# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 17 —

conditions should we sit still with the pretext: We have to care for ourselves? No, we are to let the pure Word resound, so that, if possible, everyone may hear it.

On section c it was remarked: One might perhaps ask here what it is supposed to mean that we may not violate the churchly rights of the sects. The answer is: Where there are still children of God, there is also the right of call. Now there are still children of God also among the sects. If, therefore, a pastor has been called among the sects too, we may not intrude upon those who have called him. We speak of the rights of the sects because we must regard them in two ways: first as persons who hold fast to false doctrine and are therefore a sect, then as people who have true believers among them and are therefore in this respect a church. All sects are indeed within the church, as the apostle says to Christians: "There must also be factions among you," and that the Antichrist "sits in the temple of God." As a sect, to be sure, no community has any rights whatever; as a church, however, a community tyrannized over by false teachers has no fewer rights than we. If, therefore, it calls itself a pastor, he has just as much the proper office as a pastor of the pure Word, and for that reason we may not interfere in the office of any Methodist, indeed not even of a Roman priest. That they do not rightly administer the proper office, which they have for the sake of the children of God hidden in their sect, God will judge in His own time, but it is not for us to intervene arbitrarily where God's office has already been set up. What is divine, the church has recognized since the apostles' time also among the sects. Now the call is something divine, so it is also to be recognized by us. Only those, of course, can subscribe to this part of the thesis who hold the pure doctrine of the ministry. Whoever does not hold it either believes, in Anabaptist fashion, that he can preach wherever he wants and whenever he feels like it, or, if he derives the office from a succession, whether by the laying on of hands or by the transmission of pure doctrine, then he believes that no one besides himself and his kind stands in such an office. It must of course be noted that, like the sect itself, so also the office among it must be regarded from two different sides: first, how it is by its origin and nature a proper office; then, how it is abused by those who hold and exercise it. Therefore we must respect it insofar as it is a proper one, not insofar as it is an abused one. Luther says very decidedly that one should not, for God's sake, preach in the parish of a sectarian, not even secretly, for it has not been commanded us. If such people with anxious consciences ask me for counsel, then of course I must not withhold from them the true comfort of the Gospel. But to that the general Christian duty entitles me, not my preaching office. All those, however, who live in the midst of the territory of a sectarian pastor but