# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1928_S36
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36 Proceedings of the thirty-first convention

Business Proceedings.

Negro Mission.

The following was submitted for deliberation:

Twenty-fourth Report of the Commission for Negro Missions [Kommission für Negermission; "Negermission" is the period's term for the mission among African Americans].

July 1926 to July 1928.

"Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even
unto the end of the world." Thus runs the great Mission Command of our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ. On this command is founded the mission work that our
Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America has now carried on for more
than half a century among the Negroes of this country. The Negro people belong,
after all, to "all nations." Therefore we are also to "teach" the Negroes, that
is, to make them disciples of Jesus.

That is no small matter, however. The Negro Mission has to contend with many and
great obstacles. Shall we name and set forth some of these obstacles?

We pass over the obstacles that our Negro Mission has in common with other
missions, and bring into the foreground only those that confront it especially
and alone, or at least in a special degree.

Obstacles.

1. First there is ostracism, exclusion from the society of the whites, from
which our white missionaries and their family members must suffer severely. Our
missionaries are called nigger-lovers and nigger-preachers [printed in English]
and are shut out from the society of such people. It takes strong faith and
heroism to hold out and keep on working under such conditions day after day,
week after week, month after month, year after year. I believe it is easier to
be a missionary to Negroes in Africa than here in our own country. A Southern
woman wrote several years ago about one of our missionaries: "If this
missionary had been sent to Africa, then the love, the sympathy and the prayers
of the whole Lutheran Church would have accompanied him. His journeys and
experiences would be published in the periodicals and read with interest. But
since he and the other self-denying men work among the poor Negroes of our
South, it seems as if all the doors of friends had closed behind them, and they
must carry on the work for Christ, for all of us, under a loneliness that would
overwhelm us and make us unable to work." Ostracism is hardest on the dear
wife of the missionary. So it comes about in many cases that a call to a white
congregation is accepted all too soon.

2. In the last sentence a second difficulty in the Negro Mission has already
been pointed to. It is the frequent change of pastors. The late Missionary
Bakke, who was in the service of the Negro Mission for over forty years, once
wrote: "Most of them [the white workers] left again after a short time, after a
few years, some after a few months. The frequent change of mission workers has
been a great hindrance for the mission." We do not want to leave unmentioned,
however, that some missionaries with praise-