# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1950_S840
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES 143

educational institutions an opportunity to more accurately
estimate the professional capacities of those who apply for
training, and would lend increased validity to any pro-
fessional or vocational aptitude predictability tests which
may be used (and are now being used).

~ When all or any of these outcomes are achieved, we believe that

. we shall have materially improved our Church’s capacity to teach
the full counsel of God effectively in the period which lies im-

mediately ahead. That is the real and the ultimate motivation

for every phase of the proposed reorganization. It should be the

basic criterion in any appraisal of the entire plan and of the

individual proposals. ‘
The Primary Question

The comprehensive study which follows reflects your Board’s
response to Synod’s resolution to “establish a senior college as
an additional unit in the professional training of ministerial
students” and to the directive that the Board “continue its study
to determine a satisfactory location for the senior college as well
as its organization, curriculum, and plant requirements” and
submit these preliminary plans together with its recommendations
to the synodical convention of 1950.

Having accepted this mandate to raise the standards of minis-
terial training, the Board’s extensive and prayerful exploration
of the problem led to the firm conviction that Synod is faced at
this time with an equally compelling problem in the production
of ministers and teachers if she is to do no more than to continue
her work under the same measure of blessing which has rested
upon it during the past 25 years. Note well, that the Board does
not even take into account the possibility of greater blessings, but
speaks only of a continuation of the rate of growth which has
been Synod’s actual experience during the past 25 years.

In addition to the mandate which calls for higher quality
standards through the establishment of a senior college, your
Board is forced to recognize also that a primary consideration in
every reorganization recommendation must be the realization that
Synod will urgently require a sharp increase in the production of
ministerial and teacher training candidates if she is to be able
to carry forward her work between 1960 and 1980.

Basic to this conviction are the synodical growth and future
need studies which follow in Sections II and HI of this report.
If the fundamental conclusion (not the actual numerical outcomes)
illustrated by these statistics is rejected, then it is not necessary
to consider the internal reorganization proposed. In that case we