# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S236
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

236 On the Transfer of Preachers.

...or whatever serves the greater honor of God and fruitfulness for the church, according to a rightly estimated proportion between the field of labor and one's powers. For what kind of proportion is it when a great light is confined to lighting a small room? Or Jonah confined to a small city of Judea, who was, as it were, born and made for the lighting of Nineveh?

If this is how matters stand with a vocation, then one must without doubt accept it and not run away from God, lest he turn his face upon someone in wrath, as befell the fleeing Jonah. Thus the apostle to the Gentiles obeyed, when he was called for help by an angel who had the speech, manner, bearing, and dress of a Macedonian, so that Paul of Tarsus might subdue, through the word of the lordship of Christ, the kingdom which Paulus Aemilius had subjected to the Roman yoke by force of arms. Thus that same apostle, bound in the spirit, visits Jerusalem amid the most intense and violent inner struggle. Whoever fears the lion outside gravely injures his conscience, Prov. 22:13, where Luther says in the marginal gloss: "These are preachers, rulers, servants, who will not bite the fox, and will not go through thick and thin."

20. We must add the other extreme as well: for those sin not only by too little who wholly disapprove of the transfer of ministers of the Word, but also, on the contrary, by too much, those who run back and forth and, out of weariness with their office, chase after another one, and who, out of dissatisfaction with their post — that mirror of pride — seek to attain a higher one, driven only by ambition or greed, without waiting for the church's necessity and the constraint of a call. From this, for the most part, poor results follow, and their congregations reap more harm than benefit from it.

Let this, too, be said to those who change posts faster than they are changed, in that they wait for the deaths of others, indeed even secure for themselves reversionary claims, forgetting that saying of Cato's which they perhaps once learned in school: "Set not your hope upon another's death." For this means calling oneself, and out of ambition offering one's own worthiness for sale toward a higher rank. Aaron did not do so, who did not seize the honor for himself, but received it by calling, Heb. 5; nor did faithful servants of God in earlier times do so, who were compelled against their will to the teaching office or to higher dignities.

21. Whoever, then, wishes to keep watch over his conscience should not let himself be moved from a middling post to a supposedly greater one for the sake of a shovelful of barley or a handful of honor; rather, he should diligently inquire and, in this difficult matter, follow what apostolic practice enjoins and what the benefit of the church and the welfare of the hearers allow. Whoever is godly and upright will sincerely love his congregation, and will care for it as long as he can, and will not leave it, except where the vocation has a compelling force.