# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S63
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— Page 63 —

...was likewise discussed, but the resolution of it was finally
handed over to a committee, whose report ran as follows:

I. According to the second convention report of the Venerable Synod,
from the year 1848, p. 16, the conditions under which the Fort Wayne
seminary was transferred to the Synod, per the deed of gift dated
September 8, 1847, "as sole property in the best legal form," are
these:

"1. that it serve the Lutheran Church forever, and train ministers
and pastors for it alone;

2. that German be adopted as the sole language of instruction in the
seminary, and remain so inviolably;

3. that the seminary remain what it is — namely, an institution whose
purpose is to make possible an equipping of ministers and pastors
that is as thorough as possible, yet also as swift as possible, for
the countless abandoned German fellow believers and for newly
immigrating congregations of our stock and confession. — It shall not
be a theological institution in the ordinary German sense, but a
nursery [Pflanzſchule] of ministers and pastors, whose course of
study is itself a rigorous preparation for the holy Office."

From this we believe we clearly recognize that the Venerable Synod
acts neither against the letter nor against the sense of the deed of
gift when it relocates the institution to St. Louis while preserving
its original character.

We therefore propose

1. that a copy of this year's convention report be sent by the
Synod's secretary to Pastor Löhe, for his information regarding the
proposed change, and

2. that a letter go out to the congregation in Fort Wayne, asking
them to let the institution they have hitherto tended with such love
move joyfully to St. Louis, and to turn their nurturing love instead
to the gymnasium to be relocated to Fort Wayne.

II. As for the congregations at St. Louis and Altenburg, Mo., and
their relationship to Concordia College, we see from the deed of
transfer printed in the fourth convention report of 1850, pp. 16-17,
that relocating the gymnasium to Fort Wayne and separating it from
the preachers' seminary runs counter to none of the conditions set by
the congregations concerned, except perhaps the one listed as no. 3,
which reads:

"That the institution remain what it presently is, namely a
gymnasium in the sciences preparatory to the study of theology, and
for the training of teachers for higher and lower schools, in
connection with a theological seminary in which students devoting
themselves to academic theology receive their final training."