The Lutherans of Friesland, a province of Holland, contribute to the work of the Bremen or North German Society.
In the Netherlands there are small Lutheran organizations which aid in the work of the German missionaries in the Dutch East Indies.
American Societies.
The missionary work of the American Lutheran Church is accomplished both by the various large bodies and by organizations within the synods whose sole purpose is missionary work. From the Norwegians and Danes in America, contributions are sent to the missionary societies of the fatherland, such as the Home Mission to the Santals. There are nine American Norwegian organizations--the United Church, the Norwegian Synod, the Hauge’s Synod, the Norwegian Free Church, the Brethren Synod, the Elling Synod, the Santal Committee, the Zion Society and the Intersynodical Orient Mission--which in 1915 contributed $235,000, an average of sixty-nine cents per member. The General Synod contributed in the same year $117,000, an average of thirty-three cents. The General Council contributed $119,000, an average of twenty-four cents. The United Synod in the South[[4]] contributed $20,000, an average of forty cents per member. The Synodical Conference contributed $56,000, an average of six cents per member. Not included in the above figures is the work of the Synodical Conference for the American negro which amounted in 1910-12 to $66,000. The Joint Synod of Ohio contributed $16,800, an average of eleven cents per member. The Danish Society contributed $7,825, an average of fifty-five cents per member. The Iowa Synod contributed $16,000. It is estimated that the average yearly per capita contribution of American Lutherans to missions is twenty-three cents. The fields of American Lutheranism include Africa, Madagascar, China, India, Japan, the East Indies and South America.
[4]. Contributions not reported through the regular treasurer bring the per capita contribution to fifty-three cents.
It has been impossible in this brief account to give a separate place to the work of women’s or other auxiliary societies, which have contributed so largely to the work of missions. The actual financial additions brought by these societies may be easily computed, but not the interest which they have roused, the information which they have disseminated, the prayers which they have offered. May they long continue their generous work!
Many persons and some churches hold the opinion that missionary work can be done in a haphazard fashion, each man following what he believes to be the divine direction within him. Devoted men who counted their lives as nothing so that they might serve Christ have gone to preach to the Hindu without understanding his language or being able to speak it and have counted with ill-founded joy thousands of converts who had in reality not comprehended a word of the message. The coast of Africa has within its soil the bodies of many missionaries who alone, unsupported by home supplies, unfitted for their task, have laid down their lives in a glorious but useless endeavor.
Enterprises of this sort have not been a part of missionary work in the Lutheran Church, which believes that the foundation of the Indian or African Church must be laid surely and substantially, no matter how slowly, that adult baptism cannot take place without understanding, that only those may share the communion of Christ’s Church who know His Gospel, and that with the precious message to the soul there should go also the uplifting of the body so that it may become a worthy vessel.