# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Divisions in the Lutheran Congregations Here. 133

who still retains a shred of honor should so deeply demean himself as to become the servant of a heathen congregation.

The Lutheran pastors, for their part, should recognize as sin and abandon the — regrettably still, in a large part of the church, customary — practice of trial-preaching and willful changing of positions. For this bad custom, too, rests on the view that the bond between a preacher and his congregation is a purely human relationship, one that may be tied and loosed according to one's own pleasure, much as a servant leaves his master when he has the prospect of obtaining a new, higher wage elsewhere. For why do pastors whom "the Holy Spirit" has already set in a congregation, in order that they should shepherd precisely these congregations that have been "committed to them by God," preach on trial? Do they perhaps think their gifts are worth a greater sphere of activity, and their own merit worth a higher salary; and, because time now hangs heavy for them, and they fear the Holy Spirit might forget them, to the great harm of the church, and that the dear Lord might run into too many difficulties before he directed souls in another congregation to extend a proper call to them — is it therefore necessary, on their part, to help the dear Lord along in his governance of the church by means of a trial sermon, and thus to bring themselves back to the Holy Spirit's remembrance? Who has permitted them to leave a congregation that God has "committed" to them, if they cannot show unambiguously that it was again God who called them away? Nor does it avail for someone to say: he considers it best for his own congregation if he leaves it, since it would sooner come to rest and thrive better under the guidance of another shepherd; that he preaches on trial in another congregation not out of selfish, impure motives, but rather thinks that a change of preachers will turn out to the greatest blessing of his congregation. But in churchly, divine matters no "I think," no "holding what is humanly good," no human prudence counts; one must be immovably and certainly convinced that something is pleasing to God before one does it, for everything "that is not of faith is sin."

The synods, too, can do much to hinder divisions and separations in the congregations, namely by not, above all, promoting this sin through the reception of the separated into their congregations, or by sending them preachers of their own. To be sure, the whole condition of the Lutheran church in this country is, on the whole, still a very sad and lamentable one, owing to the way the various Lutheran synods interlock and work against one another, some of them even standing in outright opposition and working against each other. God is a God of order and wills order, but this condition is a shameful disorder. Properly, there ought to be only one Lutheran church, and, in a certain sense, one general Lutheran synod of North America, composed of the individual synods of the individual states, strictly bounded by territory.