# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S236
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

236   How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?

This and nothing else is, precisely from the true evangelical standpoint, the government of the church.

It is therefore not the particular calling of a magistrate or of a head of a household, within the common Christian calling and the free citizenship in the kingdom of God, that confers greater authority in the representative congregation and in an evangelical church government — for those particular kinds of calling are in themselves in no way of a Christian and churchly nature; rather, he has the greater authority in the assemblies of the representative congregation in whom, in knowledge and in will, the churchly confession, normed and formed out of God's Word, lives most fully, and out of whom it proves the greater enlightenment and power for every sort of shaping of congregational affairs and for the founding and furthering of congregational life, so as to inform the understanding of the other members of the congregation more exactly and to incline their will to follow the better knowledge thus gained and, through common judgments and resolutions, to put into effect what is of profit precisely to "the common good."

Now it could of course happen that, for example, the grown son had more insight and knowledge in conformity with the confession, and at the same time the gift of presenting it clearly and intelligibly, than his father, indeed that he would even have to contradict his father, if the latter erred — though, according to the Fourth Commandment, with all modesty and humility; or a peasant might have a similar advantage over an official of the government; indeed it could even come to pass that an older ordinary Christian had more evangelical knowledge and experience in this or that area of Christian and churchly life than the still somewhat young pastor, hot for conversions or addicted to church ordinances, in short infected with a legalistic spirit, of pietistic-confessionistic stamp — the purity of his disposition notwithstanding.

These, to be sure, are frightful consequences of our evangelical church government, before which all friends and lovers of the legalistic "three-estates church-ordinance regime," such as Pastor Grabau with his open and secret adherents, may fairly be seized with shuddering and horror, and their hair stand on end at such conduct, which revolutionarily overturns the Lutheran church ordinances that have stood these three hundred years and that in their opinion are probably to be held fast until the Last Day, wherein the Fourth Commandment would inevitably and unavoidably be so grievously violated and all filial reverence would perish. We, however, do not fear such terrors, and are rather joyfully certain from the Gospel that even such a case would be nothing more and nothing less than a mutually wholesome school of humility for receiver and giver alike, and that brotherly love would thereby increase in both.

In sum: the New Testament character of the church and the evangelical government of the church knows just as little of an order of teachers propagated through ordination and differing in kind from the so-called laity