# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1900_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Proceedings of the eighteenth convention

[the schools] to raise and promote. Even among ourselves, therefore, we must not grow weary of setting this subject before our congregations again and again. So in these days we speak

Of the Necessity of the Christian Congregational School for the Christian Family, the Church and the State.

1. The Christian congregational school answers, first of all, a very widely felt need of the Christian home for an arrangement in which the education of the young is in part a common concern of the congregation.

2. Under conditions here, the state school cannot by any means satisfy that need; but neither do the Sunday school and confirmation instruction fully answer it.

3. From this it follows that the congregation, quite apart from the office of the Word, has the duty of love to give opportunity for the Christian education of children through the congregational school.

4. Since our congregations in future must grow more and more out of their own families if they are to continue to exist; since, further, our higher institutions of learning can expect their enrolment only from the circle of the Christian-educated young, the future existence of our congregations rests in large part on the prosperity of the congregational school.

5. Since only a Christian education offers the true foundation of all civic and social virtue, the duty toward our whole people requires that we cherish and promote our congregational schools.

1.

The Christian congregational school answers, first of all, a very widely felt need of the Christian home for an arrangement in which the education of the young is in part a common concern of the congregation.

Christian education is plainly the task which God assigns to parents. When God in Paradise names as the purpose of the family the multiplication of the human race by the begetting of children, the education of children is of course included. Our children are corrupted and poisoned by original sin, and through rebirth the old man is not annihilated, but clings to the children after baptism until their death. Hence Christian education consists in the continual combating and mortifying of the evil dwelling in the children, and in the preservation and increase of the life of faith begun in them, with its fruits. Thoroughly wrong is the educational system of the rationalistic-philosophical pedagogues, of a Rousseau, of the [sentence continues on the next page]