# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S150
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

Your Board has felt considerable concern over today’s
apparently growing tendency to invite invidious comparisons
between expenditures which the Church makes directly for mis-
sions and those made directly for higher education. A century
of experience in the Church indicates clearly that both are integral
parts of a single project. The one activity cannot prosper without
the other. Some type of education must precede a program of
mission activity; in fact, without effective work in education the
missionary endeavors of the Church may only be expected to
decline in effectiveness. The closer that Synod approaches its
divinely prescribed goal of going into all the world with the Gospel
of salvation, the more vital will become the leadership which
must plan and guide the work and which must inspire and direct
those who must support the projects which our Church undertakes
for the Lord.

A vigorous program of extension of the Kingdom of God in
the hearts of men through pulpit, press, radio, visual presentation,
chaplaincies, and a vast system of elementary schools could be
maintained during the past century because the Church had avail-
able a constant and ample supply of trained servants. These were
the products of its own system of higher education. God has also
seen fit in His gracious wisdom to use that integrated system of
Colleges and Seminaries further as a preserver of a singular degree
of unity among us and as a potent instrument to transmit to our
Church through generations of graduates the supreme gift of
fidelity to His pure Word.

When we consider these great blessings as well as the com-
plexity and the variety of our Church’s daily activity, and when
we realize how manifold, direct, and vital are the contributions
of Synod’s system of education to the projects which all congeal
ultimately in the single objective — and no other — of placing
before all the world the glorious Gospel that Jesus Christ has
purchased eternal salvation for every immortal soul, we cannot
refrain from expressing our conviction that the evaluation of our
Church’s activity in higher education must not be confined to
terms of dollars and cents.

As the Missouri Synod now inevitably emerges at an accelerated
rate from its former cultural and language isolation to face the
full impact of the great urban and rural development of our
country as well as the implications of our country’s elevation to
the status of world power, we shall need more than ever to cling
to the Holy Scripture’s pronouncements on the true state of the
human soul and to God’s gracious promise of salvation for all
mankind, but we shall have also the solemn concomitant obligation
to discern the signs of the times and thus to achieve a moral insight