# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1887_S63
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fifth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1887. 63

Home Missions should be discussed as it deserves. For this, gracious
God will surely give the necessary wisdom and true love, for Christ's
sake." (Report of the General Mission Commission.)

The Synod followed this last piece of advice by devoting a considerable
time to mutual encouragement, that this work above all should truly be
taken to heart, and that everyone should work toward its advancement at
home in the congregations as well, as much as each one possibly could.

Resolved, that the presidents of the several District Mission
Commissions shall be required to send the General Mission Commission
a detailed report on the external state of their mission field at least
twice a year.

Foreign Missions.

"Three years ago both the entire Michigan District and the
Commission for Foreign Missions submitted an urgent petition to the
Delegate Synod then assembled at St. Louis, Mo., asking that not only
the Indian mission be resumed, but also that mission work among other
heathen peoples in distant parts of the world be taken up, and that, to
this end, a mission institute be founded with a director specially
appointed for the purpose. The Delegate Synod, however, could not
bring itself, even then, to begin work among the Indians and distant
heathen, because, given the great mass of mission work to which the
Lord had, in the first place, assigned us, it was not in a position at the
time to see how we might dare, under the present circumstances, to seek
out new mission fields for whose conduct we had no indication from
God. The Synodical Conference, assembled in Cleveland, expressed itself
in a similar way when a member of it recalled what a terrible guilt
Christians bring upon themselves by letting so many heathen die
without ever having brought them the preaching of the Word of God.

"The Commission for Foreign Missions today renews its request for
the resumption of the aforementioned Indian mission and for the
beginning of a mission among the distant heathen, and calls attention
only briefly to the following points:

"1. It is without doubt our precious duty, with all our strength, to
take up, through missionaries whom we send among them, the cause of
our own neglected fellow believers here, as well as that of the Negroes
and Jews of this country; but by faithfully discharging this duty of ours
we are not in the least released from the other duty, of having mercy also
on the Indians of this country and on the distant heathen.