# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1956_S245
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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244 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

increased significantly in the next period of years. Implications of
any such expansion in number of institutions and in increased
capacity at existing institutions translated into the need for major
capital funds make highly desirable a rather comprehensive
beginning statement of the problems and issues involved.

Furthermore, beginning with the Hausmann report (1944) and
through the Board’s report to the Houston Convention, the Board
for Higher Education has found itself compelled to call attention
to various more-or-less isolated segments affecting the finance
of Synod’s system of colleges and seminaries. For a unified point
of view and an adequate basis of judgment, the Board feels it
to be most timely and critically important to attempt to provide
a general overview of the problem and to draw together a set of
principles and policies which might serve as a basis for action and
decision for Synod and for the Board in connection with its work
with the individual institutions as well as with all of them as an
integrated training system.

The Problem of Finance for Ministerial and Teacher Training

Perhaps the most important single principle on which the
church must act in any age in dealing with the problem of finance
or capital in all its forms is that the problem of finance is a problem
of means, not of ends. In application to the area of provision of
adequate ministerial and teacher training, the problem becomes
one of securing, using, and safeguarding the necessary and material
capital resources in such a way that the synodically determined
objectives or ends of ministerial and teacher training can be
reached.

As a matter of means, the problem of finance tends, never-
theless, to be primary because sooner or later it is everybody’s
problem. Most obviously, the problem of educational. costs, fees,
and charges is always a matter of concern for students and their
parents or benefactors.

An answer to the persistent problem is necessary also for each
synodical college and seminary, as it acts as a steward and care-
taker of the church’s educational fortunes and strives for improve-
ment in the amount and distribution of the income that it receives.
Students of educational finance have long maintained that one of
the most reliable single indices of the quality of instruction in an
educational institution is the amount of stable income per student
available to a school.

General and special problems of finance have been an increas-
ing problem of Synod from its very founding, as it has been con-
strained to procure the maximum amount of income from all of
the available resources properly open to it and as it has sought

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