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Show 1916 Home Department 25 for the St. Louis City Missionary Society. For these purposes $2,000 was raised on the spot, and the balance was assured before the teams left the city. Good for St. Louis! Cleveland. If any palms are to be awarded, Cleveland should have a good share. The convention there was highly satisfactory in attendance and in spirit. The large Baptist church on Euclid Avenue was filled at the day sessions and fine audiences greeted the evening speakers in the Armory. Congregationalism is splendidly organized in Ohio, and we owe much to Secretaries Royce, Rothrock, and their associates for the success of this movement so far as our denomination was concerned. Effective follow-up work is assured. Toledo closed the series and closed it well. Those who faced that great audience of men in Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church will never forget the sight. The Congregational men met for luncheon to formulate plans looking to a simultaneous canvass of our churches on January 16. Pastors and lay leaders cooperated to make the convention the religious event of the year. The American Board missionaries who have aided in the setting up of these conventions are F. P. Beach, Giles G. Brown, C. H. Burr, F. F. Goodsell, E. D. Kellogg, A. R. Mather, H. A. Maynard, A. A. McBride, E. C. Partridge. IN THE EAST Fewer conventions have been held. The one at Portland had its difficulties in losing two executive secretaries in succession. Giles Brown, of Ceylon, did valiant service in rounding out a hasty preparation. Nearly 950 men were enrolled and the sessions stirred real enthusiasm. Follow-up plans are working out through denominational channels. Boston. The Congregationalists led with an enrollment of 1,075, out of a total of 2,581 registrations. The rally gathered 250 Congregational men in historic Park Street Church to face the fact that only twenty-eight per cent of the membership of forty-one of our churches reporting were giving anything to missions, and only fifty per cent were systematically aiding in church support. A dozen Every- Member Canvasses are now in progress, with good reports coming in. Manchester. Here the feature was the cooperation of the outside towns. Delegates came from ninety towns by special car and motor. The total registrations passed the 1,250 mark. Ten of our missionary force are planning to help the preparation in the cities that are still to hold conventions in the next four months. MISSIONS AND BUSINESS An Editorial which Appeared in the St. Louis Republic of December 2,1915 The supercilious citizen who has doubts about missions and the missionary spirit ought to drop in casually at the great Laymen's Missionary Convention now in session at the Third Baptist Church. Many Americans, 1915 model, do not believe in foreign missions. These gentlemen go on in their indifference or opposition, serenely ignoring the fact that they themselves are the direct descendants of persons who wore the skins of wild beasts and drank blood out of the skulls of their enemies, and that these ancestors of theirs were converted by missionaries from Italy and Asia in the days when it was further from Antioch or Rome to the forests of Germany than it is now from St. Louis to Shanghai. To make a case against foreign missions it would be necessary to blot out all history. No wonder the modern business man believes in missions! Business has learned of the missionaries. We read of American sewing machines in Turkish harems, American kerosene in transit across the mountains of China, American railroad cars threading the passes of the Andes, and American rice mills-made in Moline, |
