The year was 1903. The crowd was gathered on a street in Wilmington, Delaware. A Black man named George White had been arrested on charges of assaulting and killing a white girl. The man orating was a Presbyterian pastor named Robert Elwood. The mob broke into George White’s holding cell, dragged him out, then beat, hacked and burned him to death [a documentary about the lynching of George White, “In the Dead Fire’s Ashes,” directed by Stephen Labovsky, debuted at the Wilmington Film Festival in spring 2005].
In an amphitheater by a placid lake on the Westminster College campus, nearly 2,000 people were at prayer last week -- as others have been every summer since 1906 -- about how God might call them to preach the Christian gospel to people of another culture.
Hundreds of veterans of the New Wilmington Mission Conference have given their lives to full-time service as missionaries. Those who served short-term or worked behind the scenes to support missionaries "would be in the thousands and thousands," said the Rev. Donald Dawson, director of the conference, which is related to the Presbyterian Church (USA). …