At the end of the day Friday, the General Assembly Council — which is meeting here Feb. 10-14 to try to decide some of this stuff — seemed willing to say, “these big things are all important,” but not to say “this one big thing is more important than that one.” The council was willing to list its top priorities — but not to rank them.
The council, preparing for yet another round of budget-cutting, is trying to set up a framework of priorities, called the “Mission Work Plan,” that the staff can use to draft a more specific, two-year budget by early May. The council’s executive committee will meet then and needs to find a way to balance a budget that’s about $8 million short on money — coming about $4.85 million shy of balancing in 2005 and $3.15 million in 2006. The staff leadership thinks it can find ways to take care of about $3 million of that, by finding other sources of funding. But that still would leave about $5 million to be cut from the budget by early May.
This is not the time in the process for line items — to recommend which jobs or programs should be cut — but for the council to articulate a vision around which a budget can be built. It was supposed to come up with what Kathy Lueckert, the council’s deputy director, described as “high-level marching orders” the staff can use to come up with a more detailed budget proposal in the upcoming weeks.
This is more than just a blueprint for cutting, however — it’s also a chance for the council to say out loud what it thinks the denomination’s most important goals are, and to see whether it has the will to stick to those goals despite the pressure that will inevitably come. The council articulated its own core values — what council member Karen Dimon of New York state described as the “eight-fold Amen” of celebration, proclamation, stewardship, nurture, trust, openness, partnership and vision.
There’s also a hope that the PC(USA) will start to explore what has been described as “a new mission funding system” overall — a really big-picture idea, and one where lots of folks from middle governing bodies and special interest groups might well jockey for a seat at the table.
That’s all ahead. But some of the discussion this week gave clues as to where the sore spots might be.
First, the council, while it was willing to list five “priority goals,” was not willing to rank them — to say that one was more important than another. The goals it has chosen — listed in unranked order — are evangelism and witness; justice and compassion; spirituality and discipleship; leadership and education; and the role and identity of the General Assembly Council.
Second, that unwillingness to rank suggests that the really difficult choices still lie ahead. As Jack Rogers of California, a member of the Mission Work Plan team, put it: “To create a budget, you have to actually have priorities. You can’t say everything is the same,” because there’s not enough money to do all the things people think the Presbyterian church ought to be doing.
Third, there’s not even enough money in the budget to do all the things the church is doing now.
Fourth, built into this Mission Work Plan is the idea that some new things — considered vital work in the priority areas — will be added in. So there’s not enough money already and the decision’s been made that even more work will be added. That can only mean one thing: to make room for something new, something else gets cut.
Fifth, the Mission Work Plan includes objectives for each goal — which are ranked in priority order, but which also are broad-brush. Although the information wasn’t divulged at this meeting, the staff leadership team apparently has fairly firm ideas about what should be considered the “lead programs” in each of those areas. And it’s what doesn’t fit into those definitions, said John Detterick, the council’s executive director, that’s most likely to be eliminated.
All this adds up to — well, that’s one of the sore points. No one knows for sure, and practically everything that’s a candidate for elimination is likely to have a vocal constituency out in the denomination.
Some council members expressed concern that the final vote on budget cuts will be made in May by the council’s executive committee, not the full body. That’s because, when Detterick asked the council last April to arrange its schedule so it could meet this spring to vote on the budget, the council said no — it voted to go to Richmond in June instead and to meet right before the General Assembly convenes. So the full council won’t get to vote on the budget because it chose not to, although some individual members plan to call or e-mail in their comments before the executive committee votes.
At times, being at this meeting felt like trying to drive in the fog — trying hard to see some kind of clear line on the road ahead.
And sometimes it was in the small points — a few moments here and there of candid discussion, not the assembling of the big picture — where things seemed easiest to see.
For example, the council seemed dead-set on resisting any kind of ranking of its priority areas. But to start with, there was a proposed ranking, in this order — evangelism, leadership, spirituality, justice and the role and identity of the General Assembly Council — although the rankings later were removed and the categories redefined.
Emily Wigger, a council member from Illinois, got the ball rolling by asking if there was a conscious intent “to put justice at the bottom of the heap” — to say, deliberately, that evangelism is more important than justice.
In response, Rogers said there has to be, sooner or later, some form of ranking. There already have been dollar figures attached for how much the denomination spends now in each priority area (evangelism and leadership each get about 30 percent of the unrestricted money, although justice gets about 30 percent of the total revenue — restricted and unrestricted dollars combined.)
Rogers said the Mission Work Plan team tried to start by “doing the things they think they have the funds to do” — that “we are trying to be very pragmatic” about what’s possible to achieve, rather than making theologically-based judgments that one area is inherently more important than another.
That brought Curtis Jones from the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns to his feet.
“I can’t begin to say how uncomfortable I am” to say the church’s ministry might be guided by pragmatic decisions and not prophetic decisions, Jones said. “There has to be a better way.”
Rogers later returned to that point, saying he had not expressed himself well — and by using the word “pragmatic,” he didn’t mean to imply that the work group is “just a bunch of bean counters. That was not the case. We came to this with prayer and theological concern. We worked hard and we really agonized over this.”
But Rogers also said that where each person thinks it’s fair to cut, and where it’s not, “depends on what you’re afraid of.” It never crossed his mind, Rogers said, that “this great church would turn its back on justice” — because in his experience, the PC(USA) never has.
But Rogers does remember a time, when he was on the denomination’s national staff in the late 1980s, when the General Assembly asked to make evangelism a higher priority, but no extra money was given, and reallocation of existing resources wasn’t allowed. “I realized what I was afraid of,” Rogers said. ‘We lost a lot of trust and credibility in the larger church because of that. I’m afraid of that happening again,” even though he believes the situation is different now.
Other comments reflected both the agreement that setting priorities is inevitable and necessary — but also a reluctance to do it that, at times, made the conversation sound a little surreal.
For a time, the council broke up into small groups to talk about all this.
When they came back, representatives of the small groups said things such as these:
– Take away the numbered rankings, “so we’re not focusing on that even though that’s in fact what we’re doing.” Lueckert responded: “So these would be the stealth priorities?”
– Put the priorities in a pie chart, with percentages reflecting how much is being currently spent on each. That way, people can see how much each area would get, but no one has to say explicitly which piece of the pie is biggest.
– Don’t rank the priorities, just list them as bullet points. But is it really a good idea to talk about how the Presbyterian church spends its money and link that to “bullets?”
And so it went.
“Our process is just the same as yours,” said Bishop Douglas Theuner, an ecumenical advisory representative of the Episcopal Church. “It is just as frustrating and just as disastrous.” After one arduous discussion, Theuner also taught the Presbyterians a song he’d learned at summer camp when he was a boy, and which none of them had apparently ever heard of, a ditty called “Jolly Presbyterians!”
At the same time, there were also moments when the discussion broke through the fog and shot right through to a point of clarity, like a blessing of sun.
In a debate over whether “stewardship” ought to be the title of one of the objectives, Judy Wellington, who is associate presbyter in Grand Canyon Presbytery and who was observing the meeting with a Native American group, spoke of how giving to the church is viewed by her culture. “For many of our tribes, the idea of generosity is one of our values, one of our core values,” Wellington said. But historically, stewardship is seen as “giving money to the church” versus her culture’s practice of “sharing what you have” in all aspects of life. In the Native American tradition, “regardless of how much you have, how little you have, you give,” Wellington said.
She paused.
“You all, when you talk about stewardship, are trying to get at that,” Wellington said with a smile.
And Marian McClure helped to cut through a debate over language about churches that are growing fast in other countries by putting into perspective what that means. In Ethiopia, there are so few pastors that 70 percent of the pulpits are filled on Sundays by brand-new converts, many of whom have never even participated in a Bible study, McClure said. At that, Rogers suggested that the council cut out a lot of extra language about training leaders for “local, national and international mission” and just say plainly: leaders in partner churches that are experiencing dynamic growth need to be nurtured and empowered.
When it was done, some felt thrilled, some confused.
The council used a consensus style of decision-making, waving orange pieces of paper if they agreed and blue if they didn’t. Council chair Vernon Carroll actually said this at one point: “I don’t think the response is quite as orange as it could have been” — which to most folks on the street wouldn’t have made any sense. But they understood he was telling the council it didn’t seem to have reached consensus yet, they needed to keep talking and throwing out ideas about which way to go.
One of those who came to microphone was Mary Lynn Walters of Arizona, who summarized some of the uneasiness when she said that the council needs to have enough ownership of the budget to be able to sell it, or at least defend it, across the church. Unless Presbyterians believe “this isn’t a product that was made by some ethereal group out there but was made by some common folk,” Walters said, “we won’t gain the trust that we’re seeking to find.”
