# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S95
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911. 95

...to have him report and to adopt the necessary resolutions. — Mr. Martin Frincke, who has served the mission diligently and skillfully since the last Delegate Synod, has left our Commission owing to his move to California. By the Commission's resolution, Mr. Georg F. Dederer of the Martini congregation has taken his place.

The first emigrant mission at Baltimore was a Lutheran one — namely ours. But is it, as would be desirable, also the first in scope and importance? — Today the Evangelicals have 1 missionary in the service of emigrant mission here (besides an emigrant seamen's home and a pilgrim house), the Methodists 1, the Roman Catholics 2, the Baptists 3, the Presbyterians 3 — and we? Half a missionary! (Our missionary is, in fact, at the same time the city missionary.) The zeal of Rome and of the sects shows plainly that Baltimore must be an important field for emigrant mission. This is also apparent from the fact that Congress has appropriated $110,000.00 for the purchase of a building site for an immigrant station.

All this, together with our missionary's extensive work as set out above, moves us to come before the Venerable Synod with the earnest recommendation that it place a full-time missionary in the emigrant mission here and take responsibility for his correspondingly full salary. This will, of course, mean that the Venerable Synod will have to add to the missionary's salary, as recommended in the accompanying regulations, out of the General Mission treasury — about $600.00 a year. Nevertheless we confidently make the recommendation just stated.

We called Pastor Totzke at the time because we were convinced that a pastor ought to stand in our emigrant mission. We were confirmed still further in this conviction when Pastor Totzke, after work so successful for our mission's growth, moved on to Philadelphia. We therefore called another pastor.

But how were we to raise the salary, since a pastor could not possibly get by on the salary we had formerly paid our agent? Necessity drove us to a makeshift. Our Commission called, first Pastor Totzke and later Pastor Eirich, as emigrant missionary, and by arrangement the local City Mission Commission called, in both cases, the same man as city missionary, so that the salary required for the right man could be raised. — Necessity now drives us, after some years' experience, to state it as our conviction not only that a pastor ought to stand in the emigrant mission here, but that the pastor ought to be entirely an emigrant missionary. —

People who are detained on landing and must go to the Detention House, uncertain whether they will be forced to return to their old homeland, or who are taken to a hospital, are often in bitter distress. As surely as temptation...