# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S130
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

130 Proceedings of the 28th General or

That the Jewish Mission is just as much a Christian duty as the Heathen Mission, our Synod has recognized in faith and testified to in deed. Christ's universal command, "Teach all nations, and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!" (Matthew 28:19), extends to the Jews as well. The apostles were expressly instructed by the Lord of the Church "to begin with the Gospel in Jerusalem" (Luke 24:47). Paul and Barnabas therefore publicly declared to the Jews at Antioch in Pisidia: "It was necessary that the word of God should first be spoken to you" (Acts 13:46). When the Lord Christ says, "And there shall be one flock and one shepherd" (John 10:16), and when the apostle Paul writes, "For he is our peace, who has made the two one and has broken down the wall that stood between them, since through his flesh he took away the enmity" (Ephesians 2:14), this can mean nothing other than that one Church is to be gathered from Jews and Gentiles. Salvation has come to us from the Jews (John 4:22); indeed, through their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles (Romans 11:11). Therefore we should not boast against the branches (Romans 11:18), but serve them with the Gospel, "that they might be provoked to jealousy" (Romans 11:11).

Now it is indeed true that our congregations, through their preaching office and through the confession of their members, have an effect on the Jews living within their territory, and that the number of Jews won for Christ and baptized through this mission work of our congregations is considerably greater than the number won through our special Jewish Mission in New York. This fact, however, no more makes a special Jewish Mission superfluous in this country than, for example, special Home Missions and foreign-language missions are made superfluous by the mission work that individual congregations carry out within their own territory. The entire upbringing and mindset, the religious concepts and outlook, even the language of the great mass of Jews, are so distinctive and so different from those of Christians that the public preaching of Christian congregations and the testimony of their members cannot affect the mass of the Jews, but can only reach individual souls among them. For the great mass of Jews we must have workers specially trained and equipped for the task, who know the Jewish people as their own, and who, out of love for them, are moved by the urge to proclaim salvation in Christ to the Jews as their own fellow people. Such workers will as a rule be missionaries who were once Jews themselves and have been converted to Christ. That such men are indeed tireless in their difficult work is proven also by the Jewish Mission missionary God has given us.

To be sure, if our Synod had the means to carry on its Jewish Mission more vigorously, it would be good to give our missionary, for managing and expanding his extensive work, an assistant drawn from the Christian