To reach areas outside the influence of the church work at the centers, colporteurs should be employed. A Sunday school missionary could give permanence to all Sunday school work and help to organize new schools in Union and possibly in Sheridan County. Some additional churches should be established; others might very well be closed. But it is chiefly up-to-date, educated, resident pastors that are needed, with a belief that the rural task is worth their lives.
The psychological and religious differences in these four counties have already been shown. All should not be treated alike. Every county is different. Every county demands individual study and treatment. Such conditions call for the survey method and for intensive coöperation. This is the key to the whole situation. Business, though still competitive and on an individual basis, combines for the community good, as in the case of Rotary and Civic Clubs. The churches might well emulate this example in organization. There are competent Ministerial Unions in Pierre and Sheridan City. What is needed now is a Council of Religion in each county with a program enlisting every minister and every church, and including every square mile of occupied land in the county. All problems are related. The causes of church ineffectiveness lie in non-coöperation. Ministers have stayed too short a time to relate themselves to their parish and their people; denominations in establishing new churches have not been curious enough about the lay of the land; the various component parts have been unrelated--the preacher to the church, the fringe areas to the church in the center and, finally, the Church to the people.
Yesterday the Range population was busy settling down. To-day it is haphazardly here, and still coming. And what of to-morrow? Franklin K. Lane wrote at the end of his term of service in the Department of the Interior: "We are quickly passing out of the rough-and-ready period of our national life, in which we have dealt wholesale with men and things, into a period of more intensive development in which we must seek to find the special qualities of the individual unit whether that unit be an acre of desert, a barrel of oil, a mountain canyon, the flow of a river, or the capacity of the humblest of men." Here is fertile ground for well directed and progressive development.