# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S226
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

226   How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?

...exhibits this phenomenon, become a sort of ecclesiastical machine, in which the pastor is the engineer, the office the steam power, and the body of hearers (the so-called church-children on the Pachinon) the pistons, wheels, and so forth that are moved and driven by this power, and that carry out the will of the spiritual engineer without consciousness and without will of their own.

Here, on the other hand, under the democratic regime of a mass that decides everything by majority of votes, the congregation will become a formless confusion, a plaything driven about in constant unrest by whichever party leader happens to be dominant and by his particular party aims, for the execution of which he then also seeks to make use of the pastor, who under such circumstances certainly plays the most miserable role of all. But if the pastor is neither a hierarch nor a servant of men, yet just as little an evangelically enlightened leader guided by God's Word, but rather a placid man of business who for so much a year performs such and such official functions — as indeed the congregation, in its annual contract of hire, desires nothing else — then of course there will be just as little possibility of speaking here of a congregational life; there can be nothing but a dead business establishment, an inherited routine, and a stagnant swamp.

Now before we, after this negative survey and review, come closer to our proper task, namely to set forth the evangelical mind and spirit of a servant of the Lutheran Church with respect to the government of the congregation, in order to establish and further in it, so far as lies in him, a sound evangelical congregational life by God's grace, it will not be unserviceable to insert a preparatory intervening consideration, partly on the proper nature of such congregational life, and partly on how favorable for it — compared, for example, with Germany — the ecclesiastical conditions here are, in view of the fundamental separation of church and state.

Now a sound evangelical congregational life arises then and there, when and where the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel and especially through its public proclamation by means of the office of preaching, together with the sacraments that accompany the Gospel and seal its promises of grace, works justifying faith in Christ in the hearts of penitent hearers who long for salvation; whence then, as a necessary consequence and effect, brotherly and universal love, and every other fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, breaks forth as the proof and exercise of faith, and the congregation, as such, submits itself in willing obedience to the Word of God as it reads, in all that belongs to believing rightly, living in a Christian manner, and dying blessedly. For as — to put it briefly — true faith and right love make the individual man, indeed in the narrower and stricter sense faith alone makes this man, a Christian, wherein he at the same time receives a new spiritual life, just so and not otherwise is it also with a larger or smaller con-