# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S332
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

332 How are truly Lutheran congregations founded and raised up?

...weak or raw, undertake at once to introduce the complete, properly formed church discipline.

For such a premature undertaking would necessarily have one of the following three effects, none of which would be a salutary, living fruit worked from within by the divine Word through the ministry of the evangelical office of preaching.

For either the whole congregation would set itself against it and compel its pastor, in accordance with its erring conscience, promptly to declare it a synagogue of Satan and consequently to abandon it; and it might then also easily fall into the temptation of casting from itself, to its own great ruin, both him and, with him, the pure and clear preaching of the divine Word; or such a hasty introduction of the complete church discipline would give rise to a division within the congregation which might well still have been prevented, and in which it cannot yet become evident whether this or that opponent of this church discipline is a willful and stiff-necked sinner who does so against his better knowledge and conscience, or a person of dull, unwieldy understanding and consequently touching, weak discernment, filled besides with a somewhat obstinate disposition and self-willed nature and with manifold prejudices against all innovations, yet without setting an evil will against the insight already gained or acting against it under its impulse; or the whole congregation might consent to this church discipline without being inwardly convinced of its necessity and wholesomeness, perhaps out of personal attachment to their pastor, thus from a merely human motive — so that, in this case too, nothing essentially good and salutary would be accomplished.

It is therefore in keeping with the evangelical spirit and mind, upon taking over new or neglected congregations, first of all to persevere publicly, and especially also concerning this article of Christian doctrine, in instructing the consciences "with all patience and doctrine," and then, in the introduction and administration of this church discipline, to go no further than the congregation's present state of knowledge actually permits — and, according to evangelical wisdom and in the service of love, to hold here too the right mean between prematurity and neglect; for it is clear and evident that in congregations that have matured in Christian and churchly understanding, a great deal must become the object of church discipline which in cruder congregations must still be borne and tolerated as a temporary ill, until God grants grace and the congregation increases both in the knowledge of the divine Word and, at the same time, in the willingness to submit itself to its wholesome discipline.

Now as concerns the object of church discipline, this consists at one end of private offenses, and at the other of grosser and public scandals; and the question now is, how is the evangelical mind of a faithful Lutheran minister to prove itself in this?

With regard now to private offenses — since one individual has sinned against...