# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S84
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 84 —

reprehensible when a person receives a call, even without any doing of his
own, and then thinks he must at once accept it, and asks no advice of his
fellow ministers, but instead thinks: now surely the time has come for
your light to be set on a greater lampstand; it must no longer burn hidden
as before. — But actually to seek another call oneself is still more
reprehensible. Such a preacher or teacher thereby makes himself a
hireling. Those who help such a person obtain a call are his accomplices
and make themselves partakers of his sin. Great harm is done to
congregations through a reckless change of office. They also lose
confidence in the Synod, thinking that it is the Synod, or the professors in
St. Louis, who so quickly take away their preachers, one after another. A
reckless change of office should never be tolerated, whether among
preachers or among teachers. Such persons ought to be taken to task.

Reference was made here to a set of minutes of the Springfield Pastoral
Conference, which should long since have been printed; in it every preacher
and teacher has a mirror held up on this very point. Congregations have
already often complained that preachers so often seek another field of
work. If nothing is done to stop this, it will soon become the worst evil in
our Synod. It is likewise reprehensible to change one's post for mere
considerations of health. For another man will simply fall into the same
danger, and it would therefore be a selfish act to give up one's office for
that reason. Equally wrong would it be to leave a congregation because of
some cross one has had to bear in it; one may not abandon one's
congregation because of adversities that arise. This is usually done by
persons who find rest nowhere, change every year, wander from place to
place, and regard themselves as persecuted, while in fact they are the ones
stirring up unrest. What great harm preachers do to themselves by this!
What strengthens a preacher more under the cross than the awareness that
God has set him at this post and has commanded him to this office in this
place! How Luther, throughout all his struggles, defied his enemies by
relying on his divine calling! But if a preacher willfully leaves a place, and
then at the new place, too, unrest and adversities arise, he loses that
comfort. He loses his joy. He cannot say: God has set me at this post,
only be comforted, God is with you; instead he must constantly hear the
accusing voice: you ran away on your own! — This willful running away
is also great ingratitude toward God and toward the blessing he has given
us. It is we who, from the very beginning of our Synod's existence, have
testified against the disgraceful practice of hiring [*Miethen*, i.e. calling a
pastor as one hires a hand]; but if this disgraceful change of office now
takes root among us, then we ourselves are doing the very thing against
which we fought, condemning it in other synods!