# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Uproar over the Newest Ober-Consistorial General Decrees in Bavaria. 143

adorn the well-house on the outside." The need for fixed ordinances is then demonstrated by this, that while the individual can indeed serve God in pure confession even without these ordinances, the fellowship of individuals, the assembled congregation, cannot. "It needs, for this purpose, standing, common forms, as means for the expression of its congregational activity." . . . "But if these ordinances are not to hinder congregational life rather than further it, they must be so arranged that the congregation, instead of merely listening and singing along like pupils in school, actively engages with the servant of the Word in confession, prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, and bears witness — showing that the congregation does not merely let things be done to it, but wills to act along, in the bearing witness of a common and unanimous faith. That is the distinguishing mark of the congregation, if it will be and remain a daughter of the German Reformation."

So little, finally (it goes on to say), is this congregation of today or of yesterday, so little can the bearing witness of its unanimous faith change its forms arbitrarily like fashions and modes. If we do not wish to disown our own nature and our own origin, then it must be noticeable in the testimony we render in our worship services that a faith dwells here that bears on its brow its origin-testimony from Christ: yesterday and today and the same forever! — a faith that binds the hearts of the children with the fathers and the fathers with the children, and that welds together, not children of a day, but generations of men in oneness of spirit into one great whole.

To refresh and keep alive this awareness is the great secondary task of all congregational order of worship. Where this awareness has decayed, the understanding of the congregational forms of worship naturally fails as well. Therefore it must be the task of the clergy not merely to handle mechanically the forms of worship offered, but at the same time to awaken an understanding of them, etc.

The best ordinance (it is remarked once more, in closing) can be abused to the point (namely, of perverting it into a falsely legalistic thing) where, handled without understanding, it is dismissed as a police regulation and wielded like an instrument of punishment. This is what our Church has always rejected, and why it has called the servant of the Word nowhere a judge but rather a dispenser of grace (see Apology, Art. 6, introduction). That all the clergy may remain aware of this character of their office would already now be occasion for exhortation, were it not that a discussion of particulars leads more easily to the goal, and were the present moment concerned less with upholding ordinances already introduced than with the right understanding of proposals in which the church government does not decree, but names to the church bodies points that first require deliberation and mutual understanding before their introduction. —

And now the individual points are discussed one by one in detail,