# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1944_S964
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 383

to the grace of God it has been. the work of the pastors, the mis-
sionaries, the individual laymen and women, the congregational
committees, and the District Mission Boards which makes the
above statement possible.
According to Government surveys about 50 per cent of the
twenty-five million migrant war workers will eventually wend
their way back to the communities from which they came. Even
now the trek back home has begun. Just as there will be a big
job for the churches to do in re-integrating
The Trek Back the returning serviceman from the war, just ,
so important will be the work of welcoming

_ back the returning war worker. It.is the opinion of our Council

that every congregation affected by the shifting of its member-
ship to and fro should appoint a special group to study and
effect ways and means to follow up its absent members until
they are either permanent members in their new community or
until they have returned home again.

The Church on Wheels

The method of bringing the Gospel to people by Trailer
Mission is nothing new. A hundred years ago our pioneering
missionaries in Michigan used the speediest means at their dis-

, posal — the pony, the buckboard. Later ‘our
Trailer Mission missionaries were among the first passengers
pulled by the “iron horse” as it gradually

blazed a trail westward over the Rockies and to the West Coast.
Today we preach that same Gospel in the same way, using the
modern means of a trailer.

Not all defense areas are located in teeming cities. In Mon-
tana there are chrome-mining areas which have jumped to major
significance in the war effort. These communities are not made
up of tens of thousands, but of hundreds. They are made up of
people with souls. Many of these have no access to the preach-
ing of the Gospel except it be brought to them as the circuit-
riding missionaries in the days of our forefathers brought it to
pioneers treking westward in the covered wagon and to lonely
settlers in the vast expanse of the prairies.

When early in the war many of. these small, forgotten places
began to receive an influx of people, our Mission Boards saw an
open door for the Gospel. The communities are too small to
justify permanent resident missionaries. What better way of