Women's national Home Mission Boards and Societies are of primary importance, for upon them rests the responsibility of the administration of all women's Home Mission activities. The earnest, prayerful planning of the Boards provides the methods of work for societies, the literature and the effective forwarding of the many lines of service on the field.
The Boards with painstaking, loving care seek to meet the constantly growing requirements of the fields committed to them, many times attaining almost the impossible in erecting buildings and responding to the appeals from people and places lacking the gospel ministry, and needing desperately the provision of a school or a hospital. Let us remember that the Boards can be strong and effective for the kingdom only as the societies and churches through their vitalizing prayers and their strengthening gifts make it possible.
The most important and basic place in all this organization structure must be assigned to the women's, young women's and children's missionary society, auxiliary, or mission band, in the local church. Here in the local society each one finds her particular place and work. Here loyalty for the denomination of our choice finds scope and nourishment. Here through prayers, letters, leaflets, the presence of missionary speakers, we come into close fellowship with those consecrated ones of our own household of faith who stand in the lonely, difficult places as our representatives, ministering of the things of Christ to those in need. Here our responsibility for maintaining the special work committed to our society is found.
To obtain a renewal of purpose, a vitalizing vision either of a personality or an enterprise, to create a fresh enthusiasm, we must turn from the familiar aspects of the subject to a first-hand thought, or view. We need to be freshly introduced, as it were. For this purpose let us renew our thought of the essential task of Home Missions. It is to Christianize our home land-Christianize, shorn of the formal services and forms of activity with which we associate the word means simply to reproduce in our own lives and strive to bring to others as accurately as possible the spirit and method of the life of Jesus, the Christ.
The source of power which will make possible the Christ-life in us, and the dynamic for all missionary service and power will be found only in Him; "Ye in me and I in you"—"That ye may be witnesses unto me," are His words.
Let us then each seek Christ afresh, that we may know and realize Him as if finding Him for the first time. Let us read the Gospels as if we had never before heard the story of His life. Let us come again to Calvary. Let us by prayer and communion open all the avenues of our being to His presence and spirit.
Let us seek a new realization and understanding of His character and purpose. For what did Christ live? Ringing in His every word and expressed in his every deed is the key note of His life—Love. He lived to express, to incarnate love—the love of the father for His children. We see Him turn from honor, riches, from what others value and strive for, that he might manifest His love and teach others how to love. The love of Jesus embodied more than it is possible for us to comprehend in the height and depth and fulness of its meaning.
His love expressed perfect understanding and sympathy. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."
His love was filled with compassion and tender pity for the needy and suffering. "Jesus, moved with compassion, touched him and saith unto him, Be thou clean."
His love felt human sorrow. At the tomb of Lazarus "Jesus wept."