# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume VIII.    March 1862.    No. 3.

(Submitted by Pastor Brauer.)

Critique of the Report of the "Seventh Synod of the Lutheran Church Emigrated from Prussia, Held from October 28 to November 8, 1861, at Buffalo."

When Pastor Grabau some years ago sought help within the Prussian Lutheran Church, the name of the "Lutheran Church Emigrated from Prussia" was struck from the sign and a somewhat more modest name was chosen. After the mission had been carried out but had failed, the "Emigrated Lutheran Church" reappeared with full force. Now the Lutheran Church has still not entirely emigrated from Prussia. —

There have been threatening conditions in the Buffalo Synod. The Senior has had much trouble. For ruling, too, has its thorns, since the appetite for ruling is contagious. The various powers within the synod have come into conflict with one another and have chafed hard against each other. Yet the Senior's superior sophistry has once more wrapped the rebellious forces in fog and brought them to rest. — The more the spirit that seeks to rule by serving retreats, the more one loses the kernel, love, and falls instead into the husk, the law; the more one comes into constitution-making. Among the apostolic congregations we find very little constitutional mechanism. The holy apostles established faith and love in their congregations, and then everything else went, as it were, of itself. The twenty-three pastors of the Buffalo Synod are governed by a synodical church court, by a senior's office [Seniorat], by several provostships [Präpositur], and by several church ministries, and yet the synodical wagon moves forward only with great difficulty, lurches badly, and has nearly been overturned altogether. Grabau complains: "Ill consequences have arisen from the fact that the concept of the provostship has been confused by some with that of the church ministry. For the provostship is, in practice, no church ministry, but a help for the same. Again, the Senior Ministerii is, in practice, no provost, but the visitor of the pastores praepositi [the pastors placed under him]. I therefore find it unfair, and going much too far, when a provost, together with the pastors he is to oversee, wishes to be first a provostship, but then also a superintendency and a royal ministry as well. Such a provost would in this way have, every time, a double authority of judgment! at once