# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S244
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

244 The Union and the Lutheran Church in Bremerhaven.

the senate replied on October 25, 1854: "That by the church order introduced
and by the churchly conditions as they would take shape in accordance with it
in Bremerhaven, the freedom of faith and of conscience
of the members of the congregation is in no way restricted; that rather it may
confidently be expected that by the arrangements made, and still to be made, in consequence of this church order,
full satisfaction will be granted to the needs
of all members of the congregation; that therefore
no ground is found for the petitioners' apprehensions, and that the senate has
the confidence in them that they themselves, upon an unprejudiced examination of the
circumstances, would come to the view that their petition could not be
granted."

That was the answer to the above protest, and it needs no further
illumination. The Lutherans well perceived that an iron arm stood against their good right,
one not easily bent. For the time being they kept silence.

There now followed the election of a preacher by the united congregation, which likewise,
by all sorts of violent means, flew in the face not only of law but even of the
unlawful church order, as may be read in more detail in
a small pamphlet by Pastor Hasenkamp in Lehe. But the
senate had miscalculated if it thought that its arrangements
would grant full satisfaction to all members of the congregation. A movement arose
which led first to the setting up of a separate service
in the chapel of the emigrant house, but out of which there has now at last
worked itself into clear consciousness the conviction that only through the reinstatement
of the Lutheran church in her old, full right, and through a
church of the Lutheran confession firmly closed within and without, can
firm ground be won under one's feet in the general ferment.

Therefore on December 6, 1860, 46 Lutheran citizens here took up again the
old protest of 1854, declared to the senate their complete renunciation
of the united church, and asked for confirmation of their constitutional
right to found a Lutheran congregation with their own means.
As an answer to this there came first the summons that a
deputation of the Lutherans should come to Bremen, so that the commission
of the senate might once set before them the difficulties of the matter.
Two deputies accordingly set out, had an
hour's conference with the senate's commissioners, and honestly
defended their good right. They came back with the impression that
it was impossible the senate should flatly reject the petition. But
so it turned out nonetheless. Soon there followed the senate's written answer, which
declared the Lutherans' withdrawal from the united church unauthorized, since
according to the canonical circumstances obtaining in Bremerhaven they were, even
as Lutherans, subject to the congregational body established there for church and school affairs.

It went without saying that no one could rest content with this decision of the