# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1864_S202
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

202 Dr. K. K. Münkel's Assessment of the Work: The Right Form, etc.

Just as naturally right and fitting as it was, in this respect, at the time of the Reformation, for the church to enter into the form of territorial church-establishment and its orders, so too, just as naturally, it accommodates itself in North America to the free conditions of the popular life and character found there. — It is in this sense that we believe we must rightly understand and appreciate it, when we see, in the Missourian church constitution, the supreme decision in all matters "which are neither commanded nor forbidden in God's Word" placed in the hands of free congregational assemblies, and the principle of decision by majority vote brought to its freest application — yet only in such a way "that everything be done according to the principles of love and equity, and after prior deliberation, in Christian order." According to our sincere conviction, in a land whose whole civil life and social customs rest upon the most complete popular liberty and the equal rights of all classes, the constitution of the church too can take no other shape than one of full freedom granted to the congregations in everything that is not regulated and determined by divine authority in God's Word and confession. And that the Missourians enter so entirely into the manner of their land and people that in no way do they approach their congregations with an outwardly human compulsion or with a human wish to "make something happen" in the field of church constitution, but rather, conversely, reserve to themselves only the sole and absolute power and dominion of the Word of God and the pure preaching of the Gospel, and, from this firm ground, seek through pastoral and fatherly instruction and oversight to form their congregations into true Christian congregations — in this we see in them a trait of genuinely pastoral wisdom and Lutheran sobriety, as well as a chief cause of the ecclesiastical blessing that falls to their share. On the ground of free-church congregational formation, nothing must come to more pitiful ruin than presumed official power that cannot legitimate itself by the immediate Word of holy Scripture and divine institution; mere theories and theological opinions about church government and the like are there thoroughly reduced to nothing, as soon as they come into serious collision with the will of the congregations and with actual life. There simply remains to the minister no other power than that of the divine Word, and only so far as that extends — and well for him if he never attempts to assert any other power. For as thousandfold experience, especially in the most recent times, confirms, nothing stands more in the way of the minister in the right pastoral guidance and leading of his congregation than the mistrust of hierarchical designs which the spirit of the present age so readily engenders; and, on the other hand, congregations certainly never give themselves more willingly and trustingly to the word of their minister than when they are thoroughly secured against all presumptions of the office. Let one therefore be without fear or care of mob-rule, or of contempt for the holy office, etc. Where God's Word is truly and livingly at work in a congregation, there is truly no want; there it brings and