# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S229
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?   229

...gated it to itself, so that in a usurping and caesaropapist manner, by commandments of men and coercive laws — in many cases even in flat contradiction to God's Word*) — it rules the church and degrades and enslaves her into a mere spiritual house of correction of the state.

Here, by contrast, in America, by virtue of the fundamental separation of church and state, that noble and excellent, genuinely evangelical congregational life can arise and endure in every Lutheran congregation and synod, wherever, upon the ground of the churchly confession and borne, united, and permeated by it, teachers and hearers, shepherds and flocks, in their scriptural working upon and with one another, let themselves be governed by God's Word in Holy Scripture as expounded in fidelity to the confession, and inwardly by the faith wrought through the preached Gospel and by the love that puts that faith into action.

In this country nothing more is required for this than that 1) the Lutheran pastor be neither, in the hierarchical sense, a lord of the congregation, nor, in the democratic sense, a servant of the congregation, but, in the Christian and churchly sense, a servant of the divine Word, and that, in order to govern the congregation, he let himself be governed by this Word alone, in accordance with the way the confession of the church sets forth and attests the sense of this Word; and 2) that the congregation be willing to let itself be governed by this Word — partly when it is publicly proclaimed from the pulpit, in exposition and application faithful to the confession, for doctrine, reproof, correction, and chastening in righteousness, as also for comfort, from the mouth of its servant, who for Christ's sake is also their servant, and is at the same time, according to each one's particular spiritual need, attested and imparted to individuals in connection with the Sacraments that seal the promises of grace of the Gospel; and partly when, in the representative congregational assemblies, it is treated as normative and decisive in matters of church discipline and of the settlement of controversies of faith and doctrine, and as guiding and supervising in matters of things indifferent, which thus fall within the realm of Christian liberty.

After these introductory considerations it will now be in place to come closer to our proper task and to set forth the evangelical mind and spirit of an upright servant of the Lutheran Church in governing his congregation, especially under the ecclesiastical conditions here.

But how far this governing takes place through the pure and unadulterated preaching of the divine Word, together with the administration of the holy Sacraments according to the Gospel, and further through private pastoral care and in the joint exercise of church discipline up to the execution of the ban — this has already been shown in the first three articles of this essay.

*) So, for example, when by virtue of its usurped right of call it calls and installs preachers who are unbelieving or of false belief, forces unbelieving catechisms and hymnbooks upon congregations, presses the servants of the church to remarry, contrary to Scripture, persons who have been divorced, and to administer the holy Supper to drunkards, adulterers, usurers, and so forth.