# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

With few exceptions the preaching of the colored pastors is in the highest degree one that stirs the emotions (emotional in the highest degree), and the pastor holds himself successful to the degree that he succeeds in carrying the people in the whole assembly away into groaning, wild shouting and dancing about, until they finally fall into unconscious rapture (finally going into a trance). One of the main tasks of most of these preachers consists in raising their salary, and to this purpose everything else is subordinated. The greatest part of the worship service seems to consist in attempts to beat money out of the colored people. Not one in twenty Negro preachers has credit in his neighborhood, and those who know them best trust them least, in money matters as well as in moral respect in general. . . . Many church members know as little about true Christianity as any people in Africa or Japan and need missionary work among them just as much as heathen in distant lands." So far Booker Washington. What he says our missionaries in the South can confirm a hundredfold.

[Printed in English: the parenthetical phrases above and the quotations below.]

How, then, do our missionaries work among these poor, misled, superstitious Negroes?

The main work is done in the mission school [*Missionsschule*]. We have in all 35 mission schools, in which 9 pastors who teach school, 14 male teachers and 35 women teachers are active. These schools are attended by about 2800 younger and older pupils. Among the older pupils there are at times also those who could already vote. It looks odd when these are in one class with the ABC beginners. But they are not embarrassed. All shades of black are represented among the pupils. A Northerner would hardly guess of some that they count as Negroes to the Southerner. The children come for the most part from huts of poverty and in miserable clothing. In the cities they have mostly grown up on the streets. About the dear Savior they know little or nothing. "I knowed a whole heap about Him; but I done forgot it all," said a big boy when he entered the mission school. A fifteen-year-old girl thought that we celebrated Christmas, "because Lincoln made the Niggers free". Decency and order they have for the most part not learned. Wild and dirty they come to school at first. The teacher has his hands full until he tames them. — What do they learn in the mission schools? Reading, writing, arithmetic and other things that are useful to them for this life. Our schools have the reputation that they accomplish something solid. During the war, when our schools were under suspicion, the Southern reporter in a New York newspaper had to declare of our schools: "They have done, first and last, no doubt, a very creditable work," that is, they have at all times done very good work. When an enemy says this, it will probably be true.

But the best that the children learn in our mission schools,