The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1923, Page 86

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86 :

The Lutheran Pioneer.

“Tn the Indian Mission field, there are 150 mis-
sion centers, twice as many churches and chapels,
55 boarding- and 20 day-schools, and 3 Cath-
olic hospitals. There are 200 priests, 450 sisters,
60 brothers, and many devoted lay teachers. Five
Government hospitals and 37 Government Indian
boarding-schools are attended regularly by priests.
St. John’s Farm School near Phoenix, Ariz, at-
tended by over 500 children, many of whom are
orphans, depends solely on Catholic charity. It is
at present in grave danger of being closed for want
of support. At the Nez Perces mission in Idaho
seven sisters are still living in shacks erected by the
Indians as a shelter six years ago, after the fire
that destroyed convent and school. The last mission
boarding-school among the Crows was closed in

Parsonage, Church, and School of Lutheran Indian
Mission, Globe, Arizona.

1921, and the sisters were obliged to abandon their
work.

“Tn the Colored Missions 175 priests, 700 sisters,
besides brothers and lay teachers, are devoted ex-
clusively to the work, while 50 more priests give
part of their time to it. There are two colleges
where Colored Catholic youth are trained for the
priesthood. Plans have been made for the estab-
lishment of a Colored Catholic industrial school, the
Cardinal Gibbons Institute. Parishes have suffered
heavily from flood and hurricane, and successive
failures of the cotton crop have placed at lowest ebb
the resources of parishes that were almost self-
supporting. A large number of children whom
their parents wished to come under the influence
of the sisters are turned away from the schools on
account of Jack of accommodations. Sixteen years
of devoted work in the missions of Georgia have
brought over seventeen hundred converts into the
Church, — over seventeen hundred children were
placed in the schools, — established six churches

and four chapels, some of which are rapidly be-
coming self-supporting. In a Southern city a parish
three years-old has a school enrolment of 1,000,
and the church is crowded at five masses every Sun-
day. Results such as these show what could be
accomplished in our great Negro population. In
rural districts, particularly of the South, dire
poverty confronts the missionary and the sisters.
Sisters in a climate of burning heat are living in
attics over the schools and are totally without
sanitary accommodations. ‘The Colored sisters of
Savannah are obliged to take in washing as a means
of support. In poverty, in privations of the most
ordinary conveniences of life, our priests and sisters
are laboring.” F. J. L.

Items of Missionary Interest.

Gartyxs Anroap, Lossrs at Home. — The Meth-
odist Church North is making rapid progress abroad,
but the growth in the home fields is very small.
The gain in membership last year in the whole
country amounted to only a little over 25,000, and
over 22,000 of these came from foreign countries.
That is to say, a religious denomination of more
than two million members had a net growth in the
United States, during the whole year of 1922, of
only a few hundred above 3,000. Some of the
Eastern conferences even reported a heavy loss.
Why is this? May not the main cause be this, that
in the foreign field the Methodist Church maintains
Christian day-schools, where the children are daily
given religious instruction, while at home half an
hour’s teaching in Sunday-school once a week is
deemed sufficient ?

ALaBaMA Gains. — The Colored Datheran re-
ports fifteen accessions in the Alabama field of our
Colored Missions for the last month. Among these
accessions is a baby girl that was born to Teacher
Thompson and wife.

From Country to Ciry. — The general ob-
servation has been ‘that for the past twenty-five
years the city church has grown at the expense of
the rural churches. Just as people in general are
moving from the country to the towns and cities,
so also our church constituency is leaving the rural
parish for the town and the town for the larger city.
Thus the Disciples report that in forty-one cities
they have grown from 35,654 in 1891 to 166,930
in 1923.