# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S247
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical Fellowship. 247

often pastors situated extraordinarily far from him, over whom he is set; besides that the countless school visitations, the piles of files to be dealt with daily, the mere sight of which strikes dread into anyone uninitiated into such office work, and, above and before all that, the service in his own congregation. So long as no essential change is made in this, one can indeed wonder, if one wishes to judge fairly, that they manage, at best, to see to it that outwardly everything goes on fairly according to proper order. Now a superintendent, with time, comes to know his pastors only barely well enough to render a judgment about them, since for that the triennial visitations, the yearly synodical conferences, the other chance encounters, and good and bad rumors suffice. But of a continuing influence on the individual pastors, of a truly pastoral guidance, there can be no talk at all. This is in any case a root-damage in our church, which has always already borne its evil fruits. But it is, fortunately, a damage that can be remedied without too great difficulty. Were the synods smaller, arranged more suitably to their purpose, a steady connection between the superintendent and the individual pastor would thereby be made possible, and besides that something else attainable, of which at present scarcely a faint trace is present in our church, and which yet would seem highly necessary for a healthy, vigorous shaping of the church: namely, frequent gatherings of the synod under the leadership of the superintendent for common work in the service of the church. Such synodical assemblies are by no means replaced by the free gatherings of clergy, which arise here and there from a felt need, for social or theological purposes; for these latter lack one essential element. Namely, because they are only accidentally and arbitrarily composed, and must leave entirely out of account any official duty or official right connected with membership, they cannot awaken the consciousness that they are a called member and organ of the church; and the effect must be wholly absent from them that their members grow together, as it were, into an organic unity, into a part of the church government, so far as this pertains to the teaching estate at all. But that would be the necessary consequence of such synodical assemblies; even now, in their most meager form, they to some degree stimulate toward it, and even if only in an abstract form: what would not the true synodical fellowships accomplish, if they filled that weak, abstract form with concrete, life-giving content! Let one now imagine as head — and now no longer a merely formal, but a real head of such small bodies — a man full of spirit and grace, in whom that fine word has become true: pectus est quod theologum facit, non gloriae sed crucis [it is the heart that makes the theologian, one in love not with glory but with the cross]; a man who is not half-believing, letting himself be weighed and swayed like a wavering reed by every wind of doctrine, but rather an