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HOME MISSION BOARD mi
radical changes In ewer work. Methods @€ approach and ways of doing things
are not inspired. The Gospel we preach is inspired and the goal we work
towards is divinely given. Tfeese earanot cfearagev
THE STARTING POINT FOB TOMORROW
Every generation begins its march of progress from its own campground.
The churches of today must meet the issues of tomorrow by traveling with
Christ towards tomorrow. They travel from where they are.
In our Home Mission work we recognize this fact and assume the responsibility
of lighting the way into the larger field of mission service. The Home
Mission Board recognizes that it is an agency of this Convention and has no
prerogatives or powers apart from those delegated to it by this Contention. It
feels, however, unless it has misunderstood the purpose for which it was
created, that its task is larger than that of administering the money given to it
for the various fields and projects generally understood and accepted as Home
Mission work. Its task includes also a study of religious conditions and needs
in the bounds of the Convention, with the purpose of keeping the Convention
informed as to its task as a missionary agency in evangelizing the homeland.
It stands to reason that in a changing social and economic order there must
be constantly arising new fields for mission activity and new conditions which
would necessitate changes in methods of approach and types of work, possibly,
in some instances, a complete readjustment if not an abandonment of certain
projects in the field heretofore occupied. Southern Baptists must meet in their
mission work the needs of a growing and changing civilization.
Nothing should be done simply because it has been done through all the
years; it should be done because it is needed in the evangelization of the
homeland. This will necessitate the making of surveys and the gathering of
data on the Home Mission tasks of this Convention; and we want you to know
that we consider ourselves a board of investigation and study on Home Mission
work as well as a board for the administration of Home Mission funds. We
face the eternal, unfolding, revealing, challenging future and looking to the ?
hills from whence cometh our strength, we gird our loins for a forward looking
program of Home Missions, traveling with Christ towards tomorrow.
If we would really understand the Home Mission task we must know what
the homeland is, for Home Missions is world-wide missions modified by and
adapted to the needs, conditions and life of the homeland; it is the first step
and the continuous requisite in the world-wide Gospel movement.
The homeland is not a matter of geography, simply. O, there is, of course,
a geographical homeland bounded and defined by degrees of latitude and longitude,
but the geographical homeland only fixes the bounds of the real homeland.
All our rivers, the lakes, hills, valleys and forests were here thousands of
years before the white man's foot ever touched our soil, and if on some fatal
night a plague were to smite our people, our plains would remain, our rivers
would run on as before and our forests would wave to the breezes, but our
homeland would be gone.
Our homeland is the human conditions found in the homeland territory;
it is the fifty million people and all they are interested in: their railroads,
their cities, their homes, their papers, their books, their churches, their factories,
their stores, their schools; every institution and every enterprise into
which they have thrust their lives. These fifty million people are held together
by an unfathomable spirit of unity. There is something common to them
all. They thrill with pride at the recounting of the past history of their
country and they glow with enthusiasm when the future of their country is
dwelt upon. They are grouped with an invisible oneness and bound together
by the bonds of civic pride and patriotism. Home Missions is the fitting of the
Gospel of Jesus into their life and through the Gospel the making of the life *
of Jesus triumphant over it all.
have must is. our sion fields To We country stations, go come many, entered, deeper must together as missions go the in far the into our Sunday as missionaries in thinking the we are our Gospel can, schools only thinking than and statistics—the at as organized, this then, work far and if as when and we we the would see can, number the church amount the homeland and know lost of then houses of what churches, saved, money into and Home built, the the spent. the Missions under-
Gospel life mis­ new of We