Vol. XLI.
MAY, 1887.
No. 5.
American Missionary Association.
We have reached the half-way turning point of our fiscal year. With March the first six months of our year ended. Our mission stations are all manned. Churches and schools, with all their multitudinous outshoots of work, are taxing the energies, abilities and devotion of our workers. Never in the history of this Association was the work more manifestly blessed of God, or more imperative in its calls for vigorous prosecution. Our schools are crowded. Multitudes of students are turned away because there is no room to receive them. The calls pour in upon us from every quarter for more dormitories and recitation buildings—for more help for worthy and needy students, for more missionaries, preachers and teachers, to go into regions most destitute and urgent for relief. Whole counties are reported in which there is neither a church nor a school; whole sections of country in which there are thousands and tens of thousands of people for whose souls no one seems to care. Revivals are reported in connection with nearly all our churches, and the evidence is overwhelming that great harvests are waiting the reaping in almost every direction. What are we to do? What would the churches have us do? We are their servants; we report to them the outlook; we send out to them the call; we impatiently await their authoritative response. That response must be in money.
Our financial situation is this: At the present writing we have paid out $14,555.84 more than we have received the current year. This, with the debt coming over from last year, makes us $20,339.55 in arrears. It is impossible either to arrest or cut down the work at this point in the year so as to secure relief. But even if we could, would we be justified in doing it? Our total receipts last year were $335,704.20. Our appeal for the current year is $350,000. Our total receipts up to March 31st were $127,605.47. Our readers can very easily figure out for themselves whether any blame can rightfully be charged to those who have the management of the Association in hand, and also whether, in view of the facts, the thought of curtailment should be cherished for a moment.
On the basis of our receipts last year, we should have received by the end of March $167,852, and on the basis of our appeal, $175,000. It will be seen, therefore, that in the prosecution of the work we have not exceeded the appeal of this year, nor even the scale of last year. Here, then, presses our problem. Summer is not a good time for collections. The necessity for special appeals, such as we have been obliged to make during the past few years towards the end of our fiscal year, has been as irksome and disagreeable to us as it has been to our friends. It is on this account we now raise the question: Cannot an effort be made during the next two months to so increase the contributions to the A. M. A. that the summer will find us delivered from possible embarrassment? It will necessitate earnest work on the part of our friends; but with such an important field urgently calling for the enlargement of missionary work, with so many evidences of the Divine approval resting upon it, and with so much ability in the possession of our friends, may we not hope that the churches will lay hold of the problem and solve it at once?