The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1915, Page 30

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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