# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S288
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 74 —

Report of the Commission for Jewish Mission.

To the Reverend Delegate Synod of the German Evangelical Lutheran
Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, assembled at St. Louis
from May 10 to May 20, 1911.

Reverend sirs! Beloved fathers and brothers!

In submitting the report of your Commission for Jewish Mission
covering the last three years, the commission takes the liberty of
prefacing it with the following remarks in the interest of your
mission among the Jews:

That mission to the Jews is just as much a Christian duty as mission
to the heathen is something our Synod has recognized in faith and
testified to by its actions. Christ's command to the world, "Teach
all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit!" (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 at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:47). Paul
and Barnabas therefore openly 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 hath made both one,
and hath broken down the middle wall of partition, having abolished
in his flesh the enmity" (Ephesians 2:14), this can mean nothing else
than that one church is to be gathered out of Jews and Gentiles.
Salvation came to us from the Jews (John 4:22); indeed, through their
fall salvation came to the Gentiles (Romans 11:11). Therefore we are
not to boast against the branches (Romans 11:18), but to serve them
with the Gospel, "that they may be provoked to jealousy" (Romans
11:11).

Now it is of course true that our congregations, through their
preaching ministry and through the confession of their members,
influence the Jews living within their bounds, and that the number of
Jews won for Christ and baptized through such mission work by our
congregations is considerably larger than the number won through our
special Jewish mission in New York. But this circumstance makes a
special mission to the Jews in this country no more superfluous than,
for example, the mission work individual congregations perform in
their own territory makes special home missions and foreign-language
missions superfluous. The whole upbringing and cast of mind, the
religious concepts and views, even the language of the great mass of
Jews are so distinctive and so wholly 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 reach only individual souls among them. For the great mass of
the Jews we must have workers specially trained and equipped for