AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMIS SIONERS FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS, The. This is the oldest foreign missionary society in America, having been organized in 1810. Its voting members are the members of the Congregational National Council with 150 additional, selected at large. The board has 650 Americans working in its 19 missions located in Japan, China, India, Turkey, Austria, Spain, Africa, Mexico, the Philippines and Micronesia. In addition the board supports 5,000 native workers, including teachers, preachers, nurses, doctors, Bible men and women selected from its converts in these various fields.
One-third of the work of the American board has been in European and Asiatic Turkey, this field having been assigned to the board as its exclusive territory. The work of the board consists in translation of the Bible and other books into the languages of foreign peoples, the establishment of churches, schools, colleges, hospitals and industrial plants in its various fields of work. Three of the most important colleges in Turkey to-day, Robert, Constanti nople and Syrian Protestant, although now in-• dependent, are the product of American Board work.
The annual income of the board for the support of all this work is $1,100,000. This sum comes from the contributions of the churches, chiefly Congregational, from legacies and from the income of permanent funds. The churches which have been founded on the mission fields have been contributing a little more than $300,000 annually toward the enterprise.
The actual management of the business of the board is entrusted to the Prudential Com mittee centring in Boston, the board's head quarters, and consists of 12 men about evenly divided between laymen and ministers. This committee meets on Tuesday afternoon to con sider the important business of the board which business, as a rule, has previously been carefully digested by its subcommittees. Much time of the Prudential Committee is taken up with con sidering applications for service in the foreign fields by young men and women .from our American colleges. A conference is held the first of June each year for instruction of these new recruits. About 60 men and women are sent out to the fields each year. After seven years of service on the field these missionaries are allowed to come home and spend a year on furlough at the expense of the board. The board issues monthly The Missionary Herald, an illustrated missionary magazine which is the oldest in America and probably the oldest in the world. Affiliated with the American Board are three women's boards with headquarters in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. These boards of women support all the unmarried women missionaries, and raise about $300,000 annually for that purpose. Of the entire mis sionary force one-third are men and two-thirds are women.