I am to spend the next few minutes
with you on the problem of “Why Have a Church?”
First, have a Church because the
organized is superior to the unorganized, and the Church is an organization of
individuals. It can be more.
Second, because in the Church I can be
all that any man of my potentialities and possibilities can be and something
more than he can be out of the Church. I can do all in it that may be done
without and get something more.
The Church is an instrument and the
person can do more with an instrument than he can without an instrument. A man
asked me: “Why have a Church?” I answered him, “Why have any institution; why
have a nation; why have an organized community; why have a school?”
God didn’t finish his work in the
Garden of Eden by producing organisms. The highest form of organism that was
created was that of man. But he did not leave his work there. He put the
finishing stroke upon that work by establishing an institution. That
institution was the fundamental institution of the human family—marriage.
An institution makes it possible for a
man to go by leaps and bounds where he must otherwise wander zig-zag from his
trail.
I say, “Why have a Church?” Not only
because I can get more development with it than I can without, but I want a
Church because there is more happiness in the Church than out of it. I can
enjoy something in the Church that I cannot enjoy without it. There is a
feeling of activity in the Church that cannot be found without.
I want a Church because the Church has
been the support of the posterity of a great organization. The non-church
nation dissolves; the non-church community becomes a place that is undesirable
for me to live in; the non-church community is fading.
Finally, I want a Church because there
is in the Church more faith—the assurance of things hoped for. There is more
happiness in the Church; there is an organized affiliation with the divine;
there is more love and charity that is unselfish. When I give through an
institution, I humiliate no man or woman.
God bless those who do not belong to
churches. Bless them that they may have the power to see. I never desire to
speak evil of the man who doesn’t belong to a Church; I pity him, because I
feel that he is losing that which he might have.
Prize your church. (George H.
Brimhall, “Why Have a Church?,” January 18, 1926, in Long and Short Range
Arrows [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1934], 138-40)