# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S243
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical Fellowship. 243

state church particularly in view, but which nevertheless retain their full worth in essence for us as well, since reflecting on them can awaken in us thankfulness toward our Lord, the one Head of the church, who has given gifts to men, Eph. 4, and can awaken in us a more faithful use of those gifts.

"The church has to do throughout with the personal in man, and makes that very thing, down to its innermost core, the object of its care. Therefore any sort of bureaucratic administration in the church, which by its very nature can only concern itself with standing forms and institutions, is wholly impermissible. Rather, everything depends entirely on personal leadership, and this should come vividly to the fore, reckoned upward from the individual pastors, first of all in the superintendent (president). The superintendent should prove himself, as a true bishop of the pastors placed under him, a faithful pastor to the individuals, and should stand as the head of the synod not merely in form, but should in truth and reality be found to be so. It is precisely this pastoral care that must come to the fore in his office, as in every truly churchly office; for all other churchly authority is only an outflow and an attendant of that divinely warranted calling: whoever is to rule in the church must first serve, in pastoral care, those over whom he is to rule. This first task of the superintendent is also met by an urgent need. For indeed the pastor, in his precious yet so heavy and responsibility-laden office, already generally needs pastoral care himself, particularly the one still inexperienced and not yet grounded in the disposition of his heart; but in particular the country pastor has to contend with a peculiar temptation which has already brought down many, and whose power tends to increase rather than decrease with the years. That is his solitary position, so greatly lacking in spiritual stimulation from without. In him all too often the word is fulfilled: "Woe to him who is alone." (Eccles. 4:10.) In many this solitude works a spiritual slackening; they do not, in the long run, withstand the monotony of their surroundings; their often already slight vigor wears itself out; a kind of spiritual numbness steals over them gradually and unexpectedly; having grown old before their time, they die, to a certain degree, to the higher interests of life, indeed even to the understanding of them. How sparse, how laborious, in part how costly, is not intercourse with one or another brother in office, and how little rewarding is even the fellowship of two or three equally low-spirited souls. Even from the anything-but-pithy manner of thought and speech of such men one can tell their dully flowing existence; they are shallow and superficial in conversation and in preaching; how rarely is it even granted them to hear another clergyman and thereby refresh themselves for a time. Thus they fall into a slack letting-themselves-go, into a sterile contentment with themselves. What does it help that they fill the greater part of their time not uselessly with farming or gardening, and in these arts