Early Missions, Charitable Work,

Young People's Meetings,

and Early Higher Education

The internal growth in the Mennonite churches due to the work of evangelists in the 1880's and 1890's took an outward direction in the early part of the twentieth century. The Mennonite Church in general was awakening to a sense of world mission. Some of this awakening could be traced to the evangelistic movement, some to the Sunday school movement. In 1893 a Mennonite mission was founded in Chicago (the first of its kind) by the churches of the Middle West which were sister congregations to the Ohio . churches.

The Chicago Home Mission was a venture that influenced the Ohio churches. In 1895 E. J. Berkey, secretary and treasurer of the mission, spent ten days in Logan and Champaign counties in behalf of the cause. He is reported to have been an earnest worker and one who influenced youth. Comments the correspondent to the Herald of Truth: "We trust that through him a lasting impression has been made in favor of more earnest mission work.'

In 1904 a joint committee of the Ohio and Eastern Amish Mennonite Conferences founded a mission in Canton, Ohio.` Besides a missionary incentive there was also a request to reopen a Mennonite church (Rowland) which from 1823 to 1899 had been there but which had discontinued services. J. A. Liechty was the first superintendent and pastor to serve the new venture in church extension. In 1907 the property and administration of the Canton mission was transferred to the newly formed Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities at Elkhart, Indiana.

Of all the early missionary enterprises which the Ohio churches engaged in, none was more important and moving than the dispatching of two of its members, M. C. and Lydia Lehman, to India as the first full-time, permanent missionaries. A minute of the 1905

128