# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S344
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

344 On Church Life in the Kingdom of Hanover.

...fortress; my God, in whom I trust. — He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler." (Psalm 91:1-2, 4.)

May the Lord keep us in humility and grant us a rich measure of patience and of wisdom always rightly to discern His ways and to enter upon them with resolve. Amen.

4

(From the "Freimund.")
On Church Life in the Kingdom of Hanover.

. . With this we have already arrived at the answer to the question of how things stand among us as regards the development of churchly and confessional consciousness. In the Kingdom — leaving aside East Frisia, last mentioned, and the small provinces of Lingen and Bentheim, in which almost all the Protestant congregations are Reformed — the Church is throughout, so far as it is Protestant at all, also Lutheran. The individual Reformed congregations in the Göttingen region (the lordship of Plesse) and in the Bremen-Verden region recede very much into the background and have never exercised any considerable influence on the whole. Now, as indicated above, our course has been that in the old portions of the land the pastors, as soon as they became believing, as a rule also came into the churchly direction. The same thing appears, the longer the more, to be establishing itself also in Bremen-Verden. Here the movement among the people proceeded for the most part from the pastors; it was therefore natural that the congregations too, wherever they began to come alive at all, became at the same time Christian and Lutheran. At least no particular obstacles arose against the Lutheran shaping of the churchly life of the people; here and there, indeed, individual Pietists and Pietist conventicles were found, but only sporadically, and only where an influence of the Moravian Brethren and their traveling preachers had taken place. — The matter stands otherwise in the Osnabrück region, and perhaps also elsewhere in individual districts whose awakening dates from an earlier time. The Osnabrück region has received its Christian stimulus chiefly from the neighboring Ravensberg and Tecklenburg regions, and in these districts — as indeed in Westphalia generally — Christianity has for a long time had a subjectively pietistic coloring, which now appears notably also in a unionistic form, drawing nourishment from the Union and lending it support in turn. This whole tendency, in its subjectivity, mistakes the true nature of the Church and of the ministry; in the Osnabrück region it has for a long time also lacked the Regulative, not only on the part of capable bearers of the office, but also through a rightly established church order — in place of which, until now, the most unrestrained arbitrariness has stood, straying into the worst monstrosities. May the Lord fill this deficiency, for which, thank God, there is prospect. Then the degenerations and excesses of a...