# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S50
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

50 The New Newspaper on Us Poor Missourians.

government among us: that registering for confession, and the church discipline commanded by Christ in Matthew 18:15-17, are in practice among us — two things which, even if not essential to being, nevertheless undeniably belong to well-being, to the Christian and churchly welfare of the congregation. Is that not indeed nicely "Americanized"? I daresay many of our brothers in office in the Lutheran state churches over there, who also live in and for their congregations and to whom it is a matter of earnest concern that their congregations should gain an ever healthier Christian shape in this respect too, would be heartily glad if they had gotten that far. Yet it is not exactly unheard of that their church government — namely, the state-church consistory — should, now and again, take unruly, butting goats among their congregations, who for good reasons resist registering for confession, under its protection against their conscientious pastors. But as for the exercise of church discipline to its final degree, namely the exclusion of the public, impenitent sinner — this right and power, which properly and essentially belongs to each individual local congregation according to Matthew 18:17, has, without the congregations' consent, simply been taken from them by the territorial church government and handed over to the consistories for administration. Of this church government, then, that of the divine Word over there stands so wretchedly suppressed by the constitution that no congregation can come out of its condition of nonage and, through the teaching of the divine Word, gradually learn and grow enough to exercise fraternal correction or Christian church discipline, even to the ban where needful, on its own. Is that not indeed nicely evangelized or Lutheranized? —

In the fifth place, the Word of God shows its power also among our so questionable and dangerously "Americanized" congregations in this, that through free-will offerings they support not only their own pastors and schoolteachers, but also the professors of their four church institutions of learning, and besides many poor, godly, and gifted boys and young men at these their schools, and erect the needed buildings for them and enlarge them as necessity requires.

In the sixth place, it is likewise a gracious working of the divine Word among us that from our own congregations ever more such boys and young men are being awakened by the Lord to prepare themselves, with the consent of their parents or guardians, for the future service of the church as pastors or schoolteachers, although they know that here in this land, in every civil calling, they would on average have more money and good days and less labor and cross to bear.

In sum, it is a glorious thing to have the unimpaired government of the church by the divine Word; and however much we too are surrounded and covered with faults and imperfection, weaknesses and infirmities, and however much strife, tribulation, and cross we too must bear from the unruly flesh of this one or that one among our parishioners who resist this government of the church, we "Americanized" Lutheran pastors are nonetheless of