# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1944_S961
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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378 MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS

are already built. 42 trailer camps, averaging 45 trailers to the
camp, are already on the place. 2,500 children have three schools,
which they attend in shifts. Additional prefabricated houses are
being put up at a miraculous rate. Ninety-five per cent of the

population work on shifts. Rumor has it that the enterprise will |.
be one of unprecedented proportions. Our people are among |

' . those being employed in this area. These members of ours must
receive spiritual ministration, and their children must have op-
_ portunities for Christian education. What is one single missionary

in an area of such gigantic proportions. The missionary oppor- —

tunities among children and adults are a wide-open door to us.

Not all of the more than 750 war-production areas present
problems as big as this one. However, every District in Synod
has its own larger or smaller problems in conserving the migrat-
ing Lutherans of our Church and utilizing the opportunities to
preach and teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There is probably no brighter page recorded in the Home
Mission history of our Church than that of our missionary workers
' in defense areas during the past year. It reads like a success
story. In between the lines you can read the record of hundreds

and thousands of hours of faithful, heartbreak-

The Church ing activities. The work of these men should be

at Work written into the saga of our Church. Unlike the

more romantic and heralded deeds of the Army
chaplains, their trek of hundreds of weary miles from trailer to
trailer, from housing project to housing project; their weary

hours spent in seeking the whereabouts of one moving, wander- .

ing, vanishing defense worker, such plodding for God does not
lend itself to dramatic story. The'many meetings of the District
Mission Boards, their efforts to meet the emergency in their areas,
their sometimes discouraging and dishearteriing endeavors to

secure workers, their efforts to secure places of worship, their  °

problems with Federal Council of Churches committees, their
pleadings with housing co-ordinators for opportunities of wor-
ship in the larger defense housing projects — all these tell 4 story
of unremitting, faithful, patient, and courageous effort to keep
the Lutheran defense worker with his Church.

No less glorious a page has been written by hundreds of in-
dividual pastors who on their own initiative have done heroic
work. In other congregations lay-member conservation com-

- mittees have been formed by the pastor as “lay. workers” for the
emergency. The Walther League has taken an active part, The