# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S150
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

150 Bavaria.

Given these convictions that have come to me, I recognize it as by far the most important advance that the Lutheran Church has made in the new era, that in America and in Germany independent Lutheran congregations had to arise which, in their formation and constitution, could not count on the state and its support. Then the Lutheran congregations, after three hundred years, came into the necessity from which they had been exempted for three hundred years — namely, to consider what the correct constitution of the congregations, the correct relation of the congregations to the ministry, of the congregations to one another, and of the congregations to the state, should be. Everywhere these congregations now, for the benefit and orientation of the whole Lutheran Church, including the territorial churches, make important studies — not merely theoretical but also practical — on the highly important questions of earthly church life for the life and leadership of congregations and their members. And I count it a great good fortune, especially for the territorial churches, to be able to see themselves mirrored in the emergence of independent congregations. Every situation has its own particular advantages, willed by God. Thus the territorial churches, in their bondedness, have the advantage of being able to avoid the errors of the independent congregations going ahead of them, while on the other hand also being able to emulate all the good that is unmistakably found among the uniformly more vigorous individual Lutheran churches. If the rightly-believing Lutheran territorial churches, content with the noblest fellowship, the fellowship of the Church, without any desire to dissolve or swallow up the independent congregations of the same confession, walk their paths honestly side by side, they will be like two hands, one of which washes the other, so that both become clean and can strengthen each other for common work. But if the territorial churches pursue the genuinely popish principle that a true union of the congregations is accomplished not through the oath to the same symbols, not through the common enjoyment of the Sacrament, but only through a return under one territorial-church government; if they, and in the end also the leaders of the independent congregations, in this mighty and violent way contradict the Lutheran principle that uniformity of church constitution and of ceremonies is not necessary to unity — then they will thereby become for themselves a cause of ruin; they will build the bridge to a papacy and become guilty of it, when perhaps in days to come a fairer bloom of church life, reserved by God, grows up not within and out of, but alongside, the Lutheran Church.

The Society for Home Missions has demonstrably had the honor, almost throughout the whole period of its activity, of supporting in some way nearly all the new Lutheran-church formations arising in Germany and America; and if it has done this for years with diligence and zeal, the ground and reason for its faithfulness and steadfastness lay in the convictions of its leaders just now expressed (p. 44 a, b). It has not, along the path of its experience, become unfaithful to its convictions either. It proved