Home Missions in Action

In Short

Written amid the Great War of 1915–1916 under the watchword "Thy will be done on earth," Home Missions in Action charts how American Protestant organizations built churches, schools, hospitals, and community centers across a sprawling republic. Tracing roots from colonial Dutch refugees to frontier revivals, industrial mining camps, and immigrant enclaves, the book argues that Christian social regeneration must conquer domestic vice, ignorance, industrial neglect, and secular rationalism if nations are ever to achieve peace. It endures as a primary document of institutional zeal meeting raw social dislocation.

The Story

The work opens by recalibrating its mandate. Originally titled "The Church at Its Task," the committee shifts focus to "The Church and the Nations" after world conflict exposes moral decay and brute materialism. Grounded in the prayer "Thy kingdom come," the text asserts that global peace requires domestic social conditions drawn into the divine scope.

Part one establishes Home Missions as a foundational national force. Tracing roots from Rev. Jeremiah Porter launching Chicago Presbyterianism in an 1833 Fort Dearborn carpenter shop to the compounding self-support and westward outreach of Portland’s First Presbyterian Church, the narrative proves that small seed-gifts yield vast institutional harvest. Yet this growth collides with war’s moral damage—portrayed via Walter Walsh as a rot of the mother-land’s soul—and industrial interdependence highlighted by John Hay and Josiah Strong.

Part two confronts reclaiming work among populations scarred by tradition or neglect. At a Medicine Lodge camp, a thousand generations of Native American dance dissolve into a quiet Christian prayer-meeting where English-speaking interpreters bridge the gap. In New Mexico, a missionary nurse confronts fatalistic "Asi me toco" resignation during a diphtheria epidemic, saving fourteen of fifteen children with antitoxin.

Part three measures the educative imperative. Citing high illiteracy in the South and West, early school dropout realities (only six of a thousand high school graduates in representative city samples), and the stealthy political coordination of Mormonism in Utah and Idaho, the book champions Christian academies and campus contact. It traces American educational passion back to Dutch religious refugees fleeing Philip II.

Part four moves to healing and integration. Mission hospitals—like Spelman Seminary’s MacVicar Hospital in Atlanta fighting smallpox, or Mary Isabel Allen Memorial Hospital in Kentucky, or Dr. Grace Atkins treating hookworm in Porto Rico—combat physical misery. Industrial alienation in mining camps (Windber, Pennsylvania; Granite City, Illinois) and radical anti-religious socialist Sunday-schools are met by peripatetic Slavish and Bohemian girl missionaries and transformed Italian congregations singing bilingual hymns before dispatching missionaries back to Italy.

Part five analyzes sources of power. Confronting college classrooms where rationalistic professors shake student faith, and industrial systems claiming 45,000 lives annually through negligence, the text pivots to the foundational machinery: summer schools at Chautauqua engaging 5,000 women, national mission boards, and local church auxiliaries holding the line in lonely outposts.

The arc concludes not with a final fictional curtain, but with an extensive catalog of contemporary source texts—from Dubois and Kephart to Rauschenbusch—signaling that individual salvation and social integration form a continuous, unfinished civic architecture.

How It Unfolds

Shifting the wartime horizon The text pivots from domestic church organization to international catastrophe, reframing local charity as a prerequisite for global peace. It establishes the foundational petition "Thy will be done on earth" as an operational blueprint rather than a passive hope against brute materialism.

Planting frontier foundations Early chapters log historical footprints from Fort Dearborn pulpits to Pacific coast societies reinvesting millions in foreign and domestic uplift. A student-led berry-picking fundraiser and portable organ morph into a community-built timber church and parsonage anchored by devoted missionaries.

Confronting traditional fatalism Moving to Native American camps and New Mexican villages, missionary nurses break through fatalistic acceptance of disease and four-day dance exhaustion with sanitary intervention and antitoxin. The contrast highlights empirical physical rescue over entrenched cultural stasis and community immorality.

Mapping national educational deficits Statistical tables on illiteracy and grammar-school attrition expose blind spots across southern, rural, and island territories. Mormon religion classes running adjacent to public instruction present a distinct civic challenge met by Christian academies and targeted personal persuasion.

Healing bodies and industrial rifts Medical missions tackle smallpox, hookworm, and industrial carnage in steel and mining towns isolated from American assimilation. Slavish and Bohemian Bible women step in as peripatetic settlements to steady shattered working-class homes against saloon and radical secular lures.

Singing across borders An Italian mission transforms via self-repair, dramatic Bible readings, and Italian-language hymns before sixteen converts return across the sea carrying Bibles. Local resistance from traditional priests sharpens the communal triumph of a living, vernacular faith.

Mobilizing the auxiliary ranks The final movement grounds institutional endurance in Chautauqua summer institutes engaging 5,000 women and local church mission auxiliaries. Organization trumps isolation, binding rural outposts to national oversight through prayerful stewardship and dedicated supply lines.

The People

Rev. Jeremiah Porter wants to anchor Christian worship on the western frontier; geographic isolation and a tiny three-hundred-soul outpost at Fort Dearborn stand in the way; he ends up instituting multiple enduring Chicago centers of Christian influence.

Rev. Aratus Kent wants a viable regional Christian ministry across northern Illinois and Wisconsin; a vast two-hundred-mile wilderness vacuum with zero clergy stands in the way; he ends up cataloging twenty-five churches and fifteen ministers within those bounds.

Dr. Grace Atkins wants proper clinical and surgical treatment for suffering Porto Ricans; island-wide hookworm affliction affecting ninety percent of workers and initial lack of facilities stand in the way; she ends up founding San Juan’s pioneering forty-five-bed hospital.

The Slavish or Bohemian girl missionary wants to stabilize mining camp households; hazardous pit conditions, employer negligence claiming one-in-a-hundred lives, and alien ethnic segregation stand in the way; she ends up operating as a peripatetic Christian settlement comforting widows and holding boys from saloons.

The Italian mission congregation wants meaningful vernacular faith and social belonging; aggressive priestly opposition shaking fists and local dance-hall allure stand in the way; they end up renovating their hall, singing Italian hymns, and dispatching sixteen Bible-bearing missionaries back to Italy.

Christian college students want intellectual stability matching their training; direct classroom exposure to rationalistic and materialistic philosophy stands in the way; they end up navigating acute spiritual adjustment shocks without sufficient foundational mental margins provided by lecturers.

In Its Own Voice

Addressing the reality of global contact following the outbreak of war, the author highlights John Hay's address to the First Hague Conference:

"Next to the great fact of a nation's independence is the great fact of its interdependence."

Analyzing industrial globalization through the lens of institutional gaps, Dr. Josiah Strong diagnoses the contemporary international crisis:

"Evidently the increasing interdependence of the nations is creating new international rights and duties, but there is no world legislature to recognize and legalize them, there is no world judiciary to interpret and apply them, and there is no world executive to enforce and vitalize them."

Defending child labor laws and institutional schooling against premature economic exploitation, the text anchors educational policy in vocational viability:

"making a living being an indispensable foundation for making a life."

What It's Really About

Beneath its institutional survey of churches, schools, and hospitals lies an urgent question: can a democratic republic survive industrial capitalism, moral brutality, and unassimilated immigrant enclaves without spiritual integration? The book argues that civilization decays from within through blatant materialism, employer-inflicted industrial carnage, and fatalistic resignation unless active Christian intervention transforms both inner motive and outer social structure. It treats Home Missions not as peripheral charity, but as the load-bearing pillar of national survival and international peace. Religion is presented as a practical civic engine—building hospitals, teaching English, organizing recreation, and cultivating transnational loyalty—that converts raw economic migrants and isolated frontier settlers into conscious stewards of a unified moral order.

Why Read It Today

Historians of religion, sociologists of American immigration, and readers fascinated by the institutional machinery of early twentieth-century reform will love this text. Reading it feels like walking through a vast architectural blueprinted archive: methodical, earnest, rich with concrete statistics, local anecdotes, and sweeping geographical ambition from Fort Dearborn to Porto Rico. What stays with you is the startling human granularity—a Slavish girl managing industrial trauma, Italian congregants mailing Bibles back across the Atlantic, or a nurse breaking a New Mexico diphtheria epidemic block by block.

Yet the difficulties are plain. The prose carries the bureaucratic optimism and moral earnestness of a study-class manual rather than narrative intimacy. Period attitudes surface clearly: paternalistic assessments of Native American "savagery," moralized panics over anarchist Sunday-schools, and sweeping generalizations about immigrant non-assimilation. Readers must navigate a deeply white-Protestant-establishment framework that views complex cultural pluralism primarily as a problem to be redeemed or standardized. Furthermore, the final stretch resolves into a bibliography index rather than a dramatic thematic crescendo. For readers patient with missionary shorthand and imperial-era civic paternalism, the book rewards attention with a vivid cross-section of how early-century America tried to engineer a soul for its industrial machine.