# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S456
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

456 CONSTITUTIONAL MATTERS

February 1, 1946, to January 31, 1947

Visual Education Service 000 —--- $ 1,942.60
Kodachrome _ 62.20
Accounts Payable __. 460.24
Accounts Receivable a 2,465.04
Receipts . 2,630.99
Refunds __....... 28.74
Net Receipts ___ 2,602.25
October 1, 1946, to March 31, 1947
“Power of God”—Lease ou $ 940.04
“Power of God” —V.E.S, 0S —_ 639.09
Visual Education — General mane ence ee ere 734.51

Recommendation

The Fort Wayne Convention in 1941 resolved “that the Depart-
ment of Publicity and Missionary Education be instructed to lay
plans for the establishment of a Visual Education Department.”
At the time of the Saginaw Convention our Department had not
progressed far enough in its plans for the establishment of a sepa-
rate Department of Visual Education.

However, in the past three years the work and interest in
Visual Education has expanded to such a degree that it is now
recommended to the synodical convention

that the Board of Directors of Synod be and is herewith em-
powered to establish a separate Department to be known as
the Department of Visual Education. This Department is to
be responsible to the Board of Directors for the conduct of
its work.

The field of visual education is a highly technical one. For the
past ten years various church bodies have endeavored to create
departments of visual education through their publishing houses.
Every such endeavor has met with failure. This was not because
the publishing houses or their managers were inefficient, but simply
because the technical differences between the fields of publishing
books and audio-visual education, in the sense in which the term
is being used, are as different as the technique of conducting
a highly technical steel business is from that of conducting art
studios. When steel mills, or the Government, went into the field
of audio-visual education, they did not turn this work over to some
subsidiary and‘already existing department, but they turned it over
to people who were technicians in the field of producing visual
aids — people who had studied and mastered the problems of
that field.

Thus it is our opinion that although our Concordia Publishing
House is a highly efficient organization, this same efficiency in the
field of publishing books does not and would not qualify it to take
over the field of visual education in our Church. The Visual
Education Department in our Church must be founded on an alto-