# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S174
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

174 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised?

Out of such a course of action, and out of this steadfastness "in all patience and doctrine," there would then gradually grow up organically, out of the life of the congregation and its course of development, a sound church order, rooted in the Word of God and conformable to the Lutheran confession — a product of the congregation's collective life, and properly nothing more and nothing less than the previous practice, conformable to the Gospel, fixed in writing in definite articles, arising from the cooperation of the churchly teaching office and the hearers.

A congregational order so arising will then, to be sure, be for no part of the congregation a hateful straitjacket and fetters of which they seek to rid themselves as soon as possible, and it will certainly bring about no split, whether inward or outward; rather, especially the older and more experienced members of the congregation will be familiar and at home with it, so that they will indeed also be able, when newly entering members ask, to give them closer information about this or that point of the church order, and generally to contribute helpfully toward a sound and fruitful understanding of it.

Here belongs also, in particular, the conduct of a servant of the Lutheran Church with regard to ceremonies, which likewise belong in part to the field of things indifferent and of the church orders instituted by men.

Here too, unfortunately, frequent experience points to the very regrettable failing and lack of understanding of this or that Lutheran pastor, especially of the ceremonial-legalistic, constitution-riding guild, namely that these little fellows, upon taking over congregations newly arisen, or older ones which are likewise ignorant in this regard, having been neglected and run down by the dead business-mechanism of earlier pastors, apply far greater earnestness and diligence toward introducing, as soon as possible, the full complement of Lutheran ceremonies in the conduct of public worship and of the particular churchly acts, than toward bringing congregations that are on the whole spiritually withered — and in part perhaps also fanatical — through thorough and unremitting preaching of Law and Gospel, and through faithful and skillful instruction and admonition of individuals, to true repentance toward God and to living faith in Christ, and from that to the beginning of upright evangelical godliness in doing and suffering; that is, at the very least to win over to God even one small flock from Satan — a flock that lives and moves in the justifying faith in Christ, that is joyful and certain in its state of grace and its childhood of God, and that in a governing way, in all its doing and refraining, working and enduring, in every kind of work of faith and labor of love, is moved and driven by the Spirit of God.

Such a premature and untimely introduction of the fuller Lutheran ceremonial, however, runs directly counter to the evangelical spirit of the Lutheran Church, and must necessarily manifest that manifoldly ruinous effect