We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE PRESBYTERIAN PENSION FUND 563
were simple, and because people could understand them, it proved an easy plan to sell. The most important features were these: the pension plan was based on length of service and average salary; it was available to ministers, missionaries, and other employed workers of the church, and also to their widows and minor children; it was operative normally at the age of sixty-five, even without requiring retirement, but it could be invoked earlier in case of disability. An extremely fair and considerate feature of the plan was that for those of sixty-five or more years of age, still in active service, it provided a minimum retirement pension of six hundred dollars, provided they registered within one year— this latter provision to be financed out of the Laymen's Committee fund of fifteen million dollars.
We made our first announcement in 1923 at the General Assembly held that year at Indianapolis. Representing the laymen, I opened my address with the slogan used so often during the campaign: "Religion is the one essential industry in the world," and went on: "The management of that industry is in the hands of ministers. Though its genesis is divine and its revelations are eternal, its usefulness and, indeed, its survival are in the hands of these administrators. For this life of service their average material compensation is less than that paid our garbage collectors. This situation, long endured, is an economic and moral crime.,, And I closed my statement thus: "Our so-called soulless corporations, with more conscience than most of our churches in this regard, all find it good business to pension their faithful employees; the Army and Navy set splendid examples; the City of New York extends the same benevolence even to the horses of the fire department when they are worn out, and sends them to the upstate farm to be cared for during the rest of their lives.
"It is grotesque to be caring for the old age of firemen, policemen, soldiers, workmen in all other lines— just and wise as all this is— yet leaving the leaders of our really indispensable work to the tender mercies of a frigid world! We will raise what is needed, of course— without question, without hesitation, without apprehension."
It sometimes seems as if the rhythm of my life had been marked by a long series of national conventions beginning way back in 1896; but the General Assembly of 1924, which unanimously adopted the perfected pension plan, was one of the most satisfying. It authorized the Board of Ministerial Relief to proceed with the enrolling of the four thousand churches and the four thousand ministers needed to initiate it.
For the next two years, while churches and ministers were joining, the Laymen's Committee came gradually to realize the necessity of building up a broad national organization. In the early stages too many people, merely by wishful thinking, hoped the money could be secured from a small number of wealthy families. This was only an unwise hope.