# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44 Proceedings of the seventeenth convention

our missionaries have had to experience the hostility of the Christian whites more bitterly on account of their work of love among the Negroes, God consoles them again the more richly by making these enemies confess publicly: "The Lutheran Negroes are better Christians than all the others of their church communions." The fine ladies in the white congregations, who do not think our missionaries' wives worth a greeting on the street, must nevertheless confess: "If we want pious and faithful menservants and maidservants, we must take such Negroes as have been brought up in the Lutheran school and are members of the Lutheran congregations. No other congregations are so strict about the Christian conduct of their members as the Lutherans." Negroes of other churches say it frankly: "If we want to hear a good sermon from the Bible, we must go to the Lutheran church." Yes, they confess: "We would gladly join this congregation too, but we fear we cannot live as piously as is required there." — The general hatred with which the missionaries were received in this state, and the scorn and bitter persecution which the Negroes who adhered to the Lutheran mission had to suffer from other Negroes, is not only giving way more and more, but is yielding to a recognition, one might almost say a respect, for God's Word among whites and Negroes. For the first time they here meet the authority of the divine Word in the pulpit and in the congregation, and discipline exercised according to God's Word, of which they had never before seen, heard or known anything. Now the sectarian preachers come running to the Lutheran pastor and get counsel from God's Word, and confess that they have never received so much light on the Christian faith as from them.

Pastors, teachers, professors and doctors now attend the Lutheran Negro services that were formerly so deeply despised. — Pastor Bakke built the Lutheran Negro church and school in Concord in the middle of the quarter where the most degraded Negroes lived and held their horrible nocturnal orgies. Today the whole district of the city is rid of this scum, and a respectable, Christian Negro population now lives there. The whole city recognizes and rejoices in this blessing of the Lutheran mission. And we have these reports not from our missionaries themselves but from our visitors, who visited these stations and took conscientious account of the faithful and blessed work of our missionaries. Why, should we not cry out with joy: O blessed leaven, that sets up such a kingdom of heaven among a people sunk so low in superstition and unbelief, in such a night of death of sin and vice! —

Missionary Bakke's station in Concord numbers 175 souls, 90 weekday-school and 110 Sunday-school pupils. For years he also served the stations Rimertown, Mount Pleasant, Gold Hill and Rockwell. Only