The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1920, Sheet 21

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The Lutheran Pioneer.

all the Northern States combined, and in that great
State we have not a single mission-station !

What are we doing for these millions of im-
mortal souls? The work is very multifarious, in-
deed, but not as extensive as it should be. Our
Board for Negro Missions educates preachers and
teachers, maintains pastors in their work and teach-
ers in their schools, builds churches, schools, par-
sonages, and colleges, arranges courses of study,
looks after the condition of buildings, orders all
repairs and extensions, calls professors, pastors, and
teachers, controls the higher and lower schools of
learning, receives financial statements from all
churches and schools, and audits all bills. The
reader will see that the work of the Board is varied,
but while almost every phase of missionary en-
deavor is represented, our churches, schools, and
higher institutions of learning are so few in num-

Mount Zion Church and School, New Orleans.

ber compared with the great number of persons to
be reached that we are again and again constrained
to exclaim, “What is that among so many?”

But do not understand me as though I wished
to belittle the work that has been done. No, no;
out of confusion, ignorance, and poverty there has
arisen a system of educational and evangelistic work
that should command the attention and the support
of every member of our congregations. In our
Christian day-schools thousands of Negro boys and
girls have been brought under religious influence
and trained in the ways of our Lutheran Church.
In our higher schools workers have been trained to
go out and labor among their own people. Con-
gregations have been gathered and organized until
now the Board has under its watchful care over
fifty congregations and missions, containing more
than three thousand members. Thousands of dol-
lars have been invested in churches and schools.

The list of our stations as it appears from time_ +

19

Immanuel School, Greensboro, N.C.

to time in the PIONEER occupies a whole page in
small type. In Louisiana we have eleven stations,
manned by seven pastors, ten teachers, and several
students. The twenty-five stations in North Caro-
lina are manned by more than twenty laborers, and
the new. field in Alabama is being rapidly developed
and calls for more laborers almost monthly. Be-
sides these more extensive fields, we have a number
of isolated stations in a number of States. But
after all has been said, it remains a fact that we
have covered only a very small part of the great
colored mission-field. Among the ‘two million
Negroes; of Mississippi, the half million Negroes of
‘Tennessee, and the hundred thousands of Florida
no Lutheran mission-work is being done. South
Carolina and‘ Georgia have only one station each,
and the great State of Texas has not been worked
by us at all.

Luther’ College, New Orleans.