The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889

At Straight, the young men receive instruction in printing, carpentry, and floriculture; the young women, needlework, cooking and housekeeping.

At Tillotson, carpentry is taught the young men; needlework, cooking and housekeeping, the young women.

Our normal schools at Memphis, Tenn., Macon, Ga., and Williamsburg, Ky., have carpentry, printing, and other industrial training for the young men, and training in the various arts of home life for the young women.

At Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Macon, Thomasville, Athens, Ala., Marion, Mobile, Pleasant Hill, Sherwood, and other normal, graded and common schools, the young women are trained in the things which they will most need in making comfortable and pleasant homes. Indeed, we make it our special care that the girls shall everywhere in our work be taught these things, so essential to the uplifting of a people. In many places where we have no schools, the pastor's wife, or our special lady missionary, is doing this same kind of work.

THEOLOGICAL SCHOOLS

At Fisk, Talladega, Tougaloo and Straight, there have been during the year theological classes. The Theological Department of Howard University, at Washington, has been supported by this Association. Even in some of our normal schools Biblical instruction has been given to some who are now preachers and some who intend to preach. But the number trained has not been sufficient to supply our pastorless churches. The need of a general theological seminary for our churches in the South is becoming imperative. The extensive enlargement of our church work, which ought to begin at once, can scarcely be made successful without this. Who is the one to seize this opportunity to establish an institution of untold possibilities in advancing the Kingdom of Christ on earth—a place where ministers shall be prepared for the work in the South and for foreign missions in Africa?

STATISTICS OF EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE SOUTH

CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH

Our church work has necessarily been of slow growth. Churches might have been multiplied, had we thought it best to lower the standard near the level of the old churches, and acknowledge wild ravings as belonging in the worship of God. We have believed that our churches should mean new ideas and intelligent worship. We have knowingly lent our aid to nothing else.

These churches are gathered into Associations, and the fine bodies of pastors and delegates which come together in these, present a most emphatic testimony to the value of the work done in the past, and are an earnest of what the future will show.

Revivals—some of them of great power—have been reported to us from the Plymouth Church, Washington, D.C., Fisk University, Memphis, Jonesboro, Sherwood, Glen Mary, Oakdale, Athens and Pine Mountain, Tenn.; Montgomery and Florence, Ala.; Tougaloo and Jackson, Miss.; Straight University, New Orleans, and Corpus Christi, Texas. Many others of our churches have had a quiet work of grace, by which additions have been made to them.

We report new churches at Glen Mary and Athens, Tenn.; Roseland, La; Fort Payne and Alco, Ala. This makes the whole number of our churches in the South 136.

Besides these churches, there are our churches among the Indians and the work of gathering the Chinese into churches in California.

We are praying and laboring for the eternal salvation of millions, the establishment through the grace of God, the atoning blood of Christ, and the work of the Holy Spirit, of character which shall meet the tests of the Judgment Day and the needs of eternal association with purity. In aiming at this ultimate result, our missionaries are doing a work of inestimable importance for the nation and the world. They are successfully working upon some of the great problems of this country, which armies and millions of money have failed, and of necessity must fail, to solve. Nothing but the "glorious gospel of the blessed God," taught from the pulpit and the teacher's desk, and illustrated in the eloquent lives of consecrated missionaries, can change the idol worshiper from heathen China, the wild-man of the West, the half-heathen Negro so recently in the cruel degradation of slavery, those of our own race in the bonds of ignorance and immorality—so that they shall have and manifest an intelligent and worthy manhood and womanhood. Nothing else can meet cruel prejudice, which would forever deny full manhood or womanhood to those called to it by God himself, and pour oil upon its angry waves until they shall be still.

Our plan of work in the South is often misunderstood and often misrepresented. It is not our plan to force the races together. It is not our plan to agitate questions which arouse the prejudices of the Southern people. We do not agitate. Quietly, steadily, patiently, lovingly, our missionaries seek to lift up the degraded, enlighten the ignorant, and bring them all to Christ, well knowing that bitter prejudice cannot forever stand opposed to an enlightened, cultivated, Christian people, whatever may be their color or their past condition. We have nothing to do with the question of social equality in the South any more than we have in the North. We are not even trying to force the races together in the churches. We have no principles which would prevent our aiding two churches in the same town—one with a membership of white, the other of colored people. We have done it. In our church work, we simply maintain that a Christian church should stand ready to fellowship any one whom Christ fellowships, that it should turn no one away because of his color, or because he, his father or his mother was a slave. We maintain that there is no Christian reason why there should be either State or local organizations of churches which will not fellowship churches whose memberships differ in race. We seek to establish churches and other institutions which dare interpret Christianity as Christ taught it, and which will not yield a Christian principle for enlarged statistics. There are caste churches enough in the South. No more are needed. If Congregationalism can go there true to its history, true to its real convictions, true to that gospel which successfully faced the bitter prejudices of Jew and Gentile with the broad invitation, "Whosoever will, may come," then it goes to become a mighty power and to win both a place for itself and other churches, in time, to accept the same broad interpretation of Christianity.

This Association has faith in the power of the gospel, and, under the reign of God, of the final triumph of the right. It is willing to enter the doors now so wide open for missionary work, and to wait, if need be, for that glory of the denomination, which is better than long tables of statistics, the glory of adhering to the right.

The time has now come when our church work can be greatly enlarged. Our schools have been doing their work, and scattering all through the South those who have learned what pure religion and spiritual worship mean, and they are ready and longing for something better than they find within their reach. We can now push our work as fast as the churches of the North will furnish the money. We most earnestly appeal for the means to enable us to greatly develop, during the coming year, this department of the work.

CHURCH WORK AMONG NEW SETTLERS IN THE SOUTH

Wonderful and more wonderful tales are now reaching the world of the unlimited resources of the South. They are a new discovery even to the South itself. These stories of lumber and mineral wealth are turning the tide thitherward. Towns and cities are beginning to spring up as they have in the West, and both great need and rich opportunity call for immediate missionary work. This new population is mostly, as yet, from the North, though many from Wales, especially miners, and from other countries of the old world are beginning to come in. In the new towns they find no churches, in the old towns few whose ideas and customs can satisfy their minds and hearts. Here is a great opportunity. We can aid these people to establish churches which will emphasize that interpretation of the Gospel which we believe to be Christian.

In Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee we have already aided in establishing such churches which have connected themselves—and gladly so—with the regular State organizations of Congregational churches. No direful results have followed. No fanaticism is in it. It is simply doing the thing that is right and Christian. May such churches continue to multiply in the "New South" and help to make it new indeed.

STATISTICS OF CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH

THE MOUNTAIN WORK

Notwithstanding all the interest that has been manifested in our mountain work, we feel sure that the churches do not realize the magnitude of this field, the pressing needs of this people in the heart of our country, the wonderful opportunities before us, and the heart-stirring results already secured.

Large portions of seven States—three or four hundred counties—with a population of between two and three millions, claim our attention and call for our work. Here is a country of untold natural resources. Here is a people of good blood. Men of power have come from among them, and shown of what they are capable. Side by side with the Northern soldiers these mountaineers fought for the Union, or suffered in prisons rather than fight against it. Where our schools and churches have been established, men and women of worth and ability have stepped out and become strong helpers in building up new institutions. But away from these institutions and out of touch with the life of the towns, we find a class of people whose condition in itself is a Macedonian cry. Their windowless, stoveless, comfortless log cabins; their so-called schools, in which on the roughest benches conceivable, and without a desk, a slate, or a blackboard, with a teacher with unkempt hair, ragged and dirty clothes, possibly bare feet, who perhaps can scarcely read, the children study at the top of their voices—blab schools they call them—have for their course of study the spelling book alone, and are taught that a word is correctly spelled when all the letters are named, no matter in what order; their so-called churches, with perhaps a monthly meeting during the summer months, without Sunday-school, prayer meeting, or any form of church work, without morality as a requisite of church membership, with an illiterate ministry—a large number of the ministers cannot read even, and what is worse in many cases are drunken, impure, and in every way immoral; their children so easily gathered into day-schools and Sunday-schools, and so responsive to the work done for them—all these things appeal to us with pathetic power. Perhaps no missionary work ever showed greater results in so short a time than those obtained in these mountains.

We have here in two States eleven schools and twenty-two churches. Earnest calls have come to us to begin work in North Carolina and Alabama. We feel sure that if the churches could hear these appeals they would bid us respond. We have promised to begin work the coming year in these States, and we must look to the churches to furnish us the means. New lumbering and mining towns are springing up in this mountain country, and immediate missionary work is their only hope. A single one of these new towns, scarcely half-a-dozen years old, has had already more than a hundred men shot in it, and this awful work still goes on. This marvelously rich mineral region is sure to be filled in the near future with these mining towns, and unless the Christian work keeps pace with this kind of growth, this large territory will become notorious for bloody scenes as no portion of our land has ever been. Now is the time to preempt the country for Christ, by planting at strategic points the church and the Christian school, and through them to send forth to every part the pure, restraining and elevating influences of the gospel. God's call to us to do this work is loud and clear. Can we be faithful to Him and refuse to obey?

THE INDIANS

There are 260,000 Indians in this country. Compared with our great fields in the South, this is small. But there is an emphasis on this work which is not made by figures. Those who were native to this land have been made foreigners. Those who were the first to receive missionary work here, and who responded as readily as any heathen people ever did, are still largely pagans. While one Christian has been telling the Indians the story of the gospel, another calling himself a Christian has been shooting them. They have not yet had a full chance to learn what Christianity is. From place to place they have been pushed so that they have not had time to build their altars to the true God. We have wronged them and we owe them more than we shall pay. We shall meet our obligations but in part, when we do all we can to save them.

We have in bur Indian work eighteen schools and six churches, one new church having been added this year. In these, 68 missionaries have been doing noble service for the Indian and for the country. Shall the Indian problem forever perplex and shame both the country and the Church? Will not the churches enable us to send all the workers and do all the work needed to be done, and thus hasten the day when it can be joyfully proclaimed that the Indians are evangelized—no longer pagans and foreigners, but our fellow Christians and our fellow citizens?

STATISTICS OF INDIAN WORK

THE CHINESE

At our Annual Meeting in 1887 we were urged to bring the attention of the churches to this their phenomenal opportunity and duty, to give the gospel at short range and nominal cost to Asia's millions, and to support their hopeful and fruitful mission with all possible sympathy and aid. Again, in 1888, the need of immediate and great re-enforcement and enlargement was urged upon us.

Sixteen missions have been in operation during the year, and in them thirty-five workers, ten of them Chinese, have been employed. 1,380 have been enrolled as pupils in our schools—249 more than last year. 40 have this year come out of heathenism into Christianity, and the whole number who have confessed Christ in these missions and have been received as true converts is above 750. This means much for the Chinese in this country, and it means missionaries for China as well.

ENLARGEMENTS AND IMPROVEMENTS

Extensive building and improvements have been called for this year. At Lexington, Ky., the Chandler Normal School building is nearly completed at a cost of $15,000—the gift of Mrs. Chandler. At Williamsburg, Ky., thirteen acres of land have been secured for the enlargement of our very successful school there and the large industrial building moved upon it. $2,300 of the expense for this was paid by our generous friend, Mr. Stephen Ballard, of Brooklyn, N.Y. The increasing number of boarders at this institution has made necessary a new and larger dining room and kitchen, which have been built.

At Nashville, Tenn., a commodious two-story building of modern architecture, with rooms for physical culture and industrial training, has been erected.

At Memphis, Tenn., the Le Moyne school building, which in the winter was partially destroyed by fire, has been restored by the insurance.

At Knoxville, Tenn., the old church building, which was unfit for use, has been built over and a parsonage added, making a neat and convenient place of worship, and a home for the minister.

At Jellico, Tenn., the building used for church and school purposes has been considerably enlarged to meet the wants of a large Sunday-school and congregation.

At Grand View, Tenn., a new building has been put up for school and dormitory purposes.

At Pleasant Hill, Tenn., a large three-story Girls' Hall is in process of construction to enable the mountain girls to take advantage of this successful normal school.

At Pine Mountain, Tenn., the church building has been completed and furnished for school as well as church purposes and a teachers' home has been built.

At Beaufort, N.C., the large old school building known as Washburn Seminary, has been placed in the hands of the Association and refitted and a new normal school started in it. The church building, also, has received many greatly needed repairs.

At Chapel Hill, N.C., a brick church building, formerly belonging to the Southern Methodists, has been purchased for a school, and will be used also for church services.

At Macon, Ga., the Ballard School building has been completed and furnished at a cost of $14,000, and a Girls' Hall erected at a cost of $7,500—two more generous gifts of Mr. Stephen Ballard, of Brooklyn.

At Savannah, Ga., extensive repairs have been made on the Beach Institute building.

At Thomasville, Ga., the school facilities have been increased by moving a school building in the town, to the Connecticut Industrial School.

At McIntosh, Ga., land and buildings have been bought for the enlargement of this historic, successful and intensely interesting school.

At Woodville, Ga., the church and school building which had been nearly wrecked, first by the Charleston earthquake and then by a cyclone, has been made solid and comfortable.

At Byron, Ga., land has been bought and preparations have been made for a church building.

At Fairbanks, Fla., a school building and lot worth $2,500 have been given to us by Mrs. Merrill, of Bangor, Me., on condition that we maintain a school there.