# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1849_S75
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 75 —

...pastors from us; then, further, we understand that several more
congregations exist that wish to join the synod as members; and since
certainly none has been brought to this by human persuasion, nor
merely followed, out of personal preference for their pastor and spiritual
caregiver who already belongs to us, we may cheerfully hope that love
for the cause has moved them to it. We may hope that all these
congregations seek to join the synod out of an inward conviction that
our foundation and manner of proceeding are honest and wholesome; we
may assume that all of them have sufficiently recognized, whether
through the instruction of their pastors or through last year's convention
address, how we, in our synodical constitution and conduct, hold to the
narrow and straight road of what is right, following the evangelical
way, and avoid two dangerous wrong paths. The one: that we do not,
after the example of the Roman or episcopal church, undermine the
right of self-government of individual congregations through the false
teaching that episcopal power or papal rule is a divine right binding
and obligating the conscience. And likewise the other wrong path: that
we do not, after the example of the democratic civil constitutional
forms found here, and of the other church bodies dominated by them
and carnally Americanized, damage the divine prerogatives of the holy
preaching office [Predigtamt] by treating the servants of the Lord and
of his holy Church — the ambassadors in Christ's stead and co-workers
of the Holy Spirit — as hired hands who may be engaged and dismissed
at will. Rightly, I say, we may hope that the beloved congregations now
seeking to join have sufficiently recognized that and how, in our whole
being and working, we do not want, and neither may nor can have, any
power other than that "of the Word and of conviction" — the power for
which God's Word, partly directly and partly indirectly, gives us clear
instruction, and which the apostolic congregation has left us as a model.

Finally, our labor has also not been in vain in this respect among
some of the congregations already joined: that here and there more and
more congregation members are growing in understanding and insight
into the nature of our sound, evangelical, sustainable church governance,
and no less in the skill and competence to exercise their own part in it,
without, however, setting themselves up as party leaders or encroaching
upon the prerogatives of the holy preaching office, but rather acting in
good, friendly harmony with it. Connected with this, at least indirectly
and happily, is the fact that proper, sound church discipline, order, and
custom, and a taste for and participation in churchly matters, are again
coming more to the fore; that pastors are again being regarded by their
parishioners more as their spiritual fathers; that congregations, as such —
not individuals within them acting as factions — are again more
unanimously carrying on the works of the Church, for instance home and
foreign missions, and so forth; and that, together with capable
congregational church schools and God-fearing, sensible parents, the
beloved youth here and there is beginning to be rescued from the
wildness otherwise prevailing here, and to grow up as a decent,
well-disciplined generation.

But if, in view of this second synodical year, we have manifold reason
to thank the faithful God heartily for all his goodness and kindness
toward us, his poor and weak children, we likewise also have reason to
humble ourselves under his hand and to bear sorrow,