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 that 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 continuing to exist as a stand-alone institution.