Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Page 250
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 250

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

250 HIGHER EDUCATION

changes in patterns of responsibility, governance, par-
ticipation, and influence are emerging — some frighten-
ing, but many more encouraging and exciting. The role
of the student, not as a passive recipient of profound
knowledge and fatherly advice, but as an interested and
responsible active participant in a community of dis-
covery, sharing, concern and action, may well develop
and is certainly not incompatible with the church’s edu-
cational objectives. Similarly, it is possible to predict
a more activistic role for staff members than the quiet,
pipe-smoking, bookbound stereotype of the past has
allowed.

It has frequently been pointed out that much of the
social structure of the contemporary college or university
derives from the guild system of medieval Europe, and
Pressures to amend that tradition should scarcely be
considered strange.

A study all its own is that of identifying factors present
in all formal educational institutions and programs which
actually do more to discourage learning than to encourage
it. Involved here are many elements of educational
bookkeeping, grading systems, concentration and degree
requirements, departmental rigidities, and the like.

3. Openness to new relationships between preparation
and professional ministry. An oversimplified belief that
the prospective minister can and should undergo a dis-
tinct and cloistered period of academic preparation and
then suddenly plunge into full-time ministry, without
any compelling need for additional or continuing educa-
tion, is being challenged at every turn. There is every
reason to believe that the kind of field education and
continuing education that was once thought of as a sort of
optional adjunct to professional education will increas-
ingly be an integral and normative element ina compre-
hensive approach to ministry.

4. Openness to new methods of educational financing.
Churchmen, like educators, are presently divided in
their confidence that church-related education can be
adequately supported by traditional methods. They are
similarly divided on the issue of seeking governmental
support. All of these ambiguities could change if the
members of the church could be more fully persuaded of
the vital importance of ministerial preparation in the
total picture of church life or if governmental aid should,
not inconceivably, assume the pattern of student, rather
than institutional, support.

5. Openness to new institutional structures and align-
ments. Many educational institutions, in every system and
every state, are where they are and are what they are by
historical accident. Like state capitals, they are hard to
move. And while some have made great issue of the
necessity of institutions of higher education being close
to the urban scene (a valid point!), it can also be pointed
out that a school is becoming less a place than a set of
experiences going on in many places at the same time.
In the case of some professional schools, what was once
the campus may eventually be chiefly the place where
the administrative offices are situated.

PLANS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Dr. Manning M. Pattillo, author of the highly regarded
book, Church-Sponsored Higher Education in the United
States, and president of the national Foundation Library
Center, recently wrote the following concerning the
system of colleges and seminaries maintained by The
Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod: “For the past 18
years I have had an opportunity to observe the program
of the Board for Higher Education and a number of the
individual synodical colleges. My acquaintance began
when I was engaged in the accrediting activities of the
North Central Association and continued during my time
with Lilly Endowment and the Danforth Study of church-
sponsored higher education. I have come to have a high
regard for the Synod’s efforts in higher education. The
program is the most carefully planned of any church in
the United States. The board carries out its responsi-
bilities in a professional and business-like way with
wholehearted dedication to the church’s requirement for
well-trained leadership. The quality of education offered
is considerably better than average for church-related
higher education, and the individual colleges are becom-
ing stronger year by year. The Synod is to be com-
mended for the substantial financial support it has pro-
vided, and Lutherans can be proud of the good use to
which their money has been put.”

As we, the members of the Synod, look back at our
program of ministerial education during the decade of
the sixties, certainly all of us have reasons to thank God
for the rich blessings which have made possible com-
ments such as those by Dr. Pattillo. At the same time,
we realize that this is no time to relax as we prepare to
welcome the new decade with its even greater oppor-
tunities and its difficult challenges.

Looking Ahead

The Board for Higher Education intends to continue
to exert every effort possible to help the church effec-
tively use these opportunities and successfully meet these
challenges in ministerial education. This can be done
best, of course, as the colleges and seminaries are helped
to continue making improvements in the most important
areas of work, which are also exactly those areas men-
tioned in Dr. Pattillo’s statement: careful planning, quality
education, best use of funds.

The board feels that its work and the work at the
colleges and seminaries can move ahead successfully,
in general, on the basis of the synodical constitution, the
Handbook, and the policies established earlier by the
church. The board continues to find the planning prop-
ositions adopted at the New York convention and the
“Platform for the Next Decade” presented by the board
to the church at that time to be significant and valid. The
findings of the Long-Range Planning Project of 1964—67
and the recommendations of the “outside” consultants
in that project continue to be valuable as resource aids.

The discussion which follows indentifies and describes
some of the plans and recommendations of the board as