And finally, he said, “I would say to you to bring in one of our development officers — we have 29 of those all over the country . . . and I will instruct them to say, why not make it 30 percent — it’s only money.”
It’s big money. Despite stock market losses and a declining economy, the Presbyterian Foundation handed out nearly $80 million last year to programs of the Presbyterian Church, more than any other church foundation in the world, according to Leech. But behind Leech’s remarks to the General Assembly lies a controversy about a fundamental change in the way the foundation does business around the nation. The Presbyterian Foundation doesn’t have 29 development officers. After layoffs this spring, the total is more like 17, down from nearly 40 in 2001.
While Leech does plan to fill all 29 slots by the end of year, the staff will be significantly redistributed, with fewer people in the central United States and more on the East and West coasts. And their jobs are already significantly different from what they were just a few years ago.
Rather than working with congregations on a broad range of stewardship tasks, development officers are now expected to spend the bulk of their time selling the foundation’s mutual funds and other for-fee services, and to focus on big churches with big budgets.
Their mandate: Go where the money is.
“Resources are scarce,” Leech said in an interview after his presentation. “To have somebody in Butte, Montana, with travel expense and everything else, it’s not feasible to do that.”
Many church leaders — including some who say the changes make sense — say they were offended at the way the foundation made them. As national denomination leaders are working harder to listen to regional church leaders, foundation leaders made their change more independently — and Leech announced it in a mass mailing. “The affected people say we’ve caused damage to the partnership, but the partnership was, ‘We paid for everything.'”
“I think it’s unfortunate that those decisions couldn’t have been done with a higher level of consultation,” said John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council and an ex-officio trustee of the foundation. “But given the nature of those decisions that consultation would have been very difficult.”
Some History
The foundation is one of the Presbyterian Church’s oldest institutions, preaching stewardship and soliciting gifts from Presbyterians for more than 200 years.
In 1997, under former CEO Larry Carr, it became the first non-profit organization in the United States to charter a trust company, called New Covenant Trust. The move was designed to ensure stability by bringing the foundation’s operations under federal scrutiny, rather than a patchwork quilt of state regulations. Creating the trust company also allowed the foundation to create a family of mutual funds, called New Covenant Funds, and to move most of the assets it managed into those funds.
Both moves received national attention — and they made some observers uncomfortable. The foundation traditionally has operated with an unusual degree of autonomy, and the new structure created separate boards of directors for each of the two new divisions, removing them further from General Assembly oversight.
Carr left in 1999, and Leech, a banking industry executive from Pennsylvania, followed. He says he inherited a $1 million deficit and a structure of national field officers built more on tradition than business sense. “We just had some people in some strange places.” Little Rock, Austin, Omaha — not exactly Presbyterian or financial strongholds. “No one can tell me how we assigned people.”
The foundation’s development staff began in the 1980s and grew with the stock market’s prolonged expansion, Leech said. The staff, frequently ordained ministers, visited churches in their regions to educate members about making gifts through the foundation, and partnered with synod and presbytery executives to host broader stewardship training and other programs.
“We kind of included them in our staff,” said Judy Fletcher, executive for the Sun Synod, based in Carrollton, Texas. “We had wonderful partnerships to sponsor events,” such as the Spirit of Stewardship conferences, which were held for several years up to 2002.
From Leech’s point of view, it was largely a one-sided partnership. “Our people were spending more and more time on stewardship development, training, and other things that don’t really support the mission of the foundation. We may have been doing great work for the denomination, but there was no source of revenue to pay for that work.”
In April 2002, a foundation task force presented a report that concluded: “Without change in development costs and/or results or outside funding, substantial staff reductions need to take place.” It added, “change in the development services/staff will be met with strong opposition and criticism unless all constituents agree on solution.”
Regional Officials Displeased
Foundation executives started work on the changes, but other church leaders say their advice was never sought.
Rather than calling synod and presbytery executives to ask their opinions, or tell them individually of the changes he planned to make, Leech broke the news that he was closing half the foundation’s development offices in a letter, after the decisions were made. “It felt very independent and un-Presbyterian,” Fletcher said. “If we are partners in this, there should be some evidence.”
Adding to the unhappiness, some of the employees who were let go had worked for the foundation for more than a decade, and they had built strong personal ties with the staffs of the presbyteries and synods where they had worked. They came to meetings of middle governing bodies, sometimes shared office space and were frequently viewed as part of the regional staff of the whole church, not just the foundation. Among those who lost their jobs is John Evans of Austin, Texas, who was foundation board chairman at the time that Leech was hired. Evans started working there as a development officer three years ago. Like other former development staff members, he declined to comment, citing the terms of an agreement he signed when he left the foundation. Mel Young, the development officer in Phoenix, works from the office of the Synod of the Southwest, based there, and shares a bookkeeper with the synod staff. “He has now also been assigned Denver,” said Janet DeVries, synod executive. “It’s not that we thought he had to only be ours . . . there was no consultation with us about changing that assignment. We all just received letters.”
Leech says development workers may travel to areas not served under the new system, as the need arises. But others in those regions are skeptical that that will make up for the loss. They fear churches and programs in those regions could lose financial support.
The new mandate that development officers should focus on revenue-generating work — selling mutual funds, for instance — has also been controversial. “There’s this perception that they’re also . . . a peddler of a product,” said Philip H. Young, a trustee from San Rafael, Calif. “That has not been received with open-mindedness.”
DeVries is among the critics. “I’ve said directly to Bob (Leech), ‘Income from a mutual fund at this point is a highly unpredictable source of income . . . The idea of spending more time, more money on mutual funds, seems to me like spending your best resources on your least stable income source.'”
Leech disagrees. To the criticism he responds, “We’re becoming salesmen. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’
The foundation’s changes appeared especially abrupt in contrast with the General Assembly Council’s prolonged struggle to prioritize in the face of dwindling membership and a tight economy.
The foundation task force on restructuring the development staff did include one synod executive, Leech said. “With 173 presbytery execs and 16 synod execs, I don’t know how you could consult with every single person. To take another year to consult with everybody would have put us in a serious deficit situation.”‘
But such time-consuming consultation is exactly what GAC leaders Clifton Kirkpatrick and John Detterick have done, traveling the nation to gauge the denomination’s priorities and to strengthen relationships. The GAC is in the middle of an ambitious effort to restructure its own spending and staff — and that process is taking years longer than its leaders expected because of the pains they’re taking to consult with groups affected by any cutbacks. “It’s my little mantra: Everything we do is good. Everything we do serves somebody. Every little adjustment we make impacts someone,” Detterick said.
Spending so much time in consultation, he said, “is very cumbersome. It gets very difficult. But in the long run it’s much healthier.” For foundation leaders who see financial viability as a major priority, consultation isn’t necessarily a virtue. “My charge from the foundation board is that the stability of the foundation is the most important: ‘You will balance the budget,'” Leech said.
“Under the worst economic scenario since the depression, we have balanced the budget and satisfied our clients,” Leech says. “If the day ever happens that we have financial problems the whole thing about the development staff will be forgotten and it’ll be, ‘Oh my god, they’re in trouble.'”
Posted June 25, 2003
Jennifer Files is a professional journalist from Menlo Park, Calif.
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