty-three years ago a colporteur sold W. A. Spicer's Our Day in the Light of Prophecy to a young mother at Newell. She read the book and was convinced that it con­tained the truth. She loved the message of the book, but knew no others who believed its con­tents. When children were born into the family, the husband and relatives urged that the children be sprinkled, but she remonstrated, "That's not the way the Bible says to be baptized."

For twenty-three long years she searched. Last fall we started meetings in an old community church building. This man was a regular at­tendant. When we called at her home to deliver our literature, she said, "You people preach just like this book teaches." She then brought out a well-worn Our Day. Great was her joy when she found out that we were the people of the book. Soon afterward, at the close of a Bible study on the Sabbath, she said, in the presence of the others in attendance, "Here is where I take my stand. I know it will be hard, and I will meet with much opposition, but from now on I will keep the Sab­bath." Her predictions have been all too true_ Her husband opposed every step of the way, but she has remained faithful and is a real credit to this movement.