Lutheran Churches (AELC). The AELC proved to be a more socially and theologically liberal church than the LCMS, and shortly after its inception, it departed from LCMS practice on ordination by opening the ministry to women. Furthermore, the new body immediately declared full communion with the ALC and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), and declared its intent to join the National Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation. To ministers and parishioners who remained with the LCMS, this and other moves by the fledgling AELC validated earlier concerns about the faculty majority at Concordia Seminary. With congregations totaling about 100,000 members, the AELC represented less than 4 percent of the 2.7 million members of the LCMS. In consequence, the break-away organization could not provide nearly enough pastoral positions for all the graduates of Seminex, whose enrollment began to sharply decline. End of Seminex Starting in 1974, the LCMS made clear to prospective students that there was no chance of ordination in the synod unless course credits were obtained in official LCMS seminaries. The synod also barred Seminex recruiters from the Concordia University System. In 1975, the LCMS convention voted to close Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which had allegedly served as a pipeline for students into Seminex. Due primarily to its difficulties placing graduates in ministerial positions, Seminex enrollment sharply declined over the next decade. By the end of the 1970s, any hope that a large number of LCMS congregations would leave had been extinguished, forcing Tietjen, who was now president of Christ Seminary-Seminex, to begin laying off faculty who had walked out. In addition, the seminary was torn between positioning itself solely as the seminary for the AELC, which would have made it difficult to continue to solicit donations from supporters in the LCMS who had remained in that synod, and reshaping itself as a "pan-Lutheran" seminary that would serve many different Lutheran church bodies. By the beginning of the 1980s, it was clear that there was no possibility of Christ Seminary-Seminex's continued existence as a stand-alone institution. In anticipation of the merger that resulted in the formation of the ELCA, Seminex ultimately dispersed its faculty and students to several seminaries of the ALC and the LCA around the country, including the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC), Wartburg Theological Seminary, and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. The last St. Louis commencement was held in