Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Page 283
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 283

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

HIGHER EDUCATION 283

ratio; however, any diminution of the production of
ministerial graduates inevitably raises the specter of
the type of inestimable damage which comes to the vital
work of a church when it has an inadequate supply of
high-quality ministers available to it.

These enrollment developments make it quite clear
that the current approach to recruitment is not pro-
ducing the desired quantity for the Synod’s ministerial
colleges, since the total new ministerial enrollments
have remained static for most of the past decade, while
teacher-training enrollments, especially of women, have
risen dramatically. In this connection the board desires
to bring to the Synod’s attention the apparent need for
revitalization of the sense of personal responsibility for
recruitment of ministerial students in his own parish
by every pastor and the apparent need for a correspond-
ing deemphasis on the concept of central responsibility
at the District or synodical level for recruitment ac-
tivities, since the promotional approach has not pro-
duced the desired results in ministerial recruitment.

Attention is called also to the progressive and sig-
nificant reduction of the percentage which “students
from the parsonage” constitute in the total enrollment
for ministerial training at Concordia Senior College.
In 1961—62, 19.9 percent of the students came from the
parsonage; in 1967—68 the percentage had dropped to
14.5 percent; and in the current year only 12.2 percent
of the students at the college are sons of pastors. This
steep decline in the short span of 7 years is Ominous,
indeed, in the opinion of this board.

The board calls attention to the statistical develop-
ments cited because they appear so clearly on this
campus where ministerial students converge and be-
cause they obviously carry definitive implications for
the future development of the Synod’s work in the min-
isterial education area and ultimately for every phase
of the Synod’s work.

Continuity in Teaching

Regarded as more serious by this board than the
declining enrollment is the accelerating erosion of the
highly competent faculty which was painstakingly se-
lected and assembled for this particular purpose.

During the biennium more than a score of calls and
offers of appointments have come from inside and from
outside the church to members of the faculty. and these
have resulted in very serious losses involving no fewer
than six professors, all except one with experience in
the parish ministry and all except one holding the doc-
torate in his respective teaching field: Dr. Richard Som-
merfeld to Capital University; Dr. Ralph Klein to the
St. Louis seminary; Dr. William Goerss to an Tllinois
parish: Dr. Warren Rubel to Valparaiso University; Dr.
Norbert Schedler to Purdue University; and Assistant
Professor Carroll Nelson to Indiana University.

In this connection the board desires to bring two
equally significant considerations to the Synod's atten-
tion:

1. Our church needs to thank and praise God for the

commitment which moves the vast majority of faculty
members to continue their dedicated service to the
Synod’s vital ministerial education project, even though
serious inequities continue to characterize remuneration
for this teaching service in the Synod’s accredited col-
leges and seminaries. when the vital nature of their
contribution, the breadth of their experience, and the
extent of their specialized professional preparation in
addition to their theological studies are taken into con-
sideration (e. g.: a faculty member with three children,
with full theological training, with 16 years in the min-
istry, and with all work on the doctorate except the
dissertation completed, serving currently on this campus
at a salary of $550 a month, plus housing).

2. Since faculty competence is the very heart of any
educational enterprise. it is both unrealistic and im-
perceptive to expect anything but ultimate disaster for
its entire ministerial education project — one of the
three primary reasons for forming a Synod in the first
place — if the Synod does not provide immediately for
a more realistic confrontation of what is happening in
the competition for its faculty members, both within the
church and in the educational world of which this as-
pect of churchwork is inevitably a part.

So acute is the situation on this upper-level college
campus, where major competition for retention of min-
isterial college students through the appointment of
well-trained and dedicated college-level teachers is ex-
ceptionally critical, that this board is submitting a formal
overture, calling for immediate action on the alarming
salary situation, which is not the only, but is certainly
one major factor in the operation — and even the sur-
vival — of the critical ministerial education sector of
synodical activity.

The New Curriculum

Concordia Senior College continues to provide sep-
arate and distinct approaches to learning because it has
been assigned distinctive goals by the Synod.

In its fierce concern for providing the church with
the best in ministerial education and in keeping with its
assignment and commitment to provide an education
significant to ministers who will live part of their lives
and give part of their service to God and the church
in the 2st century, it has felt, under the compulsion of
its assignment, the need to develop a character of its
own, to explore special programs, and to seek fresh edu-
cational approaches responsive to the needs and oppor-
tunities of the church in this age. In this connection the
most significant development for the future of the Synod
is the development of the new Concordia Senior College
curriculum, which will be introduced in September 1969.

Without discounting or diminishing those aspects of
counseling, worship, and organized student activity out-
side the classroom, where the program utilizes Word
and sacrament plus the divine and human forces of com-
munity life to make great intellectual, spiritual, ec-
clesiastical, and cultural currents flow around the min-
isterial student and his teachers, this innovative and