The pastor needs the boys because his task is to enlist and train the Christians and churchmen of the future.  These should be more efficient and devoted than those of the present, and should reckon among their dearest memories the early joyous associations formed within the church.  Many thoughtful ministers are perplexed by the alienation of wage-earners from the church; but what could not be accomplished in the betterment of this condition if for one generation the churches would bend their utmost devotion and wisdom to maintaining institutions that would be worth while for all the boys of the community?  A boy genuinely interested and properly treated is not going to turn his back upon the institution or the man that has given him the most wholesome enjoyment and the deepest impressions of his life.  The reason why the church does not get and hold the boy of the wage-earner, or any other boy, is because it stupidly ignores him, his primary interests, and his essential nature; or goes to the extreme bother of making itself an insufferable bore.

The reflex influence of boys’ work upon the church herself should not be ignored.  Here is a great plant moldering away in silence.  Not to mention the auditorium, even the Sunday-school quarters and lecture-room are very little used, and this in communities trained to sharp economic insight and insisting already that the public-school buildings be made to serve the people both day and night and in social as well as educational lines.

The basement is perhaps the most vulnerable point in the armor of exclusive sanctity that encases the church.  Here, if anywhere, organized church work for boys may be tolerated.  Whenever it is, lights begin to shine from the basement windows several evenings a week, a noisy enthusiasm echoes through the ghostly spaces above, in a literal and figurative sense cobwebs are brushed away.  The stir is soon felt by the whole church.  A sense of usefulness and self-confidence begins to possess the minds of the members.  Things are doing; and the dignity and desirability of having some part in an institution where things are doing inspires the members and attracts non-members.

It will be a sad day for the pastor and the church when they agree to delegate to any other institution all organized work for boys and especially those features which the boys themselves most enjoy.  The ideal ministry to boyhood must not be centralized away from the church nor taken altogether out of the hands of the pastor.  There is no place where the work can be done in a more personal way, and with less danger of subordinating the interests of the individual boy to mammoth institutional machinery and ambition, than in the church.  The numerous small groups in the multitude of churches afford unequaled opportunity for intimate friendship, which was pre-eminently the method of Jesus, and for the full play of a man’s influence upon boy character.