# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S282
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 68 —

was the first in scope and significance? — Today, in the service of
the emigrant mission here, the Evangelicals have 1
missionary (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,
namely, at the same time city missionary.) The zeal of Rome and of
the sects shows plainly enough that Baltimore must be important
ground for emigrant mission work. This is also evident from the fact
that Congress has appropriated $110,000.00 for the purchase of a
building site for an immigration station.

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

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 the growth of our mission, moved 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? Need
drove us to an expedient. 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. — Need 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 wholly an
emigrant missionary.

The people who are held up 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.
It is to them, if temptation truly teaches attention to the Word, that
the missionary ought to be able to devote the needed time. Only so
could he be active as a missionary in the true sense, and in our
emigrant mission the emphasis surely ought to lie not on the
material-business side but on the mission proper. How much mission
work could be done precisely among those held up at landing is shown
by the following figures. Detained in the years 1908 to 1910 were: in
hospitals, 493; in the Detention House, 4,979; in all, 5,474 persons.
Even if not all of these were such as our