# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1896_S45
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference [*Synodalconferenz*] of North America. 1896. 45

sinning if it again takes the altered circumstances into account and instructs the teacher to look about for another call. In that case the teacher cannot stiffen himself on the ground that he was called here and will accept no other call. The congregation, which had the right to branch off [the offices], has the same right, when circumstances again demand a new ordering of things, to discontinue this branching off and to unite all the functions again in the one teacher of the congregation.

It says in the thesis: "to take account of their local circumstances and of the churchly interests of their members." The churchly interests of the members of a congregation are indeed to be safeguarded in the best possible way by the local congregation, to which the keys of the kingdom of heaven have been given; provision is to be made for the individual members of the congregation in the way in which they are best provided for. If a congregation, for example, saw that a member could be better provided for in another, neighboring congregation with preaching and with school instruction for the children of the house, and the family could come more regularly to worship there; and if this member now wished to join there for these reasons, the congregation should know: it does not exist in order first to keep the interest of the whole in view, but it exists because the individual members are to be saved. The congregation, especially the congregation of the voting members [Stimmberechtigte], is not saved as a whole; rather the individuals must each live by his own faith and be saved, and the congregation exists for this, that the individuals shall be saved. And where they are better provided for, where more strength and nourishment, help, counsel and fortification can come to someone if he attaches himself there, the congregation has no right to keep him, say because it cannot do without him. The members are not there for the sake of the congregation, but the reverse. To be sure, the better provision which a Christian seeks for himself and his family must not amount to his being a connoisseur who would rather hear this or that preacher than his present one and thinks he will therefore have more blessing because the other is more eloquent or learned and more gifted. For it is always the kernel of evangelical truth that nourishes the spiritual man, and the greater gifts of a preacher or any such things add nothing to the real power of the sermon. But a walk to church, for example, which often made it impossible for him to attend worship and kept the children from regular attendance at school, may well be a reason why a head of household should be permitted to join another congregation whose church and school lie farther away, but are more easily and more safely reached for him and his family.

On the other hand, a member of a congregation should not act as if he alone were the congregation, as if provision had to be made for him, even if all