# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1956_S172
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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172 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

the ability to learn, have not finished eight grades of elementary
schooling. Many who finish the eighth grade do not go on to high
school. But of every 100 who enter the Freshman high school year
throughout the United States today, only 35 will complete four
years of secondary schooling before dropping out. For many
thousands, graduation from high school is the end of their formal
schooling. Most recent studies indicate that barely 50% of the
high school graduates in the United States who could with profit
continue their studies on the collegiate level actually enter the
Freshman college year.

Leaders of industry and of business have recently become very
interested in the problem, not entirely for altruistic reasons. New
organizations like the National Science Foundation and the
National Manpower Council have become active in ways of search-
ing out, encouraging, and making it possible for youth in the early
high school years, and even in the upper elementary grades, to look
forward to, and to strive for, postsecondary training.

As our country treads on the very verge or brink of war and
acquires the characteristic marks of a garrison state, the search
of the military for qualified personnel goes on relentlessly. What,
for example, the introduction of one of the other kinds of universal
military training system might mean in the Jong run for the church
and for the church professions can barely be imagined.

To the extent that materialism exerts a fine and gross influence
and attraction on the nonchurch professions and to the extent that
the secular contrives successfully to lure many promising young
men and young women within the churches, an inevitable decrease
in religious interest and motivation for the task and the quest
of the church becomes apparent. For many a promising young
man or young woman the restless urgency of the world situation
can exert a primary temporal demand more real and more com-
pelling than the eternal destiny of the same world. Such competi-
tive and negating factors do not make it easy for the church and
the ministry to attract an adequate number of qualified persons
for training as the pastors and teachers of the next generation.

Recruitment Factors in and of the Church

The church’s quest for talented persons in terms of student
recruitment for the church professions is directly affected by
important factors in and of the church itself.

Foremost is the issue of live orthodoxy. Pastors and teachers
loyal to, and able in, the Word of God never yet have been charac~-
terized by empty heads or cold hearts. Our own church body’s
concern for an evangelical, total, positive, confessional, and militant
orthodoxy implies an equal concern for competent leadership for a
learning and a teaching church.

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