# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

-all the members of the representative congregation, be recognized as thoroughly and clearly as possible in their understanding, impressed upon their conscience, and followed by their will.

In this endeavor he will direct his constant attention to the following points:

1) to the honor of God and of His Word, to which, in the Church of Christ, everything must justly be subject and must serve — be it the mighty or the weak, the rich or the poor, the wise or the unwise, the high or the low, the educated or the uneducated, teachers or hearers, the curable or the hardened — and which also shines forth precisely where it, and the salvation of souls, demand the severest penalty, as for example the ban of the church, imposed by congregational judgment. In the furtherance of God's honor alone will he seek his own honor, though he may thereby harvest ever so much hatred, wrath, contempt, malice and aversion, disgrace before men, and the secret enmity of hypocrites for it;

2) to the inviolability of his own conscience, that in simplicity and godly purity he seek nothing else than the honor of God and of His Word, remain captive to this alone, and therefore stay truly free from all dominion of the fear of man and the desire to please men, as well as, on the other side, from that of carnal anger, of self-will, of pride, and of the lust to dominate, etc., by which he might injure and defile his conscience in the governing of the congregation;

3) to the exercise of love, by applying all its wisdom and skill to serving the assembled congregation in the Scripture-conformed and confession-faithful handling of the matter at hand, and therein to instruct the ignorant, to set right those in error, to keep presumptuous spirits within their bounds, to encourage the anxious, to make the uncertain sure, to shame the conceited wise in a wholesome way, to admonish the unruly, to bear with the weak, to spur on the sluggish, to temper the overly fervent, to widen the horizon of the narrow and short-sighted, to make the stiff supple and the rigid fluid, and on the other hand to make the overly mobile and fluid firm, etc.;

4) to "the common good," in that it lies close to his heart not only that the matter at hand — whether it concern, mediately or immediately, the heavenly doctrine and the churchly confession and the practice conformable to it, or whether it fall within the realm of things indifferent and of Christian liberty — be handled and settled out of and according to God's Word and in accordance with the churchly confession, but also that, in such joint action of the churchly teaching office and the hearers, the latter too should ever more increase, precisely as a congregation, in wholesome knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, in the fear of God, in faith, in love, in earnestness and zeal, as well as in gentleness and mildness, in humility, meekness, patience, and every fruit of the Spirit.

In this way it will then come to pass that God's Word and the con-