# The Lutheran Pioneer_St. Louis_1915_S30 # Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration) 30 The Lutheran Pioneer. baner, who died last fall while in Germany on fur- lough. She reports that she has plenty of work among the natives, particularly among the Moham- medan women. Ju. A. FRrepricu. Rev. H. Hamann, Supervisor of the Missouri Synod of the mission schools in India, who was to go to India last September, but whose departure was postponed on account of the outbreak of the great war, left San Francisco for his new field of labor on the 27th of March. Items of General Missionary Interest. Tire ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION AND MEDICAL Missions In Curva. — The Rockefeller Foundation has decided to undertake a comprehensive plan for the improvement of medical and hospital conditions in China. A special organization has been called into being to carry out the work, which will be under the supervision of a Director, who will reside in Peking. It is probable that several medical schools now already existing will be aided by a more thorough equipment, and that the Mission hospitals already existing in the vicinity of the medical schools will be aided by the Foundation. A special Commission, which has studied conditions in China, reports that it was greatly impressed by the work which has already been done by mis- sionary societies in hospitals and medical. schools, and that the standard of the medical missionaries is very high. practical thing to do will be to simply expand the work already begun by the missionary societies. The Commission reports that the work of the foreign missionary nurses is of a high degree of excellence, and they propose to assist the missionary societies in sending out a larger number of well- trained nurses, and help them in training a larger number of native nurses. AMERICAN ForEIeNn Missions. — The latest sta- {istics show a large increase in missionary gifts in America since 1901. The total income reported for 1901 was a little over six million dollars; last year the income for the same purpose was over seventeen million dollars. The contributions of the native Christians in the foreign field in 1901 was only one million dollars, but last year it totaled four and a quarter million dollars. American re- ligious bodies have almost ten thousand missionaries in the foreign field. In American fields more than 150,000 natives were baptized. In the foreign mis- sion fields conducted by Americans there are about They seem to think that the most . ten thousand churches, over six hundred colleges, ° training-schools, and seminaries, and almost thir- teen thousand other schools, with a total attendance of a half-million scholars. AmenicAN Home Missions. — The churches and societies represented in the Home Missions Council, which by no means includes all religious bodies in the United States, report contributions amounting to more than twelve million dollars for last year. This is an increase of nearly two million dollars. ‘Che work for Negroes cost over seven hun- dred thousand dollars, for missions ameng the Indians almost a million was expended, and work , among the newly, arrived immigrants cost nearly a half-million dollars. Socruern Barrists AND FOREIGN Missions. — The Southern Baptists are celebrating the Judson Centennial by raising the sum of $1,250,000 for foreign missions. ‘This large sum it not to be kept for an endowment fund, but is to be spent outright in the field. If we consider that this large sum is to be raised in the South, which feels the effects of the European war more than any other part of our country because of the low price of cotton, their chief crop, we must admire the mission spirit of this body of Christians only the more. FrENcI, PROTESTANTS AND ForREIGN MISSIONS. —The Paris Missionary Society, the foremost French Protestant mission society, began its work about eighty years ago by sending three missionaries to South Africa. ‘The work is conducted by 17 European missionaries, 19 native pastors, 222 native evangelists, and 473 native teachers. ‘The work ° done by the native helpers is almost self-supporting. Work is carried on by the society in all the French colonies of Africa and in British South Africa. In Basutoland the Paris Mission has a ¢hurch-member- ship of over 21,000. War AnD Missrons. — ‘To sustain the extensive mission work carried on in foreign fields by the churches of the nations now at war must be get- ting increasingly difficult as the months roll by, and in view of the fact that the end of the awful struggle is not yet in sight. It will be a hard task for Great Britain to sustain its 10,000 missionaries in the foreign field, since it entails an annual cost of about ten million dollars. Germany will have a still harder task to provide for its 1,200 mis- sionaries, which annually need two -and a half million dollars, not so much because of the diffi- culty in raising the necessary funds as, rather, be- cause of the difficulty in getting the funds to the