# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S335
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How are truly Lutheran congregations founded and raised up? 335

And even should the labor of love not succeed in converting the sinner and in helping his soul from death to life, great benefit and blessing nevertheless flow back from it into the congregation; for precisely through such a public act and the participation of the whole congregation, the impure are wholesomely alarmed, the sincere but weak in understanding are strengthened, believing and experienced Christians are manifoldly furthered and confirmed, and the whole life and constitution of the congregation is, in this respect, set into a still better condition — precisely in that each individual member becomes all the more conscious and aware of his organic union with the whole.

It is therefore greatly to be lamented when Lutheran congregations of this land either voluntarily relinquish this their evangelical fundamental right — to exercise church discipline independently, in the proper union of the teaching office and the hearers — and hand it over to the church council or consistory for administration, or else, through false doctrine concerning the Church and the preaching office, under the guise of the divine Word, allow themselves to be robbed of this right, as though it were a divine ordinance that the pastor and the other members of the church council alone and exclusively conduct such judgment, while the other members of the congregation are merely mute, learning assessors, or indeed nothing more than persons to whom the decision "of the high council" is announced for due compliance.

But such pope-like doctrine is just as much contrary to the Gospel in Matthew 18:17, Acts 15, 1 Corinthians 3:21-23, 1 Peter 2:9, 1 John 4:1, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, and other passages, as it is to the condition and constitution of the apostolic congregations, in which not even the high Apostles claimed the government of the church as a divine right belonging to their own persons, but always regarded themselves only as teachers, fellow-elders, and fathers in Christ, and let all things be ordered, judged, and settled through and according to God's Word by means of the congregations — as is evident from Acts 6:5, 15:2, 1 Corinthians 5:4, 2 Corinthians 2:6, and other passages.

Therefore it is in accordance with the Gospel and the apostolic example gradually to train our congregations toward the careful and skillful exercise of church discipline up to its final degree, namely, exclusion from the congregation; for by this too a manifold, lovely, and blessed fruit is attained.

In the first place, the congregation becomes ever more conscious, through this very act, that and how it, precisely as a congregation, furthers the honor of God, whose holy will it is that the manifestly wicked and impenitent be put out of His congregation, and that the sanctuary not be given to the dogs, nor the pearls cast before swine — whether by such earnest discipline and God's righteous punishment they might be brought to reflect and return in penitence.

In the second place, the congregation, precisely as such, becomes ever more conscious that it is not, say, a civil community and worldly police force...