The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1927, Page 170

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170

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

Church (Pastor Frenz) were damaged. The walls of
the former were left intact; but part of the roof was
torn off and almost all the art glass windows were
crushed. Bethlehem Church was right in the path
of the storm. Its two spires were knocked down,
and the art glass windows in the west wall were
broken. Bethlehem’s hall, about three blocks away
from the church, was badly damaged. At the time
of the storm the primary grades of the school were
on the first floor of this building, and the Ladies’
Aid had a meeting in the basement; but not a single
child or woman was even injured. It seems that not
a Lutheran was among the killed. Thank God!

Atlanta, Ga. — Pastor Alston has received a
pulpit gown from Pastor D. M. Kleist, Bogota, N. J.,
in answer to his appeal in the September number of
the PIONEER.

Lutheran Negro Missions in Brazil.— One of the
pastors of our Brazil District, Rev. Aug. Drews,
Solidez, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, has been doing
missionary work among the Negroes in the vicinity
of his churches for the past eight years. At present
he is working at five different places. At Solidez the
Negroes have their own chapel and a school attended
by twenty-five pupils. The white congregations of
the Brazil District have helped the colored people
of Solidez to get their own chapel and school. The
chapel bears the name Capella da Redempcao (Re-
deemer Chapel).

Wisconsin Synod’s Missions. — In its Home Mis-
sions the Wisconsin Synod has a staff of 98 pastors
and 6 teachers, who are serving 105 missions and
202 stations. In its Indian Mission among the
Apaches of Arizona there are 10 missionaries, 2 wo-
man teachers, 2 assistants and 3 interpreters. This
mission is caring for 267 Indian children, of whom
sixty-seven are in an orphanage. In conjunction
with the other synods constituting the Synodical
Conference it helps to carry on an extensive mission
among the freedmen. Jour pastors of the Wis-
consin Synod are working in Poland, and six
students of theology are preparing to go to that
country.

An Aged Medical Missionary. — Dr. Anna §.

_ Kugler, who founded woman’s medical work in the
Guntur Lutheran Mission, India, in 1884, and ranks
among the outstanding woman physicians of the
world, has returned to India in spite of the fact that
she is over seventy years of age.

; Lutheran Missions in New Guinea. — At the end
of last year the Lutheran mission-force in New

_ Guinea numbered ninety-one white adult laborers.

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During 1926 over 3,000 adults and children were
baptized. There are at present more than 19,000
baptized native Christians on the island in the care
of Lutheran missionaries, and the Lutheran laborers
are estimated to be in contact with 135,000 natives.
The work is carried on by the Iowa Synod and the
United Lutheran Church of Australia.

A Large Bequest for Missions. — One of the
largest bequests ever received in this country for Lu-
theran Foreign Mission work was left by the lateP.A.
Peterson, a furniture manufacturer of Rockford, IIl.,
to the Foreign Mission Board of the Augustana
Synod. The bequest amounts to about $500,000
and will be used in the synod’s mission-fields in
China and Africa.

All He Had. — At the close of a mission-lecture
a mountain boy of thirteen, whose parents were
desperately poor, came up to the lecturer and from
the pocket of his overalls drew two coins, a half dol-
lar and a quarter, which he put into the missionary’s
hand. Knowing the conditions, the pastor of the
boy asked him the following day, “Did you really
mean to give both of those coins to the missions?”
“Why, yes,” he said in a somewhat surprised tone;
“it was all I had.” “An unreasonable child,” some
will say. :

Statistics. — Our country has a population of
106,000,000, and 55,000,000 are unchurched. Of
our total population 51,000,000 live in the country
and 55,000,000 in towns and cities. The Indians on
reservations number 350,000; of Negroes there are
11,000,000, and the foreign-born Americans number
35,000,000. Of mountain-dwellers our country has
3,000,000.

Fifty per Cent. Growth in Twenty Years. —
Though the Protestant churches in our country lost
half a million members last year, largely through
a severe pruning of membership lists, which carried
names they should not have carried for years, there
has, for all that, been a net gain in the membership |
of Protestant churches last year of 489,556. Detailed
figures of the twenty-five leading Protestant denom-
inations show that the membership in these has
grown from 18,762,948 in 1906 to 27,466,470 in
1926. But is it not a pity for all these gains that
the Church has such great “back-door” losses? Are
our congregations doing their duty in the way of
conserving their membership? Are the pastors
doing their full duty as shepherds of their flocks?
Are the members doing their full duty by word and
deed to prevent these sad losses? ‘These are ques-
tions that we all would do well earnestly to consider.