Mission Initiative team hopes church’s future will be about more than infighting, decline

“I don’t think it’s accidental that any of us are here,” Lundeen told the members of the steering committee, some of whom were appointed because they represent diverse views within the church, at their first meeting here Nov. 18 and 19. “I believe deep in my heart that God is at work here,” Lundeen said, adding that most experienced development officers would refuse to take the job because not enough potential donors have been identified yet and some pieces of how the PC(USA) have handled this don’t match the textbook approach to professional fund-raising drives.

“There are some outrageous aspects of it,” Lundeen said. “I’m doing it because the gospel of Jesus Christ is outrageous.”

The steering committee is just starting its work, but it’s already had hints of some of the decisions and difficulties it will confront. Among them:

• The Mission Initiative is intended as a “big donor” campaign — for those whose pockets are deep enough they can make significant gifts, of thousands or even millions of dollars. But the denomination’s grassroots — ordinary Presbyterians already running marathons in mission work — don’t want to be left out either. Commissioners to last summer’s General Assembly gave more than $17,000 in cash and pledges, a sign of enthusiasm that the steering committee does not want to squelch. The denomination needs to find a way to capture that populist energy, to make sure it’s not seen as a campaign for “just a bunch of fat cats,” as pastor John Huffman from Newport Beach, Calif., put it.

• Already, the Mission Initiative has broken some of standard rules for how a fund drive should be conducted. Usually, Lundeen told the group, the campaign is kept quiet at first, not made public until commitments have been received for 80 to 90 percent of the money the group is trying to raise. But, by necessity, the Mission Initiative has been public for months — and Lundeen has some worries that could inhibit possibly the largest donors, the ones who want to know that their big gifts are ones that get things rolling, that really make a difference.

• Even if all the money is raised — and both Lundeen and Saul said they thought it could be done in less than five years — that won’t solve all the denomination’s problems. John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, acknowledged that $40 million is “frankly our best guess of what would be an appropriate starting point.” To fund all that the PC(USA) wants to do in mission would take substantially more than that and would require the denomination to keep going in raising funds.

And presentations on how the $40 million would be spent gave indications that a shortage of money isn’t all that’s wrong with the PC(USA), an aging, predominantly white denomination with many small congregations; one in which many evangelical congregations mistrust the denominational leadership; one that says it wants to grow but is sometimes reluctant to change. In the 1950s, the predecessor denominations to the PC(USA) started 1,345 new congregations, compared with just 292 from 1990 to 2000. From 1995 to 2000, 35 percent of PC(USA) congregations grew, but 65 percent did not.

Presbyterians in the United States need to recognize that the church around the world is growing faster than it is in this country and need to find ways to extend a welcome to people who might not look or talk or think like they do, Fahed Abu-Akel, the Palestinian Christian who is moderator of the 214th General Assembly, has been telling the church. And Edmundo Vasquez of New Mexico said a man told him recently at a gathering of Hispanics that “the Presbyterian Church has responded to the poor and immigrants in generations past. This generation isn’t doing it . . . . We’re middle class, and we don’t know how to talk to or to serve the immigrants coming in.” Lundeen reminded the committee that “every one of us in this room is more wealthy than 90 percent of the people on the planet.” Presbyterians have the money, he said, but “we need a delivery system” to do Christ’s work out in the world.

As a statement trying to make the case for the Mission Initiative puts it: “Mission is not a choice for the church. The Scriptures don’t merely suggest that we proclaim the gospel message in word and deed. Christ doesn’t just imply that we should give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked or visit the sick and the imprisoned. It’s not simply a recommendation that we call others into a faithful relationship with our God. The church IS mission.”

If the $40 million is raised, more than half — about $20.9 million — would go to fund international mission. Marian McClure, director of the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division, said the money would fund 54 new long-term compensated mission personnel, 31 long-term volunteers in mission and 72 short-term volunteers in mission. Among the priorities that would receive additional support would be hiring regional experts, people who have served in a particular region for a long time and have strong relationships with the people there and expertise in the language and culture, and bringing on specialists trained in work such as disaster response training, health care and frontier mission work.

Another $18.6 million would go for new church development and redevelopment in the United States, both through loans and grants, with an emphasis on serving people from racial ethnic groups and immigrants.

Saul said the PC(USA) can have no higher priority. Mission and evangelism are “what we’re all about,” he said. “What a wonderful opportunity for leaders in the church to be able to come together for a common goal,” despite their differences on other issues, “and be an example to the denomination. We could be part of a healing process.”

As Huffman put it: “I’m tired of partisan battles. I’m a global Christian.”

But the extent to which the Mission Initiative can be a uniting force for a denomination divided by issues such as the ordination of homosexuals or how to witness in a pluralistic world remains to be seen. Some congregations either withhold money from the denomination altogether — sometimes giving it directly to mission or funneling it through non-Presbyterian evangelical groups — or restrict their giving to particular causes within the church. The committee will need to decide what to do with donors who want to restrict their gifts to fund particular programs rather than to the Mission Initiative with no strings attached.

According to Lundeen, who ran through for the committee some of the basic principles of funds development, the approach with a campaign like the Mission Initiative is both similar to and different from a secular fund-raising drive. Bible stewardship has theological roots. It is, in essence, “everything I do after I say, ‘I believe,'” Lundeen told the group. “Christianity began with a gift,” he said, and “we’ve got to get this idea out of our head that there’s something demeaning about stewardship and fund raising,” and instead begin looking it as an opportunity to witness to the world about Jesus Christ. Some Christian donors will say, at least privately, that they see themselves as trustees of God’s wealth and, in giving, “some need in them is fulfilled,” Lundeen said. “They have been abundantly blessed and they have a need to share that blessing with others.”

Many people don’t like to ask for money, he acknowledged, thinking of it as “manipulation, coercion, hucksterism, the used-car salesman.” But Lundeen said “we have to be squeaky-clean and ultra-careful” and that any hard-sell approach “will turn my stomach for sure.” Lundeen said he likes to think of fund raising as education, as presenting a crystal-clear, compelling and rational case for the Mission Initiative — for what the money will allow the church to do in evangelism — “so people want to be a part of it.”

Roberts said that makes sense. If she has a good recipe, she tells her friends about it. “So why not tell people about Christ? It is Jesus Christ that we’re selling. He’s the best thing that’s happened to me,” Roberts said. “I know that everything that I have, He’s given me. So I’m just giving back what He’s given. I know I can’t take it with me.”

And Lundeen said that “major donors today don’t give money” — they’re not giving anything away, they’re trying to accomplish something. “I’ve never met a stupid rich Presbyterian, particularly a generous one,” he said. “These are people who are concerned about making a difference, about leveraging the abundance that God has given to them.”

Lundeen said the campaign should start with a strong effort to attract major gifts. The first gift, he said, must be at least $5 million, the next two in the range of $2.5 million, the next five at least $1 million each. The textbook says you stop there, “you stay in this room until you’ve found those eight gifts,” to give the big-hitters a chance up front to start off the campaign with real momentum.

One of the big difficulties the Mission Initiative faces is starting out without a long list of possible givers, Lundeen said. To raise $40 million will take 10,000 qualified prospects, and the Mission Initiative team so far has identified only 100 to 200, he said, adding that there is no “master list” of the denomination’s 2.5 million Presbyterians. “Somebody hear the alarm go off?” Lundeen asked. “I’ve got a duty as a professional fund raiser to say we’ve got a problem here.”

This also will take lots of time, particularly from top leaders of the denomination. Convincing someone to give involves building a relationship, Lundeen said, and that can take time and visit after visit.

Despite those challenges, though, Saul said, not one person said “No” when they were asked to serve on the Mission Initiative Steering Committee. Members of the committee were asked at this meeting why they agreed to join the cause.

McClure said she’s been motivated by knowing missionaries, by seeing “eyeball-to-eyeball” the work that they do and feeling “almost physical pain” when she can’t give them the resources they need.

Erin Cox-Holmes of Yatesboro, Pa., said she brings concern for younger people who either don’t go to church or, if they are Presbyterian, “feel they are in one room listening to their parents in the other room arguing about whether they’re going to get a divorce or not.” But the passion for mission, she said, “is something big enough to capture our younger generations.”

Curtis Kearns, director of the PC(USA)’s National Ministries Division, said, “I honestly feel this whole endeavor is a Spirit-touched endeavor.”

Roberts said that before she got the call asking her to help, she’d been going from one doctor to another, being told that she had degenerative bone disease and that it wouldn’t get better. She was, as she put it, “sort of wallowing in myself,” had resigned from all her community and church activities, had her husband bringing her breakfast in bed. She even overheard her daughter telling a friend that Lucimarian was “enjoying ill health.” “I guess I really was,” but when she was asked to help with the Mission Initiative, “then everything I started reading was about working for the Lord.”

There is, in this group, a real hope that the PC(USA), with its history of faithful Christian witness, can be about more in the years to come than decline and infighting.

“The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is still alive and well and has a future, and I want to be a part of this,” said Melva Wilson Costen of Atlanta. And Chuck Ford of Huntington Beach, Calif., said simply: “I think that saving souls is what we’re all about.”