# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1887_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fifth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1887. 67

heathen mission commission — to take under its own supervision the
Indian cemetery at Bethany, Michigan, which has been kept up by
[that commission]. Whatever small expenses the upkeep of the cemetery
requires shall be reimbursed to the said congregation by the [mission]
commission, after it has submitted its account to the commission.

Jewish Missions.

"Your Committee begs leave to submit the following report to the
General Synod. It must state at the outset that in recent years it has,
admittedly, come to know the Jews somewhat better, and at the same
time has had ample opportunity to learn the difficulties of this mission.
In our report in the year 1884 we were already able to report six
baptisms, and were sanguine enough to believe that the whole mission
would continue to make such blessed progress. Unfortunately, all too
soon we had to have the opposite experience, and one blow followed
another: various of those who took part in instruction became
indifferent, others even fell into gross transgressions of the
commandments, still others had sought out our missionary merely to be
supported. So that, in reality, of some thirty proselytes only a few have
remained, and only three have been baptized in the last three years.
After such experiences your Committee soon came to the decision to
depart, in essence, from this practice of taking Jews into the house and
supporting them daily with 15-20 cents, and to give only occasional,
provisional support — for instance granting them advances for peddling.
We then began to work in another direction and instructed our
missionary to go into the houses of the Jews and, where possible, to
proclaim the Messiah to entire families. We must say that this approach
has pleased both us and all the brethren interested in the Jewish
mission far better. But there, too, the successes have been only slight.
One chief difficulty we ran into was this: that while the men were
generally receptive, their wives and children — though mostly
personally attached to the missionary — clung firmly to Judaism, and
that, as a result, the men, although they professed that Christ is the
Messiah, would not let themselves be baptized. The missionary himself
— in whose faithfulness and untiring self-sacrifice for Israel your
Committee has the fullest confidence — sometimes got the best
opportunity, at circumcisions and weddings, to enter into disputation,
before a great number of Jews, with rabbis themselves, and to testify of
Christ so warmly and clearly that all contradiction fell silent and all
murmuring subsided. He has distributed masses of tracts and Bibles,
was often able, in fa-

[SCAN: faint word-fragments show through on the left margin from the facing page (p-072); not transcribed.]