# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S182
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

182 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

place under any conditions for the sole purpose of making available
a degree is quite as likely to be harmful as it is to be helpful to our
system of ministerial training. To achieve the ideal and to meet
the real needs, requires a clean, new start and a program directed
toward greater spiritual maturity as the primary objective.

It is also understood that the present Preparatory Junior
College and High School system will remain substantially intact,
both as to courses and locations. Some minor curricular adjust-
ments may become necessary. By leaving the present educational
system of Synod intact, there will inevitably be created in the
student, when he completes the Junior College, a sense of coming
to an end. He cannot help but feel the exhilaration and anticipa-
tion of a new educational experience to come. For him it is a
determining transition from an emotional adolescence to a pur-
posive manhood in the educational process.

Especially if the Senior College is designed exclusively for
ministerial training, its existence will tend to emphasize the fact
that the student is preparing to make a final choice of profession
as he approaches graduation from the Junior College. There will
be created then a favorable situation for careful selection and
guidance by Junior College faculties and the application of voca-
tional, personality, and aptitude tests, which may prove valuable
when compared with actual performance of the respective student
when he has completed his stay at the Senior College, but has
not actually matriculated at the Theological Seminary.

There can be little doubt that there is need for such a bridge
to the study of theology between the sophomore college year and
the Theological Seminary. The sheer complexity of the profession
involved makes it illogical to expect students to step successfully
from the college sophomore level into professional study. They
are not sufficiently advanced in academic, cultural, mental,
chronological, or spiritual age to cope with the responsibilities
involved. Since intense concentration upon its development is
precluded by the preponderance of general education in large areas
of our present Preparatory School system, it is difficult to see how
a sufficiently high grade of spiritual maturity may be produced
unless the additional time and facilities of the right type of Senior
College are made available.

Under any plan for a Senior College, whether by the erection
of a new institution or the conversion or amalgamation of an
existing institution, the element of time for the opening of the in-
stitution will become significant. But even if the money were
immediately available and construction were to begin shortly after
the next Delegate Synod, it would hardly be possible to open the
college before September, 1950. On the other hand, this delay need