# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S114
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

114

(Submitted.)
On the Divisions in the Lutheran Congregations Here.
(Continued.)

A. The source, the actual origin of this grave sin and great evil, is unbelief. One does not believe that the holy preaching office is a divine institution, a divine ordinance. The word: "The LORD gives the word with great hosts of evangelists," Psalm 68:12, and: "You children of Zion, rejoice and be glad in the LORD your God, who gives you teachers unto righteousness," has not yet come to the knowledge of many congregations. They think it is a churchly, human arrangement — that preachers are needed so that the Word of God may be proclaimed and the holy sacraments administered — but that it depends on their own will and pleasure whether to establish the preaching office among themselves or not, whether to keep the pastor they have chosen, or, after a certain term of notice has expired, to dismiss him. That it is God who, through a lawfully exercised authority, gives them their pastor, and that the bond which therefore unites them with their pastor is likewise a holy, divine bond, which, as it was tied by God, can also be loosed again by Him alone — of this many Lutheran congregations still know nothing. And how indeed should these poor people have learned it? How grievously the filling of pastoral positions lies in confusion in most parts of Germany, where it is not the living and only wise God but the seniority of the preachers and the size of the parish income that usually determines the appointment; so that here, even in congregations that are already somewhat advanced, one nevertheless sometimes hears, in matters of a call, the remark: if our preacher can better himself in the position to which he has been called, we cannot keep him. To this is added that, unfortunately, many Lutheran preachers here too, in complete ignorance of the doctrine of the call, most arbitrarily and often from purely worldly motives, themselves give up their divine calling and change congregations as often as they promise themselves an advantage from it. Is it then to be wondered at if individual members of the congregations too, as soon as things do not go according to their own head and wish, take steps to dissolve the bond that binds them to their congregations, and, since they cannot, like the preachers, readily move on at will to other congregations, now instead seek to form parties of their own, make divisions, and, when it comes to actual separations, form, together with their following, an opposition congregation?

Here it is above all needful that the conscience of preachers and congregations alike be awakened, so that divine light may shine into this sorrowful darkness.

The preaching office is a divine ordinance, a work of the divine...