# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S316
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

316 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

principles, a rift arose in the congregation, and without giving up the Lutheran name,
Stegmann founded a new congregation with 70 members. The old congregation of 800
to 1000 members now turned, on the advice of Mission Superintendent Hardeland, again to
Hanover, and received from there in 1851 Pastor Parisius, with whom the congregation
was so edified that it sent a special letter of thanks to Hanover.
Parisius found here an ecclesiastical order that had its peculiarities. The public
confessional writings, to which the preachers are bound, are the Lutheran ones including
the Formula of Concord. The worship service, on the other hand, has the Reformed
shape. No altar, but a white, covered table with bread instead of wafers at the Lord's
Supper. At baptisms the formula is spoken from the pulpit, and then the baptism itself
is performed at the font. At public worship the preacher goes up into the pulpit, sits
down there, speaks the apostolic greeting after the singing has ended, reads a chapter
from the Bible, holds a prayer, and then announces the next hymn, which he also reads
aloud himself. Then sermon, church prayer, hymn, and benediction.
Parisius attempted some changes, so that he would at least not need to baptize and
marry from the pulpit. However, precisely in the outward matters that are tangible and
catch the eye, many people tend to be more stubborn and sensitive than in doctrine.
Parisius had various experiences that brought him, in January 1861, to the decision to
give up his ministry. It then became evident that his calm and steady work had not
been in vain. A considerable part of the congregation, chiefly the native-born Germans,
gathered around him and formed, for the time being, a separate congregation, until
conditions in the main church should change. Worship was henceforth based on the
Kalenberg church order.
The new congregation numbers about 1000 souls, and in order not to stand isolated, it
has placed itself under the government and oversight of the Consistory at Hanover, which
at the same time fills the preaching post and, in case of need, removes the preacher. The
consistorial decree concerning this was read from the pulpit around Easter 1862. The
congregation has its own school, at which the Hanoverian Klüver was in charge, who has
however been called as pastor by a Lutheran congregation in Kaffraria. In this school an
attempt was made to introduce the new Hanoverian catechism. If that has happened,
then, after its rejection in the homeland, it has found a new homeland abroad in three
places, in the Elberfeld Petri congregation, in Africa, and in the East Indies.
Regeneration through Baptism. The Evangelist reports: "Spurgeon
in London, the well-known Baptist preacher, has gotten himself into great trouble by
declaring that the preachers of the Episcopal Church who do not believe in the effect of
regeneration through baptism, and yet sign the confessional writings of the Episcopal
Church, are not acting honestly, and that honest people should not associate with them."
— Would that our own pseudo-Lutherans also took note of this, who likewise deny that
doctrine, although the Lutheran Church in its symbols presents baptism as a means of
regeneration far more decisively than the Episcopal Church does.
Herr Pastor Löhe's Judgment on the American General
Synod. After he communicated a notice about the latter synod from the "Lutheraner" in
the "Kirchliche Mittheilungen" of July 1864, he adds: "We would note, for readers less
familiar with American ecclesiastical conditions, that the American Lutheran General
Synod comprises almost the whole eastern and thus the most populous part of America.
Despite its name it is, notwithstanding, Lutheran in a united [uniert] sense, and indeed
more so than any church communion, e.g., in Germany, because there not only Reformed
but also sectarian (Methodist) elements of every kind have mixed in. It is a union for
reasons of expediency, a union of circumstances, since it is more convenient that the
various church parties of a place be served by a common pastor than that each should
set up its own, and one that also arose at a time when the significance of the confession
was not yet again rightly appreciated. — Yet there are