# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S235
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?   235

...its effects; for the Gospel is wise and strong enough — much as it did and does in the heathen lands — to found and to shape Christian congregations, and to sweep out of already existing congregations at home the evil leaven of false doctrine and practice, and to set up an evangelical congregational government, without the encroaching rule of so-called state-church laws and ordinances of the secular authority; for the New Testament Christian church in general, both in every individual congregation and in the totality of them, needs nothing else for her government than the law-book and church law of the divine Word, rightly expounded and applied in accordance with the churchly confession.

But to this confession, and especially to its fundamental concept of the church and, derivatively, to its concept of the representative church, as it is contained in the Symbols of the Lutheran Church, it is by no means conformable that this representative church should essentially and properly consist of the so-called three estates, the teaching estate, the defending estate, and the sustaining estate; or, in other words, that it should be represented by the pastors, the civil authorities, and the heads of households. For if it is incontestably clear and evident, according to the doctrine of the Gospel, that the church at large, as well as each individual local congregation, is essentially and properly the congregation of those who truly believe and are holy — a congregation which, however, makes itself known and manifest outwardly in the confession of the truth unto salvation, through the pure and unadulterated preaching of the Gospel and through the administration of the Sacraments in accordance with the Gospel, so that, as faith alone is her inward, so the confession alone is her outward unity — then it is just as incontestably clear and evident that the representative congregation is the congregation of the male, judgment-capable confessors of the church's faith; for whether the confession of all of them also flows out of the true living faith of the heart in Christ, that we cannot decide, since only the Lord, who searches hearts, knows His own, and since His congregation, according to her inward nature, being an essentially and properly spiritual one, is invisible to the sensible eye of men.

Accordingly, from the true evangelical standpoint it is entirely accidental and indifferent whether this or that member of the representative congregation belongs, in respect of his civil calling, to the secular authorities and to the heads of households, or not; for such belonging confers no greater, and non-belonging no lesser, right to church government, since they all essentially have the same equal right by virtue of their union and fellowship in and through that one and the same churchly confession, which, as it alone is normed by God's Word, is now in turn the norming power of the representative congregation, whose task is precisely none other than to bring that confession into currency and practice in the worship, in the Christian life, and in every sort of wholesome ordering of the congregation.