The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Page 141

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER. 141

We do not want to find fault with the people
for moving to more desirable residential neighbor-
hoods. Neither do we want to chide the churches
for following their members. But we do, wish to
say that to leave unoccupied the districts they once
lived in is not answering the challenge the needs
of such areas hold out to us. Such an action is
a retreat that the army of Christ ought not to be
guilty of. The surrender of such territory with its
teeming population to the powers of darkness lays
the Church open ‘to the charge of not performing
as she prays nor acting as she preaches. FF. J. L.

Items of Missionary Interest.
By the Eprror.

Rio de Janeiro.— The City of the Beautiful
Harbor has welcomed Christian missions more cor-
dially probably than any other city in South
America. ‘The first Protestant church in South
America, built in 1819, found its home in Rio de
Janeiro. In this city is the only hospital supported
by South American churches. One Protestant
church in Rio de Janeiro raises $15,000 a year,
supports a missionary in Portugal, and conducts
fourteen Sunday-schools in the suburbs.

Walled Cities of China.—In China there are
over fifteen hundred walled cities in which there
are no white missionaries.

A $100,000 Buddhist Temple.— This and the
Mormon temple are the most pretentious houses of
worship in the Hawaiian Islands. Combating these
forces are seven American organizations doing
Christian mission-work. ‘There are 130 organized
churches and about 10,000 communicants. Your
Protestant papers are published in the islands.
The Hawaiians are disappearing rapidly. When
the missionaries first came, they found about
150,000 natives on the islands. ‘To-day. there are
only about 20,000 full-blooded natives and as many
more who have some Hawaiian blood. ‘The white
man did not only bring the Gospel to these islands ;

the money-makers who followed the missionaries

brought all the vices of the white man — gambling,
the social evil, and drunkenness.

Los Angeles, Cal.—Rev. John McDavid is work-
ing with fine success in Los Angeles. St. Paul’s,
his charge in that city, numbers sixty-six souls,
forty communicants, and eleven voting members.
During the quarter ending with June the congre-
gation contributed $163.15 for all purposes. — Rev.

McDavid has also begun work in Oakland, Cal.
The latest service held there was attended by
eighteen persons. — The Sunday-schools of the Cali-
fornia and Nevada congregations continue to give
fine support toward keeping the only Lutheran col-
ored worker on the Pacific coast.

What about the Children?— What are the
churches doing for the children? Only about one
half of the 53,000,000 children in our country are
enrolled in religious schools of any creed. Even if
some churches are able to say that they are holding
their own, what about the rest? Who is holding
them? <As a whole, the Protestant churches are
not holding their own. In 1916, when the last
official religious census was taken, the reported en-
rolment in Protestant religious schools of all kinds
was 21,888,521. In 1920 this number had shrunk
to only 15,617,060, according to statistics gathered
by the Interchurch Movement. Aside from the
150,000 Protestant children who are attending
Christian day-schools and, possibly, 250,000 more
who are getting some religious teaching on week-
days, Protestant boys and girls average only twenty-
four hours of religious instruction a year, which
they receive in Sunday-schools. But much of this
Sunday-school work is done by teachers who are
untrained and unguided. The public schools pro-
vide one supervisor for each hundred teachers, but
in the Sunday-schools of many churches there is no
supervision at all. Were the secular education of
the children of our country carried on in the same
poverty-stricken manner in which most Protestant
churches care for the religious instruction of their
boys and girls, a ery of protest would arise to high
heaven. There are churches that spend three times
as much money every year for their music and twice
as much for their janitor service as they do for the
religious training of their children.

Strange Coincidences. — Miss Search and Miss
Hunt went to serve in a China mission on the
same boat. At a certain Chinese mission-station
there are working a Miss Dresser, a Miss Pillow,
and a Miss Couch. In another we find a Miss
Gone and a Miss Went.

A Famous Preacher. — Two Negroes were talk-
ing together one Saturday night. “You'd better
come to church to-morrow,” one of them said to
the other; “Brother Johnson is goin’ ter preach.”
“Who’s Brother Johnson?” asked the other con-
temptuously. “Huh! Don’t you know Brother
Johnson? Well, you ts behind the times fo’ shuah;
fo’ that man’s known from the ho-risin’ to the Thos
settin’ and plumb up to the ho-sannahs.”