In this regard every organization must clearly understand the church it seeks to aid.  Most organizations have singular aims and motives.  The Church is a complex organization, with many needs.  The church school has many divisions and departments, has two sexes to minister to, embraces all ages, from the cradle to the grave, and usually has no paid officers.  Through it all proportion has to be maintained—­balance of organization, fair opportunity for all, young or old, male and female.  A plan for the education of the teen age boy will no more solve the problem of the Sunday school than it would the educational, physical employment, or social difficulties of the Young Men’s Christian Association.  In proper relationship to the other factors of the problem in church school, or Young Men’s Christian Association, it would help the whole organization.  It surely takes more than plaster to make a house, important as is plaster.

The Sunday school has its own problems of organization, sexes, ages, equipment, equality, fair-play, opportunity, leadership, etc.  No organization can help these problems from the outside, or by emphasis on any one phase.  Gain in one department may be loss in another.  The Sunday school needs proportionate gain.

The Sunday school, therefore, should welcome any organization or method that bids fair to help in the solution of its problems.  It should eagerly avail itself, especially, of the aid that the Boy Life Expert of the Young Men’s Christian Association can give, thus reducing religious, economic duplication, and achieving united conservation of boy life.  On the other hand, the Boy Life Expert of the Young Men’s Christian Association should thoroughly acquaint himself with the genius of the Sunday school, the plan of its organization, and the pith of all its problems of sex and age, leadership and training, aims and objectives.  He should also know thoroughly the policies of denominational and interdenominational Sunday school bodies, and, where there are denominations in plural quantity, this may mean a task worth while.  Sometimes it is a slow process.  Surely, so!  The Kingdom, with all the wisdom of Heaven, has been twenty centuries in the building, and it has been wrought out in the Church.  The contribution that each man or woman makes must be small, but likewise great in its possibilities, if wisely, patiently given.

An organization cannot be permanently helped by introducing into its life the methods of another without the process of assimilation; neither can strength be given merely a part of the body to cure the whole.  Organic tone is needed.  Intelligent, Sunday school-wide cooperation!  This is the invitation of the church school to all existing organizations.  The conditions of the challenge are not easy, but the task is interesting and worth while, and the promise of increased efficiency is great indeed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SUNDAY SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS