# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1896_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Proceedings of the sixteenth convention

Thesis V.

Insofar as church practice is left to the free discretion of the Christian congregation, uniformity of church practice also cannot and may not be made a divine demand upon the Church.

Of the parts of church practice also, as of whatever belongs to church life generally without being governed in God's Word so that it must be so and could not be otherwise, Col. 2:16 says: "Let no man therefore judge you." This holds, as our Confession also says, of Sundays and other festival days, also of other church matters indifferent [Mitteldinge, adiaphora], and what St. Paul says here is just as much a divine ordinance, a divine command, as any commandment of God, as the commandment: You shall not steal — not commit adultery — not kill. Whoever makes a conscience for Christians where God has made none for them, sins just as much as the murderer, the robber, the perjurer. The one is just as really and truly sin as the other. Indeed, if one considers which sin ought to weigh more heavily, it is this one, that a man presumes to seize for himself what God has reserved to Himself alone, namely to bind consciences. Insofar, then, as church practice is left to the free discretion of the Christian congregation, in that it, as the housewife in her house, may establish orders and, according to circumstances and conditions, arrange things as is most profitable for it, nobody is to come and say: You have no right to this; you have to hold here to what the synod has resolved; you have to conform here to what has counted as the best in the Church of the Reformation; you have to hold here to the good old Lutheran church orders (as they taught in Buffalo); you have to conform here to what the synod and especially the pastors have resolved (as was practiced in Buffalo and other American synods). Rather, here what God has said through His apostle is to stand firm in real and complete earnest: Let no man make a conscience for you where it concerns such things, since you may use and avail yourselves of your Christian liberty which your Lord and King has given you. There one may also not demand uniformity within the same body. There one may not say: So it has once been fixed, so it must now remain. The Confession says expressly that in such matters the Christian congregation has right and power to change. We read, namely, in the 10th article of the Formula of Concord: "We believe, teach and confess that the Church of God in every place and at every time has authority, according to its circumstances, in good order, to change the same without levity and offense in an orderly