# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S300
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 86 —

Taking Over the Newly Founded Persian Mission.

New York, March 15, 1911.

Right Reverend General Präses [president]!

The Pastoral Conference of New York resolved unanimously
yesterday that I should represent, before the committee appointed for
this purpose and before the Synod, the memorial for the General
Synod's taking over of the Persian mission. Might you kindly inform
the chairman of the committee that will be appointed for this
proposal, at once, of what our conference has resolved? The matter
is remarkable and wonderful indeed! The missionary Pasha, whom we
examined in colloquy and who has now been working under our eyes for
some time and attending our conferences, is a sincere, faithful soul,
glowing with love for Jesus and burning with zeal for the salvation of
his countrymen. He works eight mission stations here in the East: 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 instance in Yonkers, in New York, in
Bristol, New Britain, and Philadelphia, work alongside him, watch his
work as it were at close hand, and report, in agreement with each
other, the very same things Pasha reports at our conferences. At
these eight places he has 1,500 souls under his care, all of them
grown men; for their families are in Persia, and the men are too poor
to send for them. 130 to 150 people are often present at a single
service, as the pastors report. Every five weeks the missionary makes
his rounds through his mission field and comes into contact with the
1,500 souls. But now he tells us how, in Chicago and Pittsburg,
another 5,000 Persians are living, who besiege him with letters to
come to them. That is impossible; his son ought to be placed there —
a young man trained at Hermannsburg who 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 among the Mohammedans now stands wide open there, as a result of
the great changes that have taken place with the Turkish government
in recent years. What a prospect God opens up for us, and what a
mission — one we never sought at all — God throws into our lap, indeed
into our very hands: ready-made workers, and so many souls already
prepared! 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 as it does in the farthest corner,
or, if it is, 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 this. We simply had to take up this mission here at
our own risk and at our own expense. It would have been irresponsible