# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

In this jubilee year we remember the manifold benefits which the kind God and Father in heaven has shown to our fathers, to us and to our children, and still shows, through this union of churches pleasing to him, and we thank him with hearts, mouth and hands. In this connection we remember quite especially the great and undeserved blessing that he has laid on the principal work of the Synodical Conference in the last forty-five years: the Negro Mission. At its sixth convention, held in Immanuel Church at Fort Wayne, Ind., in the year 1877, the delegates resolved unanimously and with enthusiasm "to begin and carry on a heathen mission, namely for now among the heathen or at any rate religiously neglected and forsaken Negroes of this country." By God's blessing and prospering the seed that was planted then has grown into a great tree that spreads its branches over eleven different states of the Union.

The beginning of the Negro Mission was, to be sure, inconspicuous and small. That is indeed the way in the kingdom of God. The Synodical Conference appointed a commission or board for the direction of the work. This commission consisted of Rev. J. F. Bünger, Rev. C. F. W. Sapper and Mr. J. Umbach, all living in St. Louis. In that same year (1877) the board called the first missionary, J. F. Döscher. In October, on the occasion of the synod of the Western District of the Missouri Synod at Altenburg, Perry County, Mo., he was solemnly commissioned. The task first set him was to find suitable mission sites in the South. His journey took him to Memphis, Little Rock, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. In Little Rock he founded the first mission station. At Easter of the following year (1878) the young candidate for the ministry Friedrich Berg came to Little Rock as the first resident missionary and in July organized our first Negro congregation. It still exists today. In New Orleans too Döscher founded a mission station, namely in the old, dilapidated and abandoned Sailors' Home near the Mississippi. Thus arose our Mount Zion congregation in New Orleans.

The spiritual misery of the Negroes that Döscher found in Little Rock, New Orleans, etc., defied all description. The poor blacks had indeed been freed from bodily slavery about a decade before, but most of them still languished in the much more terrible bondage of sin and knew nothing of the great golden freedom that Christ has won by his life, suffering and death for all men, be they white, red, yellow or black. Here too one had to sing and say:

The poor heathen move me to pity,
For great is their need;
Ah dear God, have mercy!
They are dead in sins.

They do not know the Savior either,
Who bore their sins;
They live without comfort and light
And lie under the curse.

[The two stanzas are printed side by side.]

At the end of the first ten years (1887) three missionaries were in the service of the Negro Mission, who on five mission stations about 300