Made up of men and women who by faith in Christ are priests and kings before God. The Christian congregation is self-governing and sovereign, subject only, yet always, to the authority of Jesus Christ and His Word. The only power in the Church is the Office of the Keys, the power of the Gospel to forgive sins, and this is given to each congregation as a whole. The Lutheran congregation therefore conducts its own affairs. It chooses its own pastor.
All pastors have an equal status.
The local minister performs the rite of Confirmation. The specific form of church organization is a matter of Christian liberty. Confirmed membership in Lutheran churches in this period grew from 175,000 in 1850 to 2,205,000 in 1910. Second, thanks to the expansion of railroads and the opening of the frontier, many of these immigrants settled in the upper Midwest, in the Northwest, and in western Canada. There they established communities with strong ethnic flavors and were able to transplant much of the culture and way of life from their old homeland to the new.