# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S225
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume III.   August 1857.   No. 8.

(Submitted by Prof. Dr. Sihler.)
How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?

Fourth Article.
The Government.
(Continuation.)

In the second section of this fourth article, "on the government" of the congregation, we began by showing wherein the evangelical mind and spirit of an upright servant of the Lutheran Church does not consist, and this demonstration was already supplied from the unevangelical and legalistic conduct of Lutheran pastors on occasion of Lutheran congregational ordinances and churchly ceremonies, while at the same time the evangelical and wise conduct was set forth alongside it; and both of these have, we hope, not been useless and superfluous in view of our own ecclesiastical conditions here.

But the deviation from evangelical wisdom and rule in the governing of the congregation is not only the legalistic sort, which presents itself as the hierarchical, in consequence of false doctrine, or through the unbroken pride and love of dominion of the heart, or through both; there is also the opposite sort, the democratic, indeed under certain circumstances even the ochlocratic, that is, the mob-ruled, where the pastor, in consequence of ignorance of pure doctrine, or out of fear of men and concern for his belly, or through both, submits himself, at least in things indifferent, to the caprice of the ruling mass of the hearers, and thus falls into bondage to men; and just as the former, by his lordly parsonic bearing, encroaches upon the evangelical rights of the hearers, so the latter fails to resist with God's Word the democratic cravings to encroach upon the rights of the churchly office of teaching.

In both cases, however, it is impossible that the congregation should attain to a sound ecclesiastical form and to a truly Christian, evangelical congregational life, and grow and increase therein — which is surely the first and the last purpose of genuine and right government; rather, in the one case, much as the Roman-papistic church on the large scale...

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