# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S228
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

228   How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?

That, for the founding of such congregational life and for its ever richer and firmer Christian and churchly formation, the constitution of the Lutheran territorial churches of Germany is very unfavorable, while the ecclesiastical conditions here are very favorable, is surely subject to no doubt.

To be sure, it is not to be denied that where over yonder a faithful and capable servant of the Lutheran Church, one who knows just what he is, what he ought to do, and what he wills, holds office, there it neither will nor can fail — according to the promise of the Lord in Isaiah 55:10–11 — that the Gospel, publicly and privately administered, together with the accompanying Sacraments, should kindle and awaken true faith in Christ and the new spiritual life in this heart and that; nor can it or will it fail that these true believers should enter into brotherly fellowship with one another and, in the love of Christ, mutually instruct, reprove, comfort, admonish, serve, and help one another, according to each other's bodily and spiritual need and according to the bodily and spiritual gifts granted by God for the relief of such need. It will further not fail that these children of God, at their pastor's and teacher's prompting or without it, join together in the same love in order to help carry out this and that work of faith, to the glory of God and for the common good, be it for the preservation or the spread of the church. And in this way there does indeed form, in this or that congregation of the Lutheran territorial churches of Germany, an association, which may then well unite with other similarly arisen associations in other congregations for this or that larger work of faith and love, as for example for the conversion of the heathen and for the sending out of evangelists.

But over yonder it is impossible that out of such an association system there should arise the congregational life which presents itself upon the ground of the churchly confession — chiefly in the independent, orderly calling of the servants of the church and in the harmonious cooperation of teachers and hearers, of shepherds and flocks — and this indeed chiefly in watching over pure doctrine, in the establishment of edifying services of worship conformable to the Confessions and of other wholesome ordinances, in the erection and exercise of scriptural church discipline, in judging and deciding controversies of faith and doctrine that arise within the congregation, in the founding and maintaining of Christian parish schools, in the works of brotherly and general love, in joining together upon the same confessional ground with other congregations faithful to the confession, in order upon this ground to work together with united strength for the preservation and spread of the church.

Of such congregational life properly so called there can unfortunately be no talk in the Lutheran territorial churches of Germany, and its wholesome rise and blessed continuance is there impossible for the very reason that the secular authority has taken from the individual congregations of its territory their good evangelical right of self-government and has thus arro-