# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S149
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Bavaria. 149

property to others is compelled to leave, will in the end become not merely unskilled in its management, but also quite indifferent to the property itself. Conversely, one learns to value nothing more than that for which one has to care; and when one is driven to apply some diligence and effort to something, one thereby also has an admonition, indeed almost a compulsion, to handle it wisely. If, therefore, the congregations are given the right and duty to care for their own church affairs, if they must think, deliberate, and decide about church matters, then they have, so to speak, a compulsion to live, and with it at once a compulsion to learn, to go forward, to the formation of convictions; and the deadly lifelessness that is the greatest distress and greatest burden of all pastors is broken through — whereas, on the other hand, as already stated, a perpetual governing in spiritual and church matters, which by their very nature can only flourish on the soil of one's own deepest conviction, can only work death. An American pastor once told me that he compels his congregation members, as much as he can, to take part in the church's deliberations. In my judgment he was entirely right. It is a fine thing when congregations trust their pastors and let themselves gladly be governed by them; but it is also wise, and altogether necessary, on the part of pastors, not readily to govern a congregation without its own conviction, but to keep it alive through life. Had this never been forgotten; had one never resolved to take away from the congregations the rights and duties belonging, according to God's Word, to the individual congregations; had one, in the state churches, applied the government actually inherited in such a way that the congregations became accustomed and trained to the administration of their rights, then the distress of the Lutheran territorial and mass churches — however highly one may also reckon other causes of ruin — would hardly have reached its present height. In the forms of church government borrowed from the forms of the state and its government there lies, in my conviction, a most powerful obstacle to the flourishing of congregational life. The kingdom that is not of this world simply does not thrive rightly by the way of mere command and obedience, which is right and unavoidable for the state. It has, this summer, already been twenty-five years that I have served the Bavarian territorial church; and although of these twenty-five years I have spent nineteen at a single congregation, I nevertheless, before that, in the course that Bavarian vicars and administrators follow, came to know many other, very different congregations, and I can say that along the path of experience I have become ever more persuaded to lead the congregation entrusted to me, at every impending step toward improvement, only through the establishment of a conviction of its own won from the divine Word, while at the same time speaking that holy word of discipline by virtue of which a member of the congregation who, in knowledge and life, does not bow to the divine Word can also be granted no vote in congregational matters.