# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S246
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

"Woe to him," says the Preacher Solomon, "who is alone; when he falls, there is
no other there to help him up."

Now if the talent entrusted to a pastor, be it great or small, is, through his becoming stunted or given over to a worldly way of life, as good as buried for the good of the church, then one must already be well content if the inherited condition of Christian morals and morality is maintained even barely in the congregations. If, as sometimes happens, new life nevertheless breaks forth here and there, then at least the pastor is not to blame for it. "God," says old Rieger, "must have children, and Christ must have servants. Here and there people slip forth out of the ground, so to speak (if I may put it that way), so that one hardly knows where they come from, who with their new zeal for godliness, with their new earnestness to serve Christ, with their evangelical and unfeigned Christianity put utterly to shame our old, sluggish, indolent, unfruitful nature, our lukewarmness and hypocrisy, our unbelief, worldly-conformity, and earthly mind." To be sure, the Spirit of God, when the ordinary way is overgrown or blocked up, can break new paths; but one must not let it come to depend on that, but must rather see to it that the ordinary way of the church is kept in good order; and that would indeed be the task of the superintendent, to work toward this through pastoral influence upon the pastors placed under him. Here indeed the activity of a faithful shepherd of souls would be desirable, one endowed with wisdom and strength, in part to speak a word in season to the weary, to raise up the drooping hands and the feeble knees, to revive the downcast spirit, and in part to work against a worldly mind and secularization. Such pastoral care by the superintendent must in no case be regarded as superfluous on the ground that this or that fellow minister will help his brother in office with encouragement or correction where it is needed. For in the first place one ought not to wait to see whether such a thing might perhaps be found; the matter is too important for that; and furthermore it is a peculiar thing for a pastor to hand over pastoral care to another merely out of a general Christian-brotherly duty; one knows indeed how difficult that is in such a case, for many reasons. It would, in order to grasp and carry through the matter with a securely grounded heart, hardly be sufficient for the general Christian calling alone to suffice. Here there is need, even more than in any other pastoral care, of the consciousness of having duty and right to it behind one through a special calling received, according to God's ordinance, from the church government. Of such pastoral care on the part of the superintendents, however, one cannot as yet boast much. That lies certainly, in many cases, neither in the timidity or indolence nor in the deficient sense of duty of the spiritual inspector, but in an impossibility conditioned by circumstances. Under present conditions a superintendent has far too large districts to look after; at least in most cases there are twenty to thirty,