# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S288
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

288 Bavaria.

...benefits the work; joint deliberation over openly and trustingly expressed wishes, the immediate consideration of the carrying out of orders given and of whatever difficulties may stand in the way of their execution — all this is a necessary supplement to what can be gathered from files and reports and what very often remains a dead letter on paper. Carried by this conviction, the royal Superior Consistory has for the present sought to make it possible, with those organs of church governance in whose hands the direct oversight of the individual dioceses immediately lies — that is, with the deans — to initiate personal meetings." The Ministry of State has recognized these conferences as very beneficial and salutary and has allocated a sum from the surplus of the Protestant Worship Budget to make them possible. (The deans receive, for each day, 3 Bavarian gulden — a little over 1½ thalers — in per diem, and travel costs to whatever extent they can show by reckoning that they were needed; the conferences are calculated to last from 3 to 4 days.) — The gatherings, which also give the deans occasion to enter, among themselves, into an exchange of experience and an intercourse conducive to church affairs, are to be held under the personal direction of commissioners delegated from the midst of the Superior Consistory (in September or October of this year), in such a way that, from both consistorial districts, the deans meet in four groups at conveniently situated places; where a dean is prevented from attending, the senior of the chapter (this is what the whole body of clergy of a deanery is called in Bavaria) takes his place. In order to give the deans the opportunity to make known their wishes as to which subjects should preferably be discussed, they are called upon to state their views in advance in reports submitted to the authority. The manner of conducting the meetings is to be arranged by the commissioners on the spot; no special worship service is to be connected with them, though the opening and close should not lack prayer. The authority is convinced that this arrangement will not only meet the wishes of the deans themselves but will also exert a beneficial influence on the conduct of church governance, and indeed on the whole of church life, and will thus, as a further consequence, prove profitable to all the clergy and their congregations as well.

This is once again a welcome contribution toward meeting the demand that has gone out, loudly and urgently, to the church government of the present day, and continues to go out — namely, to free itself more and more from the mechanism of an outward conduct of business by means of written reports and written directives, and to let the demonstration of the Spirit and of power in personal presence take first place, so far as God grants grace.

(Petri's Zeitblatt.)