# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S107
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911. 107

...and burning with zeal for the salvation of his countrymen. Here in the East he covers 8 mission stations: in the State of New York, Yonkers and New York City; in the State of Connecticut, Bristol and New Britain; in the State of New Jersey, Newark, Elizabeth, and Atlantic City; in the State of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Our pastors — for example in Yonkers, in New York, in Bristol, New Britain, and Philadelphia — work alongside him, as it were watch his work, and report consistently the same thing that Pasha reports at our conferences. At these 8 stations he has 1,500 souls under his care, all of them adult men, since their families are in Persia and the people are too poor to bring them over. 130 to 150 people are often present at a single service, as the pastors report. Every five weeks the missionary makes his round through his mission territory and comes into contact with the 1,500 souls. But now he tells us how, in Chicago and Pittsburgh, another 5,000 Persians are living, who bombard him with letters to come to them. That is impossible; we ought to place his son there, who, trained at Hermannsburg, would also like to transfer to us (from the General Council). And finally Pasha tells us how all the letters from the old homeland report that the door to mission work has now been thrown wide open there among the Mohammedans, as a result of the great changes that have taken place with the Turkish government in recent years. What a prospect God opens to us, and what a mission — one we never even sought — God throws into our lap, indeed, at our very head: ready-made workers, and so many souls already worked upon! The conference also expressed the view that so great a mission ought not to be handed over to the Commission for Foreign-Language Missions, sitting off in the farthest corner, or if it were, that one of the pastors in whose places of residence mission work among the Persians is being carried on should be added to it. The pastor of Yonkers, to whom we have so far entrusted the direction of this mission since we provisionally took it up, is very well suited for it. We simply had to take up this mission here at our own risk and our own expense. It would have been irresponsible to let such an opportunity, which God fairly forced upon us, pass by!

The Mission Commission of the California and Nevada District had sent in the following petition:

On the basis of a detailed report from our subcommission in Los Angeles, Cal., the Mission Commission of the California and Nevada District, at its regular meeting held on March 7, 1911, resolved to ask the Venerable Delegate Synod to accept the mission among the Finns, specifically at Bisbee, Ariz., as a branch of its foreign-language missions, and to hand over this new mission work to the Commission for Foreign-Language Missions.