Robert Edgar, the Methodist minister who is the NCCC’s general secretary, told the committee that the past four and a half years, while difficult, have put the council in a much stronger financial position. While it then faced a $5.9 million deficit and had to cut 60 staff positions, the council this week will mark its third year of having a balanced budget, Edgar said. Long-term reserves have increased from $2 million to $10 million (helped significantly by a single, large anonymous gift). The council is launching a “Let Justice Roll” campaign to register voters living in poverty in 15 cities. And the NCCC is prepared, Edgar said, to care for the children, the elderly, and “all those in the shadows of life.”
Some committee members asked questions about the PC(USA)’s financial support of the NCCC — including asking whether Presbyterians bear a disproportionate burden of the bills for the 54-year-old ecumenical agency.
For 2003-2004, the NCCC budget is about $5.8 million — the biggest chunk of which comes through an unrestricted Ecumenical Commitment Fund provided by its 36 member communions, which include mainline Protestant denominations, Episcopal, Orthodox, historically African American and peace churches, the report states. But noticeably missing, critics counter, are Catholics, Pentecostals and many evangelical churches.
Presbyterians were the second biggest givers to the ecumenical commitment fund in 2002-2003, giving $421,000 and following the United Methodists. The Presbyterian contribution to that fund will be about $400,000 for 2003-2004, said Robina Winbush, the PC(USA)’s associated stated clerk for ecumenical relations. Together, Methodists and Presbyterians provide more than two-thirds of the Ecumenical Commitment Fund, although the PC(USA) has a goal, Winbush said, that no one denomination provide more than 25 percent of the NCCC’s funding.
In 2002, the PC(USA) also gave more than $2.2 million to Church World Service.
The review report does raise some issues for the PC(USA) to consider. It states, for example, that the NCCC often asks churches to join its agenda — which critics say is too liberal — rather than involving them sufficiently in decision-making. The report suggests that the PC(USA) should try to convince other denominations to try to increase their financial support, and to make sure that smaller denominations don’t feel marginalized by the bigger ones’ giving.
During an open hearing, Alan Wisdom of the Institute for Religion and Democracy urged the PC(USA) not to promise continued financial support of the NCCC. Wisdom said there are “huge questions” the review committee’s report doesn’t address — for example, why the NCCC, in his characterization, engages in political advocacy that’s “harsh” and “uniformly liberal,” such as describing President Bush’s environmental policy and the war in Iraq as “immoral.”
But Syngman Rhee, a former General Assembly moderator and the president of the NCCC in 1992 and 1993, spoke in personal and moving terms about what the council has meant to him. Rhee said that when he fled his home in North Korea in 1950, leaving with his brother just before the border was closed — two teenagers, sent away by their mother to freedom, never to see her again — conditions were terrible, but Church World Service was there. “I wanted to repay what I had received during the time of war in the 1950s when I was a refugee…in those cold, cold winter days without any hope,” Rhee told the committee. Church World Service “came to share the love of God, they came with food for the hungry, they came with blankets for the cold. Most of all they came with hope for the hopeless people, and I was one of them.”
Perhaps the PC(USA) does give the NCCC more than its share, but “we have received so much, and now we must continue to give so that others can live,” Rhee told the committee. “I’m proud that we are way above the average denominations” in sharing the love of God with struggling people around the world, he said.
And he wonders, how many other Syngman Rhees are out there, “waiting to be touched by the love of God?”
