# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1877_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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could not see, the pastors in some cases have formed school societies of those heads of families who were willing to found a parish school, and these have then set up flourishing schools, which are later to pass to the congregation. In general the pastor must be somewhat inventive in the way he can reach the goal. If it does not work one way, one tries another. Everything depends on the pastor. Therefore at visitations it should also be asked whether the pastor, if there is no teacher, himself keeps school. That is absolutely necessary.

The founding of parish schools may well be harder in the East than in the West, where mostly German immigrants live, or where in any case they began at once to provide Christian instruction. For in the East not only have many congregations never had their own schools, but there are also many pastors there who never attended a parish school and therefore perhaps do not even have the skill to set one up. These must first get a heart for the matter. If that is the case and the matter weighs on their conscience, then, as experience teaches, the founding of parish schools goes forward.

Thereupon a pastor from an English district declared that he too was convinced of the blessing of parish schools, and although neither he nor his congregation members had been brought up in them, he wished with them earnestly that he had such an institution. At first the matter had been new to them, and they had therefore had no great inclination for it. But after the matter had been made clear to them, all were for it. But a parish school has not yet come into being in their midst. In the cities that might well work, but his members live too scattered for the children to be able to come together in sufficient numbers. This cannot be changed for the moment. Moreover, he too takes care of the youth entrusted to him as far as he can and does not content himself with preaching, but is often absent from home three to four weeks, also to instruct children living farther away in God's Word. He felt compelled to communicate these circumstances openly to the Synodical Conference [*Synodalconferenz*].

To this it was replied that we Lutherans of the Synodical Conference are surely not legalists [*Geſetzestreiber*]. One need only attend to the wording of the thesis. There it says: "It is a glaring contradiction of the confession when a church body shows no earnestness and zeal, as far as lies in its power, to get orthodox parish schools going." More cannot be demanded even of a pastor than that he do as much as lies in him. If circumstances then hinder it from coming about, or the bad situation that the people do not have the right earnestness and the right insight, the guilt is not his. We do not cast away synods that do not yet have any parish