# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S326
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

326

(Submitted by Prof. Dr. Sihler.)
How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded
and Reared?
Second Article.
(Continued.)

2. What are the principal elements of his pastoral duties?

Naturally, given the purpose of this periodical and the arrangement befitting the essays it is meant to contain, in answering this question there can be no question of furnishing here a Lutheran pastoral manual with particular reference to American conditions; for the present writer would scarcely be qualified for that task. Rather, only indications are to be given as to the directions in which, according to the particular spiritual need of these or those souls — who form, as it were, the material for his activity — the Lutheran pastor is to show forth that evangelical spirit and disposition treated of more fully above.

Let us now turn our attention to:

A. The Instruction of the Ignorant.

To be sure, in this regard the Lutheran pastor (see the first article) certainly applies every possible diligence — in the public sermon and the exposition of Law and Gospel, as well as in catechetical examination, especially with the youth in the church — toward producing, in simple and thorough handling of the divine Word, a right, Scripture-conformed understanding in his hearers; but it is precisely the closer conversation with individuals, e.g. at the announcing for confession, that shows him incontrovertibly how not a few have by no means yet attained this understanding, even the most necessary minimum of it, from the sermon or even from the catechetical examination. For whether the cause be earlier neglect in the home and school, or an excessive slowness to learn, a sluggish and unwieldy formal understanding, or thoughtlessness and distraction in hearing the divine Word, joined with a worldly and carnal disposition — it is certain that here in this country we find, among not a few of our parishioners, especially the older ones, no small ignorance, particularly among those who have only recently come from the territorial Lutheran churches of Germany into our ecclesiastical care. For unfortunately the pastors over there seem, for the most part, either to have no awareness of the necessity and salutary benefit of announcing for confession, or, despite this awareness, to make no scruple of it — whether from indolence, or from thoughtlessness, or from fear of man, or from excessive preoccupation with the often quite ephemeral theological literature of the day, or from these and other non-theological private hobbies (to say nothing of those to whom care for the belly lies nearer than care for the soul) — that they are not tending the individual parishioners entrusted to them according to God's Word and will,