# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

72 On the Divisions in the Lutheran Congregations Here.

Church, the discipline is to be exercised by the congregation: Matthew 18: "tell it to the church." But how can the highest court in the church be exercised by immature children, by an uncomprehending people who understand nothing?! The Lord Jesus probably did not think that through properly; the royal church authorities are more prudent, and understand better how to establish and maintain order with force; a fortnight's imprisonment on bread and water, imposed by official decree, brings the sinner to his senses sooner. — Now when one occasionally meets here individual well-meaning church members who nevertheless give church conditions in Germany the preference over conditions here, that can at least be understood, for the transition from an oppressive over-guardianship that paralyzes all free activity into a complete independence and self-reliance that demands practiced strength is too sudden, and the resulting confusion and struggle are often too bitter and too long-lasting. Under what anxious strife must it not first be won, that the congregations acknowledge the call of their pastors as a divine one, forget the unbridled arbitrariness in the filling of pastoral positions in Germany, and let go the disgraceful hiring and dismissal of their pastors that arises from that same arbitrariness here. What distress it costs to remove from the congregations the old German rationalist and unionist hymnals and catechisms, especially since (thank God!) no worldly authority lends the church its helping, enforcing arm, and what anxiety and storms it takes before the congregations learn to exercise that so salutary church discipline. As has been said, when church members who are only beginning to sense what a Christian congregation really is about and what the freedom of the church actually means occasionally long back for German ecclesiastical conditions, that is understandable; but if similar cravings for state over-guardianship and police help are found among pastors who have recognized what a Christian and the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth really is, that would in fact be quite incomprehensible, were there not an analogy in those sorrowful Jews who, scarcely freed from bondage, because the way of freedom was rough at first, likewise longed back for the Egyptian fleshpots.

A great evil of the Lutheran congregations here, which people from Germany like to describe as a specifically American one, but which in truth is only an ulcer brought over from there, breaking out here only because it is no longer forcibly held in check by the worldly arm — is the divisions within the congregations, which in most cases degenerate into formal separations, so that often in one place two or even three congregations arise and exist in opposition to one another out of a single congregation. And since most Lutheran synods, without territorial separation, in unhappy, disastrous