# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S30
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

30 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

"We All Believe in One True God", "Abide, O Dearest Jesus, among Us with Thy Grace". [Printed in English.] It touches the heart when one sits in the evening in rural stillness and from the hut at the edge of the pine forest over there, and across the cotton field, there reaches our ear from the mouths of black children the song learned in our own childhood, "Müde bin ich, geh' zur Ruh'" [Weary am I, I go to rest]:

Now the light has gone away,
Savior, listen while I pray,
Asking Thee to watch and keep,
And to send me quiet sleep.

Not all Negro children who attend our schools also join the Lutheran Church. But the divine seed that is sown here perhaps comes up later. A missionary lost a boy from the school and from sight. After some years he found him almost by chance on a sickbed. "Pastor, I put my whole hope in my Lord Jesus," said the sick boy. The ray of this hope soon shone for him across into the heavenly paradise, where he now sees his Jesus "face to face in everlasting joy and blessed light." Teacher Dietrich Meibohm, who for more than twenty-eight years has led hundreds of Negro children to Christ the children's friend (he once had 120 present in the class), relates the following experience: "Once, after school was over, a richly dressed Negro woman came into the schoolyard and asked me whether I was Teacher M. When I said yes, she explained: 'I come from Defiance, and my present sister-in-law, Klara B., who formerly went to school with you, asked me to greet you. She told me she would never have come to know her Savior if she had not come to your school.'" Thus God lets the mission workers in the school learn already here, after years, that their work was not in vain. Only the Last Day will reveal how many Negro children have been set on the way that leads to heaven through the school.

In the worship services of our Negro congregations things go quite differently from the noisy, wild "worship services" of the ordinary Negro churches. When our Lutheran Negroes come into their church, before the service has begun, they sit down quietly; and if they can read, they perhaps open the hymnal and read in it. Vigorously the congregational singing resounds. They sing by preference our beautiful Lutheran hymns. It sounds fine. At a first visit tears sometimes come to the eyes of the white visitor. Now the pastor delivers the sermon. It is biblical-Lutheran. God's Word and Luther's doctrine are presented in a quiet, edifying manner, by the colored pastors (18) as well as by the white ones. Devoutly and attentively the people listen. At times the service lasts three to four hours. Especially in new places the people can hardly get enough of hearing. A member of the Mission Commission once visited a station where about five months before the work