Your Committee finds in the report of the Executive Committee for the past year, proof of healthy and steady growth in the work of planting churches. The report records the organization of six new churches, viz., McLeansville, N.C.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Jackson, Miss.; Fayetteville, Ark.; and Belle Place, La., and one new State Association of six churches in Miss.; making the whole number of churches eighty-nine, and of State Associations eight. The additions to these churches during the past year have been six hundred and sixty-seven; the number of scholars gathered in the church and Mission Sunday-schools has been nine thousand four hundred and four; the contributions for church work $12,027.21 and for benevolent purposes $1,049.35. We are glad to find it to be the distinct aim of the Society to press its work of evangelization to its consummation in Christian churches, and that while its educational and industrial work must from the nature of the case be general in its character, the obligation is recognized to gather up the result, so far and as fast as opportunity affords, in a more specific and permanent form. An intelligent Christianity, such as is fostered in the academies, seminaries and colleges maintained by the Society, demands a church-polity that gives scope to the developed manhood and retains it in a process of growth. Our work would be but half done did we leave those brought under its influence to fall back into old methods and be lost in the mass of ignorance and superstition. The Association was debarred from this distinctive work at first, but when soon after the war, others, who had contributed to the funds of this Society, seeing the magnitude of the undertaking, wisely began efforts of their own, the Association was left to the support of the Congregational churches, it directed its labors to this end. This distinctive church-planting work began in 1867. In that year the Society organized three churches. The statistics of its growth in this direction are summarized thus: In 1867 there were three churches; in 1870 there were twenty-three; in 1875, fifty-six; in 1880, seventy-three; in 1883, eighty-nine. The membership now numbers five thousand nine hundred and seventy-four, an average of sixty-seven to each church. Every church but two has a pastor, and eighty of the eighty-nine have their own houses of worship. These churches give promise of permanency. They have not sprung from a division or denominational spirit, and are not the representations of restlessness or the mere desire to try some new thing. Their roots are laid deep in the Christian education of the schools, and their organization expresses the need of the growing intelligence of those who compose them. Churches made of such material, formed upon the New Testament plan, have thus far been stable; those first formed are among the strongest.