# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 75 —

workers 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 kinsmen. Such workers will as a rule be
missionaries who were once themselves Jews and have been converted to
Christ. That such men are precisely the ones untiring in this
difficult work is proven also by the Jewish 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 place beside our
missionary, to help him cope with and expand his extensive work, a
missionary who came up out of Christendom. Such a man would find
love for the cause much harder to come by, but he could work better
on some Jews — namely, on those on whom it makes a greater impression
when Christian-raised missionaries make it their life's task to labor
for their salvation. That there are a good many such Jews is taught
by the experience of other Jewish missions. In any case it would be
good if something could be done to win at least one more worker for
our Jewish mission. If our present missionary falls ill, or is
released from his labor by the Lord of the Church, the whole mission
among the Jews must come to a standstill. If our present missionary
remains healthy and grows as old as Methuselah, his work alone among
the mass of Jews here will remain but a drop in the ocean.

Another pious wish will probably remain just that: to escape the
wretched rental conditions under which our Jewish mission has to
suffer. The mission halls that must be rented are small and
expensive. In them only the lowest class of Jews gathers, tightly
packed. At any moment our mission stands in danger of being turned
out of its hall when the property changes hands by sale. If we
consider that the rent for the hall and the rent for the missionary's
dwelling together amount to $720.00 a year, that represents a sizable
capital with which something could surely be done. Yet, given the
multitude of great labors our Synod carries on in the vineyard of the
Lord, we do not venture to bring forward any proposal on this point.

As for the success of our Jewish mission in New York, it has
remained seed sown in hope. If the whole Christian Church on earth,
in relation to the unbelieving world, is already called "the little
flock," then those converted out of Jewry are called nothing more
than "the remnant according to the election of grace," and are
compared to the seven thousand men whom God kept for himself out of
the millions of Israel in the days of the prophet Elijah (Romans
11:3, 5).

Only a few Jews could, in the last three years, be prepared by our
missionary to receive holy baptism. One intelligent Israelite, who
had earned the title of doctor in his former homeland,