# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S176
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

176 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

improved integration, the extent and the nature of the general
education development at the majority of Synod’s present Pre-
paratory Colleges precludes the possibility of recreating a training
situation in which both faculty and students focus every thought
and effort upon the sole objective of effective preparation for the
Lutheran ministry.

This situation may indeed be the Lord’s way of providing our
Church with a supply of urgently needed lay leadership trained
under the direct auspices of the Church, but if the Church is to
continue simultaneously to enjoy the blessings that have resulted
from separate training of the clergy, then it appears that there
remain only two opportunities to again establish the essence of
traditional practice and at the same time to improve the outcomes
by improved adaptation to current conditions and needs, This con-
dition may be achieved by the establishment of a separate Senior
College (two-year or four-year) with the most carefully defined
functions and objectives or by a plan which will reserve an
adequate number of our present Preparatory Schools as exclusive
agencies for ministerial training.

Your Board believes that a Senior College devoting its facilities
exclusively to pre-ministerial curricula and a program of min-
isterial training is the best answer to the problem.

Functions of the Senior College

To serve as an effective means to such ends, the required
principal functions of the proposed Senior College would be the
following:

The first and dominant function of the proposed Senior College
is to serve as a carefully planned and thoroughly organized means
through which candidates for the Theological Seminary in St. Louis
may experience, during the two years immediately preceding their
entrance into the Seminary, a profound strengthening of their
Christian faith, a deepening of their consecration to Christ, and
a genuine and wholesome development of their personal sanctifi-
cation, It is expected that the operation of the Senior College will
be directed chiefly to these ends.

Another major function shall be the cultivation of desirable
intellectual traits and viewpoints through study, not here for the
sake of knowledge, but for the sake of discipline.

It shall be, further, the function of the Senior College to extend
the cultural knowledge of the student through (a) substantially
those courses which are now included in the first year of the Sem-
inary curriculum, and (b) additional courses which will provide
every student with a comprehensive major in the field of social
sciences, and which also will offer limited opportunity for the selec-