Personal Work in Union College by M. E. ELLIS

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 21, 1915

Personal Work in Union College

By M. E. ELLIS

THE YOUNG MEN'S PERSONAL WORK Band of the College View (Nebr.) Missionary Volunteer Society has about fifty members, with one or two members being added each week. About seventy-five per cent of these young men are students of Union College.

The band is composed of live, energetic, Christian young men who believe in earnestly praying for the things they need and the blessings they want, and then just as earnestly working to help answer their own prayers. A weekly meeting is held on Sabbath afternoon, and if any of the members are absent it is usually because they are actually engaged in some personal effort for some one who needs help.

The band is subdivided into four auxiliary working committees, but we endeavor to keep in sight and in mind that personal, soul-winning efforts are the object of our banding together, that no auxiliary line of home missionary work can fill the place of that, and that we must be before we can do. The auxiliary committees are: the prayer and cottage meeting committee, a band of young men who attend the district prayer meetings in the village each Wednesday evening; the country meeting committee, whose work is not yet fully organized; the junior committee, who join with a similar band from the Young Lady Personal Workers in studying junior methods and holding weekly meetings with the junior young people; and the literature committee.

One aggressive move by the last-named committee was the raising of $100 for tracts, and the placing of two tracts on the Armageddon and Turkish question in each home in the city of Lincoln. This received notice by the editor of one of the Lincoln dailies, who wrote an eight-inch editorial on the “peace and safety” order, referring to the “flooding” of the city with our pamphlets. About a quarter of a million pages of tracts were used in this effort, and we are having inquiries from several who received them, for other reading along the same line. This of course is being supplied, and the interest is being followed up.

An interesting series of Testimony studies is just beginning in the band, on intensely practical subjects, and there is every prospect that each member will be profited by this practical study.

Week by week, as the opportunities come to us to be of service to those near us and those far away, we are realizing the truth of the statement, “A thousand doors of usefulness are open before us,” and by our lives and our efforts we want to experience the truth of another statement in the same paragraph: “Were we thoroughly in earnest, even now we could multiply the resources a hundred-fold.”

M. E. ELLIS.