# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

islands were permitted to baptize the first heathen only after 15 years of bitter labor, Carey the first Hindu after 7 years, Ziegenbalg 7 slaves after 2½ years, then should we not have reason to be highly delighted and deeply thankful for God's blessing in our Negro Mission, especially since our Negroes too stand for the most part at the level of heathen ignorance and heathen superstition? Should it not stir us up to carry on the work with new zeal and with new, greater faithfulness? Indeed, may we not perhaps even give room to the thought that God may yet use this mission work of ours, so that we may bring the pure Gospel to the Negroes in their motherland Africa and so also carry on heathen mission in the proper and full sense of the word? For it is beyond question that the great Synodical Conference [*Synodalconferenz*] has from God this calling too, to carry the mustard seed of the pure Word and Sacraments into distant heathen lands and to gather the heathen sighing in the shadow of death under the peaceful shade of the Christian Church.

We now take the liberty of presenting to the honorable Synodical Conference a short, summary report on the state and progress of the individual stations of our Negro Mission in the last two years, from August 1890 to July 1892:

I. Little Rock, Ark.

This is our first and oldest station. A wonderful and incomprehensible dispensation of God, through the death of missionaries and frequent change in the mission staff, has brought its once so hopeful condition and progress to a sad decline. It is now our weakest field of labor. A year and a half ago Missionary Allenbach followed a call to a German congregation. Student Kuhlmeyer from the seminary at Springfield, Ill., entered as vicar and worked with great faithfulness and visible blessing, but the Lord took him away at the beginning of this year by a blessed death, and only after months did we succeed in obtaining a student, Brauer, from the St. Louis seminary as help; but he too, after a few months, had to lay down the work there because of illness. During the long and frequent vacancies Pastor J. Miller of Little Rock faithfully looked after the orphaned mission, as far as his own large congregation allowed. Now we have received again, from this year's candidates, a missionary in the person of Mr. Rüßkamp, who, God willing, will take up his office there at the beginning of September. May God's blessing be with him, that the mission there may at last come again to joyful prosperity! The weekday school has ceased entirely in the last half year; even the Sunday school has been suspended in recent months. The number of souls is 38, communicants 23. The mission owns a small church here. From this rather dispiriting picture we now turn to the all the more gratifying one, according to