He wants the council members to have a vision, a sense of ministry and call that will consume them, that will keep them up at night and wake them in the morning, that will obsess them and feel like fire in their bones.
He wants to create a new culture for the council, a new way of doing things: something with intensity and focus. So the council, meeting in North Carolina, will focus this week on fewer things and at more depth. It will try out consensus methods for making decisions, rather than strict up-and-down voting (a technique that’s also being tried by the Theological Task Force for Peace, Unity and Purity).
It will talk seriously about the budget — about how the PC(USA) will set its financial priorities for drafting its 2005 and 2006 budgets, which may well involve more cutting of staff and programs. By the time the council finishes its work Sept. 28, its leadership hopes it will have identified key areas of focus — basically, top priorities — in four areas: evangelism, leadership, spiritual formation and justice.
What the council has to say will be used to shape the budget proposals the council will consider when it meets again in February. And the message is being sent: it’s time for the council to step up, to say what it considers important and, by implication, what it’s willing to give up when there’s not enough money to go around.
“We are changing in some fairly dramatic ways the way this council operates,” Carroll said on Wednesday, asking for “God-inspired patience.” At some crucial points in the recent past, the council has been asked to be bold, but “we backed away or we sidestepped,” or maybe took an easier way out, he said.
But Carroll didn’t start by asking for the answers — getting there, he told them, is what this meeting will be about. As a Native American and former cattle rancher on the plains of Montana, Carroll said he has learned to listen for God, to understand that the journey can be as important as the arriving.
