Quote of the Week- August Pieper

A reconstruction that endeavors to make various external changes in the Church or to introduce various external innovations, without correcting the basic damage of the Church, the indifference in spirit, is worth nothing.  What we teachers and hearers need above all is a new and right spirit.  The zeal for our own soul's salvation and the zeal for the house of God must consume us, as it once did the Lord (John 2:17) and Paul (2 Corinthians 11:2), to the degree that we--to use only one example--do not rest until we have filled Saginaw, New Ulm, Watertown, and Wauwatosa with students who wish to become pastors and teachers, so that the walls burst.  If God gives the pastors and teachers of the Church above all a new and right spirit, a new burning and consuming zeal for their own soul's salvation and for the salvation of the Church, then all necessary and wholesome external arrangements become insignificant details.
(August Pieper, The True Reconstruction of the Church, p. 12)