# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S173
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised? 173

...to the acceptance of such righteousness of form as it is to bring about the acceptance of the righteousness of faith in Christ), then this would be, for those thus fanaticized, the greatest harm of all; for they would then stand in great danger of holding themselves, for the sake of their zeal for the church order, to be not only outstanding Christians but even eminently churchly Lutherans, while before God this zeal would in truth easily be nothing but the churchly signboard hung over a proud and untaught heart, and a dead work of the Law set against the righteousness of faith in Christ. Another, and presumably larger, part of the congregation, however, would be repelled rather than attracted by just this zeal, and would therefore all the more bear the church order only with reluctance and constraint, as a yoke — partly out of a correct feeling that such a church order was, for the present, not needed, partly out of a fleshly resistance to any wholesome discipline and restraint, and partly because it is commonly the case that precisely the greatest zealots and champions for the glory of the church order are not, in their manner of life — in humility, in quiet diligence in their calling, in simplicity and purity — the greatest Christians. A third part, and perhaps no smaller one, would behave toward the church order in a rather detached and cold, indifferent and apathetic manner, especially where it did not run too sharply counter to their material interests and chiefly concerned itself with matters of church ceremony.

Even if it did not at once come, between the first and second of these parts, to an open, hostile collision and a split in the congregation, the split would nevertheless, sadly, already be present inwardly, and its outbreak already prepared — and this not by reason of malicious unbelief against Christ and His Gospel (for such a split one could well be content to see), but through the fault of the pastor and his premature introduction of his church order. Indeed, he himself, given his then unevangelical and legalistic standpoint, could hardly do otherwise, under such circumstances, than hold the zealots for the church order to be the true Christians, and the objectors to be manifest non-Christians and enemies of the divine Word, and diligently hurl the thunderbolt of the ban against the latter; and while it would in fact be he himself who, through his zeal joined with a lack of understanding, was the cause and the guilt of such a rupture and such misery — in which many a soul might suffer irretrievable harm — it might easily happen to him that he should consider himself, in this very matter, a true martyr of the Lutheran Church.

Evangelically and wisely, then, and in accordance with the spirit of the Lutheran Church, will the servant of a newly arisen Lutheran congregation act under the above circumstances, that is, after taking over such a congregation, whenever, in every newly arising case that falls within the field of things indifferent, he takes pains, through a mediate application of the divine Word, to produce, by means of teaching, the right evangelical understanding of the nature of the case at hand, and thereafter, in joint deliberation with his congregation, carries the fitting resolution of the case into effect.