# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S172
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

172 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised?

...cation of Hebrews 13:17, create a false conscience, as though he — because in Christ's stead, by virtue of his office, he publicly preaches the Word of God and administers the Sacraments — also had the right and the power to arrange and establish everything, at his own pleasure, in this field of things indifferent, so long only as it did not run counter to the Word of God. For here he has no other authority than: 1) to point out from the divine Word the guiding principles that are to govern the remedy of whatever need is actually present; 2) with that same Word to oversee the carrying out of these principles for such a remedy, so that in the Church of Christ, or respectively in his congregation, everything be done honestly and in order.

Thus, for example, the apostles, according to Acts 6, did not themselves choose and appoint their helpers in the care of widows and of the poor in general — just as they never and nowhere, contrary to the sense of the Gospel, exercised a church government of the kind found in the modern territorial and state churches — but rather they called the multitude of the disciples together and laid it upon their hearts to look out from among themselves for such fellow workers in the work of faith and in the labor of love.

Nevertheless they directed this choice, in that they stated what sort of disposition, gifts, and reputation these their helpers should have, namely that they be men "of good report, and full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom"; then they also oversaw the carrying out of this their proposal, and would scarcely have confirmed any of those chosen in whom, for example, wisdom or a good reputation (with regard, say, to his former conduct, upright before men, prior to his conversion) had been manifestly lacking.

Similarly, an evangelically minded servant of the Lutheran Church, especially here in this country, has to act in the wide field of things indifferent, wherein — without prejudice to the unity of faith, of confession, and of doctrine, as Article VII of the Augsburg Confession likewise testifies — matters may be held differently in different congregations, according to each congregation's Christian and ecclesiastical maturity in knowledge, experience, faith, and godly character.

Suppose, then, that he had received a regular call from a congregation arising through such a calling, consisting of Lutherans who, having immigrated from various Lutheran lands, dwelt in geographical proximity to one another in this or that county of some state: then nothing would be more unevangelical and unwise, and therefore nothing more foolish and perverse, than to load upon such a congregation, as soon as possible, an elaborately articulated church order taken from some older or larger city congregation; for even if the Lutheran pastor should succeed in winning a part of his congregation to this church order, indeed in enthusing them for it or even fanaticizing them (since flesh with only the appearance of spirituality is so much more easily won over