LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1973, Page 260

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260 HIGHER EDUCATION

of the church for service. Spirited recruitment can best be
done by spirited people who care about the future of the
church of our Lord and who know full well that the future
depends on an able ministry of the New Testament.

Plant and Facilities

Oct. 15, 1972, was a day of celebration because that was
the date for the formal dedication of the new Herbert P.
Buetow Memorial Music Center. This facility, announced to
the Synod in our last report, has already proved to be a most
productive, functional building. In addition to its instruc-
tional use for quality music education for the church, the
building serves many college needs and also the Districts
and the community. Special paeans of praise should be re-
corded in this report: Mrs. Herbert P. Buetow, Miss Dorothy
Schoknecht, Dr. Henry Neils, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Schilling,
the Minnesota South District, the Minnesota North District,
the Aid Association for Lutherans, the Lutheran Brother-
hood, and many other individuals combined to present a
nearly million dollar facility to the assets of Synod at Con-
cordia in St. Paul.

Jan. 4, 1973, was another day of celebration as the doors
were opened to the new Concordia College Union. This
facility, too, has quickly proved to be a pleasant and helpful
asset to the life of the school. Some financing is still needed
from private sources for this project, but the students them-
selves are to be credited with much of the impetus and most
of the funds. Their fees will amortize the HUD subsidized
oan,

Other projects are in planning to improve the educa-
tional opportunities and to enrich the campus life. An im-
mediate priority is the creation of a new Art Department
facility which will join the relatively new Administration
Building to the new College Union.

Conclusion

Concordia’s primary purpose continues to be the prepa-
ration of church workers for service in the Synod. Students,
faculty, and administration are conscious of this purpose.
We are thankful for the blessings of support from the Synod
for the past 80 years. We face the future with commitment
to the Great Commission of our Lord Jesus and implore
the prayers and blessings of the Synod to sustain us in that
commitment. The world and all its cultural components, the
Synod and its institutions, may all together look very shaky
at times. But we are hearing a voice that says, “In Thee,
O Lord, do I put my trust ... for Thou art my rock and
my fortress; ...I1 will be glad and rejoice in Thy mercy.”

Boarp OF CONTROL
Harvey Stegemoeller, Executive Officer

Concordia Senior College
Fort Wayne, Ind.

The Board of Control of Concordia Senior College. with
gratitude to God, who has graciously supported its efforts
and has directed the course of the institution and kept His
protecting hand over it, herewith makes its regular report
to the convention of The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod.

At a time when developments of deepest significance for
the future welfare of the Synod and its entire system of
ministerial education are being widely discussed, we wish
to call attention to several items. A most fundamental issue
in synodical higher education is whether it will remain a
system of synodically owned and operated colleges and sem-
inaries, each with a defined purpose and function in relation
to other synodical schools, or will become a number of
synodically related but academically self-contained and func-
tionally independent educational institutions. The answer to
this will affect the basic objectives of the Synod in higher
education; and the vital specific relationship of the colleges
and seminaries to each other and to the Synod. Nothing could
be of more vital significance in the future welfare of the
church than an erosion or weakening of the solid ministerial
education foundation from which the Synod has derived
basic strength and unity since its founding and to which it

has committed enormous investments of thought, manpower,
and funds during the past 125 years.

We are aware that many strong voices are being raised
calling for abandonment of the Synod’s junior college-senior
college-seminary plan of ministerial education and, particu-
larly, of the “systems concept” which it embodies and upon
which it is predicated. This is happening at the very time
when the dominant thrust of educational thought in higher
education in both the public and private sectors to call for
a movement toward consortia, cloisters, and other types of
interinstitutional cooperation and collaboration similar to
the type of working arrangement the Synod has had all these
years on a national scale. There are now 28 separate upper-
level colleges and universities in the United States. The
major advantage of the Synod’s “system approach” is the
avoidance of isolated, individual institutions carrying for-
ward costly, wasteful, and unnecessary duplication of pro-
grams and expansion in competition with each other. To
propose so-called “equally effective alternate routes” to the
ministry will weaken and eventually vitiate the validity of
the fundamental concept and unique purpose of synodical
activity and expenditures in the field of higher education.

It has become commonplace to say that we live in an age
of transition. The transition is that of a whole social order,
an order that is still undergoing the severe strains associ-
ated with rather fundamental shifts in national goals, atti-
tudes, and values. Permeating all we see around us are
rapidly shifting social and ethical norms — whether of col-
lective or of personal behavior. Everyone is aware that
colleges are part of this rapidly changing social environment
and therefore undergo, like the broader society, periods of
disorder, uncertainty, and even trauma. But what everyone
does not perceive is that higher education has met, with
a demonstrable suppleness, the strains of recent years and
is emerging with rather remarkable strength envisioned.

In any case, new conditions and opportunities lend urgent
emphasis to the responsibility of the Synod’s colleges and
seminaries to examine and reexamine the programs they
offer to prepare effective ministers for service in the context
in which the church must do her work. Concordia Senior
College has not been insensitive to the changing social con-
texts and ministerial needs in which members of the church
carry forward our Lord's commission to preach, to teach,
and live out the Gospel in the world. On the basis of 15
years’ experience, the college is attempting faithfully to
meet its obligations to interpret the significance of these
changes and the church's needs in terms of ministerial edu-
cation. Provisions have been made from the college’s begin-
ning for continuing institutional research, curriculum study
and revision, in student guidance.

In all these studies we need to insure that measures
taken today will contribute to the long-range health of the
ministerial training program and we assume that the only
valid reason for the church to own and support colleges is
to prepare workers who are sensitive not only to the prob-
lems of our complex contemporary society, but who are
specifically oriented to theological, spiritual, pastoral minis-
try in distinction from the clinical approach of nonchurch
workers in such fields of counselling and other social work
activity. Sound stewardship principles clearly require this
Board and faculty to explore every possibility of developing
programs which respond in a meaningful way to the de-
mands of the current context in which the church does its
work.

In keeping with the recommendations of the Carnegie
Commission on Higher Education, Concordia Senior College
proposes to offer highly qualified high-school graduates the
opportunity to complete the requirements for the B. A. degree
by spending 3 years on the Concordia Senior College cam-
pus. It is predicated on the assumption that able and highly
motivated students can receive quality education in less
time. The purpose of the program is to attract highly quali-
fied voung men into the Lutheran ministry by placing the
preministerial requirements on the same level as those re-
quired for young men preparing for medicine, dentistry, law
and other professions, since many colleges and universities
offer a 3-year B.A. to these. The program is also intended
to shorten the ministerial program of such students and in
that way to provide opportunity for additional time of ser-
vice in the Lord’s kingdom.

Concordia Senior College believes that the introduction