# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S201
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES 199

strated by the many years of successful operation of similar
organizations in schools operated by other church bodies and in .
many universities.

It should result, also, in enhanced direct educational service to
the Church. The Preparatory Schools and the Teachers Colleges
are left undisturbed. At the same time, the need for excessive
shifting from campus to campus by ministerial students is not
created. In a positive way, the academic and social intercourse
between students and staff of Seminary and College might well be
expected to be mutually helpful in the matter of stimulating con-
tinuous, prompt, and effective evaluation of potential improvements
in the Church’s program of ministerial training.

RECOMMENDATIONS

; Years of preliminary general explorations and intensive con-

sideration of specific plans during the past triennium have con-
sistently served to emphasize the extremely complex and involved
pattern of this entire problem. But specific progress can also be
reported as a result of these microscopic examinations of conditions,
developments, traditions, and policies. These studies have yielded,
first of all, the convictions on the part of both your Board and its
Advisory Council that there is need for an extension of the
ministerial training program. A second and most significant out-
come has been the clarification of the Objectives of Ministerial
Training and a new formulation of these basic Objectives. Finally,
vital criteria which must govern a Senior College or any other
effective extension of the present system have been established.

Recognizing that the outcomes yielded have very considerable
value, your Board must report that neither its lengthy deliberations
and studies nor its consultations with the Advisory Council and
the Professors’ Conference have yet indicated a specific plan which
is sufficiently acceptable to yield the degree of unanimity desirable
for recommendation in a matter of such significance. It is apparent
that a high degree of enthusiastic support is a vital requirement
for any plan if there is to be real hope of resultant blessing to
the Church.

In addition to the negative factors indicated in the analyses
of the various individual proposals and of the significant modifica-
tions involved for the entire system, the reluctance to give un-
qualified endorsement to any specific plan results also, in part, from
the Board’s inability to gauge Synod’s future attitude toward general
education in the synodical schools. Other elements of extreme
uncertainty include the very considerable fluctuations of con-
struction costs experienced by the few synodical construction
projects now in progress or already completed. These indicate