# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

-Church, so we hope also now for no other visitation than this: that spring days may once more appear to the Church of the Reformation. We hope for no Church of the future, which, as a result of new disclosures concerning a higher unity of the confessions, should arise and thus embrace within itself the parties hitherto separated; far from it, then, that we should be tempted by our hope to abandon our established basis for the sake of preparing the way for the Church of the future — rather, our hope exhorts and encourages us to make the words of the confessors of the Formula of Concord our own: that we "intend to make nothing new, nor to depart at all, either in Rebus [in substance] or in Phrasibus [in wording], from the divine truth once recognized and confessed by our godly forefathers and by us, as it is grounded in prophetic and apostolic Scripture and further comprised in the three Symbols, as well as in the Augsburg Confession delivered in the year 1530 to Emperor Charles the Fifth, in the Apology that followed thereupon, in the Smalcald Articles, and in the Large and Small Catechism of that highly enlightened man, Dr. Luther" — and, we add, in the Formula of Concord — "but rather, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, are minded" (together with all the members of our Synod) "to persevere and abide unanimously therein, and to regulate all religious controversies and their resolutions accordingly."

(Submitted by Dr. Sihler.)
How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded
and Raised Up?

Fourth Article.
Church Government.
(Conclusion.)

After, in the last two installments of this article, various unevangelical understandings and the corresponding practices resting upon them, with regard to the governance of congregations particularly in this country, have been traced out and refuted: it will now be time to proceed to the matter itself and to demonstrate how an evangelically minded Lutheran pastor ought to conduct himself in representative assemblies, in order to help form, so far as lies in him, a sound congregational life resting upon and pervaded by the confession of the Church; for as has already been mentioned above, a Lutheran representative congregation has no other task than to bring the Lutheran confession — normed solely by God's Word — into currency and practice as a norming force in worship, in Christian life, and in all manner of wholesome order of the congregation, so that in all these individual particulars the confession finds its fitting expression.