CHURCH WORK.
| Number of Churches | 127 |
| Number of Missionaries | 103 |
| Number of Church members | 7,896 |
| Added during the year | 1,197 |
| Scholars in our Sunday-schools | 15,109 |
These statistics show a substantial gain over last year. Seven new churches have been organized during the year. These are situated as follows: Decatur and Riverside Plantation, Ala.; Hammond, La.; University Church at New Orleans; Petty, Texas; Combs, Ky.; and Andersonville, Ga. The hills and valleys of the old prison pen at Andersonville doubtless sometimes echo with the songs, and with the prayers of these Negro disciples, loyal to the heart’s core to New England Congregationalism.
Five churches have been dropped from the list this year, as changed conditions of communities made it unwise to continue them.
There has been during the year a quiet Christian work throughout the South, which has borne gratifying fruits, over 1,000 having confessed Christ for the first time. The Sunday-school enrollment has increased by nearly 2,000. The contributions of these churches also show a healthful increase. They contributed this year for benevolence, outside of their own work, $2,322.51, and for their own church purposes, $16,014.50, making a grand total of $18,337.01. This was an increase over the previous year of $610.96 in their benevolences, and $3,075.61 in the total. This is an average contribution of $2.32 per member for every man, woman and child in these churches. The average membership of these churches, planted among a humble people who have no Congregational trend nor training, stands at the encouraging number of 62 for each church, while the average membership for each Congregational Church west of the Mississippi is only 43. And these people in the South are loyal Congregationalists. Although “a wild olive tree and graffed in among the branches, they already partake of the root and fatness of the olive tree.” The old argument urged by their Baptist brethren that the Bible tells of John the Baptist, but no where of John the Congregationalist, has lost its power to shake their faith in the church of Paul and John Robinson. An old black man recently arose in a prayer-meeting and most solemnly, with eager voice and emphatic gesticulation, exclaimed: “I am a Congregational, and I mean to continue a Congregational till I get up yonder,
‘Where congregations ne’er break up,
And Sabbaths never end.’”
They have found Congregationalism in their old hymn book, which is the next thing to their Bible.
At the annual meeting in Cleveland in 1882, in the report of the Committee on Church Work, is found the following: “The rate of progress during the last seventeen years has been uniformly constant, about five churches per year. * * The question now comes, whether it is not quite time to change the rate by doubling it; at least to quicken the pace.” Do the facts show that this suggestion has been followed? Since 1882 fifty-five churches have been organized, an average of eleven per year for the five years since 1882—more than double the old rate of five per year; another illustration of our Lord’s words, “Be it unto you according to your faith.” In 1882, 709 were added to the churches; in 1887, 1,197 were added. But the advancement in the Sunday-school work in our churches is still more remarkable. The total Sunday-school enrollment, as it appears in the annual report of 1882, was 7,835, but we are able to report this year an enrollment of 15,109, an increase in these five years of 7,274, or nearly 100 per cent.
These years have witnessed marvelous progress in systematic care for the children and youth by the churches of the Association.
The year just closing has been a year of building activity in the church work. Five new meeting houses have been erected; four of these are among the mountain people and one among the freedmen. One new feature in our church work is the organization of two churches composed principally of Congregationalists from the North, who have taken up their residence in the South. They needed help and organized under the care of the Association. Although we have no great Pentecostal baptism to record this year, we reverently speak our thanks “that the Lord has added to the church almost daily, such as are being saved.”