# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 Proceedings of the seventeenth convention

The Lutheran pastor is a Lutheran pastor and is a pastor at all only for Lutheran Christians. These are the flock whose shepherd he is. For the others he is at most a preacher who, as God's missionary messenger, also lets his voice reach those who are first to be brought to the flock over which he is set as shepherd; but pastor, shepherd of a flock, he is only for the Lutheran Christians of his congregation. This is so certain that a pastor, even when he preaches as a guest in a strange congregation, does not appear there as pastor of that congregation but as the substitute of that congregation's pastor; he has not become shepherd of this flock but a substitute for its shepherd, and therefore also has no right, by virtue of his preaching office, to go into any other congregation and begin to preach there and afterward declare: I am, you see, a pastor. Then one can say to him: Go where you are pastor; here you are not; tend the flock that has been committed to you, and do not reach into a strange office. And a pastor should not deviate from this in such a way that he ministers pastorally to people who have no business with him in the world, who perhaps even declare: We actually belong to a Methodist congregation. That is not part of his office; he has no calling for it. That, moreover, is a breaking through of the principle on which, in this matter, church solidarity rests: that we are Lutheran preachers, orthodox Lutheran preachers, are pastors for our Lutheran Christians and have to perform the works of our office on them, while we leave the erring to those to whom they belong, the erring preachers. A pastor's field of office ends exactly where another pastor's field of office begins.

This applies also to the conduct of a funeral. According to civil law, at least according to common law, a person has ceased to be when he has died. The whole law of wills rests, in the view of jurists, only on statutes, not on common law. When a person has died he has no more rights; then he has ceased to exist as far as the law is concerned; then also what he decreed counts only insofar as he decreed it while he was still living. For us, on the contrary, the person has not ceased to be when his body is laid in the grave, has not ceased to be that which he was when he died. He has not ceased to be a child of God and to live as a child of God, and his dust rests as the dust of a child of God in hope, if he died as a Christian; or else he is, as he departed, a servant of Satan, who has sunk from spiritual death into eternal death. So he belongs either to the Christian church, and indeed as a member who has been transferred from the orthodox, militant church into the triumphant church, if he died as an upright Lutheran Christian, or he does not belong to the Christian church, if he did not die as a Christian. We have no right to recognize him as belonging to the Lutheran church and