Nebraska by M. E. Ellis

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 18, 1909

Nebraska

By M. E. Ellis

THE net increase in membership [in this conference] during the year was three hundred five, or an increase of thirteen per cent. The total number of Sabbath-keepers now in the conference is 2,630. The tithe receipts average $12.99 per capita.

Two church buildings have been erected, but no new churches were organized during 1908. The church at North Platte, through the efforts in Bible work and tent-meetings, more than doubled its membership last year, and the church in Hastings lacked only two members of having done the same. The membership of these churches is respectively twenty-one and sixty.

The largest increase in any one line of activity during the year was in the offerings to foreign missions, $14,785.59 being the total amount, of which $2,858.59 came from the Sabbath-schools, and 2,383.46 from the young people. This puts us nicely over the ten-cent-a-week-per-capita line, with between two and three cents a week per capita to spare, even including in our basis of reckoning our two hundred twenty-one isolated Sabbath-keepers who are not church-members, and our two hundred two Sabbath-keepers who meet regularly in seventeen companies, but are not organized into churches.

The work done in missionary branches has also been increasing quarter by quarter, and the last three months of 1908, forty-one of our fifty-one churches reported work done—eight churches more than we have ever before heard from in a single quarter.

The young people's work is organized in more churches in our conference than

ever before, and those concerned are responding nobly in every line of missionary effort proposed. Our young people raised last year for various enterprises in home mission fields, $1,085.95, one item of which was three hundred thirty dollars for a small printing outfit, which was installed in the Hunstville school. One hundred five young people have joined the various churches in our conference this year, the majority of them by baptism. The largest number of church-schools we have ever had—twenty—is now in operation.

The prospering hand of the Lord has been very manifest in our work, but instead of looking complacently at this report, and forgetting to take longer strides forward this year, let us take heart from the blessings of the past, and remember that there are infinite possibilities before every individual, church, and conference that will work in right lines and in harmony with God's will. — M. E. Ellis, in Nebraska Reporter.