Council members did ask some questions about the budget before the vote April 4 – particularly about what will happen with racial-ethnic schools and with spiritual formation – but they accepted with no changes the plan that the council’s executive director, John Detterick, and his leadership team presented.
Detterick has made it clear that this is the last year he wants the budget done this way: that from here on out, he will push the council to build a budget based on strategic priorities, not the way things have always been done. But doing that will take significant changes in thinking – and discussions in committees the night before the vote made it clear that a lot of change still needs to come to get to where Detterick wants to go.
In the Congregational Ministries Division Committee, people expressed frustration about how deep future cuts can go and still keep doing the church’s work.
“We’re cutting programs,” said Charles Easley Sr. of Atlanta. “At what point do we cut bone and get into marrow? At what point are you viable?”
But John Bolt of West Virginia said it often seems like “the driving idea is let’s start with what we do,” not “what do we need to do for the church.” Does the question ever get asked, “What is it we need to be doing? Forget what we’re doing right now.” It’s natural, he said, that every program’s constituency thinks it’s good and necessary.
Kathy Lueckert, the council’s deputy executive director, was asked before the vote about the impact on the remaining staff of continuing cuts. “I won’t tell you that overwork is not a problem,” Lueckert said. “Workload remain an issue . . . The same amount of work is spread among fewer employees. That has created some stress and concern,” and the denomination needs to learn “it’s OK to stop doing something.”
But there also was the suggestion that change can bring a new and sometimes better way of doing things. One of the jobs cut was the coordinator of spiritual formation – and some council members raised questions about how spiritual formation can be seen as one of the denomination’s strategic emphases while that was being done. But Donald Campbell, director of the PC(USA)’s Congregational Ministries Division, said the coordinator was in charge of only a staff of three – and one of those positions was vacant. That layer of management wasn’t needed, Campbell said.
And Joseph Small, who leads the Office of Theology and Worship, encouraged the council to think of spiritual formation not as the responsibility of just one office – but as a focus that permeates all of the denomination’s work. “Spiritual formation is not a little box off to itself,” Small said. And he said that “all of this budget cutting stuff is painful, painful business for everyone. But this is one instance in which budget reductions have made possible a new way of conceiving our work.”
The budget for 2004 was balanced by $1.47 million in budget cuts and by pulling $1.67 million from reserves.
Another issue that’s stewing behind the scenes is whether the denomination should start charging administrative fees for restricted funds – money that individuals or congregations give on the condition that it be designated for particular uses. That idea drew fire when it was raised in January – but Detterick indicated to the council’s Mission Support Services Committee that he’s prepared to go ahead with it for the 2005 budget.
The denomination’s Research Services office has done focus groups around the country on the question, and determined “there would be no problem in implementing up to a 5 percent administrative cost allocation,” provided that parameters are developed in advance of the implementation and communicated to the whole church, Detterick said.
