# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 Proceedings of the 25th General, or

...dear fellow believers. But prayer must also go up for workers for the
harvest. If our mission is to endure, more workers must be sent into
this part of the LORD's harvest as well. For preaching to the heathen
and schools, catechumen instruction and congregational care, one worker
per station is really too few; somewhere the work must then be carried
on inadequately. Nor may the fire of the divine Word remain confined to
the hearth of our four stations — it must spread, and the network of
stations must be expanded as soon as possible. Finally — and this is for
now the most important of all — there must be a reserve of workers on
hand to step in at once when missionaries are forced by necessity to
return home, fall ill, or are called away by death. And it is a great
wonder before our eyes that in these first years we have been permitted
to remain and work at our stations without serious disruption, amid
epidemics thick around us, amid the daily preaching to the heathen and
oversight of building work, in the course of which we must expose
ourselves to the tropical sun to a considerable degree.

"Reverend Fathers and Brethren! Our mission in India has, moreover, a
quite especially noble and exceedingly important task. It is true that, on
the one hand, there are still millions of heathen in this land to whom
God's Word has perhaps never come at all, or only sparingly; but on the
other hand it is also a fact that no continent has been made so much an
object of mission work as India, where almost every mission society is
represented. But almost all of these missions are also more or less
indifferent to the pure doctrine of the divine Word. For this reason, it is
only parts and fragments of the truth that are preached to the heathen
and Christians of India. Here, then, our mission has the important task
of offering to Christians and heathen alike 'God's Word and Luther's
teaching' — God's Word and its Lutheran interpretation according to our
confessions, an interpretation raised above all doubt, certainly true, and
whole. And the Tamils, even the Pariahs, have an understanding for this,
for truth is simple and clear, while half-truth and falsehood, by contrast,
are confused and dark. For the sake of this special task alone we ask the
Synod to continue to carry on our mission work with all devotion, all
zeal, and all joyfulness.

"To be sure, the mission is, in distant, foreign lands, under conditions
opposed to our own way of life and habits, a difficult work, and
demands great sacrifices on all sides in both people and money. Yet
thus speaks the LORD in Matthew 17:20: 'For I tell you the truth, if you
have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain,
Move from here to there, and it shall move, and nothing shall be
impossible for you.' Yes, from year to year the mountains will give way
and the hills will fall, and nothing will be impossible for us, if only we
continue in faith the work that we began in faith