# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1938_S103
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Elementary Education 103

Perry County, and this became the practise as the Synod spread
over many other States.

The attitude of the Missouri Synod has not changed with regard
to Christian education. We train pastors and teachers; we further
parochial schools; we insist on thorough instruction for confirma-
tion; and we have for many years been making use of additional
educational agencies. This emphasis on Christian education is a
distinctive feature of our Lutheran Church. It is a heritage of the
fathers which God in His great mercy has preserved unto us and
for which we must not fail to be truly grateful.

It is true, much of the first love and ardor, of the spirit of sacri-
fice and devotion to the children, has escaped us in the course of
a century. That conviction should humble us and lead us to re-
pentance. It is no doubt true that in numerous individual cases
the Christian education of the children is taken too lightly, both in
the church and in the family; that, for example, children are un-
necessarily deprived of a Christian school and no real effort is made
otherwise to approximate as nearly as possible the daily instruction
and training of such a school, since about half of our congregations
and preaching stations restrict themselves to the Sunday-school
prior to confirmation instruction. In some cases more is not well
possible, but this very general practise is certainly a symptom of
decline since the days of our fathers and calls for a change of our
ways, for a renewed application to duty.

But it can also be said to the glory of God that we have not
forsaken the policy of the fathers. This is true both of the many
congregations that maintain or seek to establish a Christian school,
and the many others who, unable to have the school, strive in every
other way to give their children, brought up in the public school,
the best possible religious instruction. There was probably never
a time in the history of Synod when Synod as such, both in general
and in the Districts, concerned itself more diligently with the educa-
tion of the youth than right now through specially appointed boards
and superintendents and through the officials down to the circuit
Visitor. The educational agencies themselves, the schools, Sunday-
schools, Saturday- and summer-schools, confirmation and postcon-
firmation instruction, are being constantly improved and are ap-
parently on a level never before attained. This is also true of our
teachers’ colleges, the scholarship of teachers, school-buildings and
their equipment, books and literature for the educational agencies,
and pupil achievement; it is true also of the preparation of pastors
for educational work in their congregations, which had always been
rather meager.

While keenly mindful of our failings and shortcomings and
aware also of the grave consequences which continued indifference