# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S307
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Our General Convention in the Year 1857.

On Wednesday, October 14, A.D. 1857, at 9 o'clock in the morning, the synod members, who had arrived in large numbers, gathered together with a number of guests and hearers in the German Evangelical Lutheran St. Paul's Church in Fort Wayne, Ind., for a liturgical worship service, in order first, in common hymns and prayers, to entreat the triune God, the giver of all good gifts, for his grace and his blessing upon the deliberations and proceedings that lay before them.

As with this first session, so all later sessions were opened with such a liturgical service, joined with the reading of a passage from the Acts of the Apostles according to the Altenburg Bible, and closed with the Lord's Prayer, led by the general Präſes [president], the Reverend Pastor Fr. Wyneken.

The sessions, twenty in all, ran in the first days from 9, later from half past 8, until half past 11 in the morning, and from 2 until half past 5 in the afternoon, and were opened and adjourned punctually.

This year's general convention was, as was to be expected, a very numerous one. How many brothers saw and greeted one another again with joy after years of separation; and how many now greeted one another for the first time! But also how many dear brothers were sorely missed among us, who were prevented, some by illness, some by other difficult circumstances, from appearing in our midst, from taking direct part in our deliberations, our edification, our joy, and our sorrow. So too many among us surely remembered, in loving memory and holy sorrow, the dear brothers whom the Lord, in matters of life and death, has called out of our midst and set into everlasting blessed rest in these ten years since our first convention in 1847.

At this, our ninth general convention, there were present 86 pastors entitled to vote, 56 congregational delegates entitled to vote, and 54 advisory pastors, professors, and teachers — thus 196 actual synod members in attendance. In addition there were 5 pastors from other synods, some of them only for a few days, several congregation members and theological students from St. Louis as guests, and the theological students of the Fort Wayne seminary, along with, by turns, many members of the Fort Wayne congregations and neighboring congregations, present as hearers.

We give here the roll of all synod members present, in alphabetical order, in three divisions: