# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S231
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?   231

...light should work sound knowledge in the understanding of all the judgment-capable male members of the congregation, and inform their consciences, and thereby also equip them for the wise and vigorous execution of what has been recognized, rather than that such instruction and the execution following upon it should fall to only a few, so that in that case the rest would be merely idle spectators and ignorant, will-less instruments for carrying out what the few had resolved.

Further, however, not only would the knowledge of those members of the congregation, instead of growing, rather waste away and shrivel up in all the matters that concern congregational life, but faith too, in its outward exercise through love, precisely for the "common good," would find no practice and furtherance herein among most of the members of the congregation, if the direction of their most important affairs were handed over only to the hands of a few, or even to the pastor alone. It would then be just as impossible that in the manner described above a congregational life properly so called should form, together with a treasury of spiritual congregational goods in every sort of wholesome knowledge and experience and of mutual brotherly love along with other Christian virtues — as it is, unfortunately, only too certain, and constantly attested by experience and history, that instead there would develop an opposition between those who command and those who obey, resembling the civil-legal commonwealth, or a legalistic and unevangelical distinction, corresponding to the Old Testament and neo-papistic character, between ruling priests and spiritual officials on the one side and the ruled laity on the other, that is, the people "who know nothing of the law." Every Lutheran congregation here, for example, which under the direction of a faithful and capable pastor has already matured so far in Christian and churchly things as to exercise church discipline in full, can certainly bear witness that precisely through the treatment of the individual cases in the public congregational assemblies — after these cases had come, according to Christ's ordinance, before the representative congregation — it has carried away a rich gain in knowledge, experience, faith, love, patience, zeal, fear of God, prayer and intercession, and so forth; and this gain would in any case have escaped it if it had transferred to the church board, for administration, this its right, grounded in the Gospel, to exercise church discipline.

The Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the apostles also indicate in several places that and how the congregations of the apostolic age themselves exercised their good evangelical right.

Thus, for example, the congregation at Antioch sent its ministration of love to the poor brethren in Judea "by the hand of Barnabas and Saul," Acts 11:29–30.

Thus the same congregation "determined," Acts 15:2, "that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and elders," for the sake of the question, namely, whether it were really