International issues at GAC

LOUISVILLE — It wasn’t a big-fireworks meeting — but the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), meeting in Kentucky Sept. 22-25, kept the concerns of the world close at hand.

It approved a resolution calling for support of members of the U.S. military.

It learned that Forman Christian College in Pakistan has received a major $5 million grant from U.S. AID. “We cannot tell you what a big deal this is,” said Will Browne of the Worldwide Ministries Division.

And it is trying to find ways for Presbyterians from the U.S. to help protect the life and the human-rights work of Presbyterians in Colombia, who have watched their colleagues in human rights work being assassinated and imprisoned one-by-one.

Colombia
The council, after hearing heart-breaking stories this week about violence and anguish and displacement in Colombia, has approved the initiation of a program of accompaniment there in which Presbyterians from the U.S. will travel to Colombia to stand with Colombian Presbyterians who are working, at great peril to their lives, in support of human rights and the poor.

Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly, recently returned from making the first such trip to Colombia, and preached to the council about what he experienced. But Ufford-Chase made it clear that he was chosen for that work not because he’s moderator, but because of his extensive experience with mission work in Latin America and his training as a Christian peacemaker.

Going to Colombia to accompany the Presbyterians there will definitely be dangerous work — there’s always the possibility someone could be injured, kidnapped or even killed in the violence, said Marian McClure, director of the PC(USA)’s Worldwide .

Ministries Division
The PC(USA) is trying to hire a new mission worker in Colombia, who would be responsible for coordinating the accompaniment program. For those who will go to Colombia, the denomination is looking for people trained in conflict resolution, particularly in an international setting, said Will Browne, the PC(USA)’s associate director for ecumenical partnership. It also wants people who have media connections- who can help tell the story once they return from their trips.

The denomination also wants to send delegations of American Presbyterians to Colombia, 25 to 55 groups a year who will pay their own expenses and provide a continuing, ongoing American presence — watchful foreign eyes — that the Colombian government and paramilitary forces will notice.

“There is risk there,” Browne said. “People who are going are trading on their being American. That doesn’t always work. It could be a paramilitary person doesn’t know they’re American or doesn’t care . . . There is a possibility of death or injury. You can’t undertake this without knowing it’s real.”

But for Presbyterians and other church leaders in Colombia, “it’s really a struggle to find a way to have a nonviolent witness for Christ,” when “all the players are holding them guilty and are seeing all their interventions on behalf of the poor and the displaced as political action,” Browne said.

“These are really polarized situations in which Americans can sometimes impose a second way, a neutral party role, which simply doesn’t exist in the minds of the people where they go,” McClure said. “That’s a very dangerous situation,” he added. If people go to Colombia “they will be around people for whom it’s already too late,” who don’t see anyone as neutral. “You’re either ‘with’ or you’re ‘against’ in a situation like this. That’s what makes it so dangerous.”

Judy Angleberger, a council member from Pennsylvania, called on U.S. Presbyterians to surround the accompaniment program, and the Presbyterians in Colombia, with prayer.

Mission Funding
Funding — the recognition that the denomination’s system for paying for its mission work isn’t working particularly well — was another subtext of this meeting, woven through the discussion in bits and pieces.

A new task force has been established to look at PC(USA) funding, which will start meeting in October and is being led by Paul Masquelier Jr. of California, the council’s vice-chair. A second task force, led by Carol Adcock of Texas, is looking at governance issues.

“We may have to break some of the rules on how we did do fundraising,” Masquelier said in an interview. “We’ve operated out of a paradigm that was shaped in the ’50s,” when it maybe made sense. But “we’re living in a different world” today.

McClure cautioned council members who serve on her division’s committee that Worldwide Ministries is facing a $3 million shortfall in 2007, unless something changes. McClure said that 85 percent of her division’s funding comes from restricted funds, and an expected shortfall in those funds already is anticipated because some restricted funds are having to be spent to meet denominational needs.

As those funds disappear, some vital Worldwide programs that traditionally have been paid for entirely with restricted funds — among them health ministries and international evangelism — may have to become “new claimants” for unified mission dollars from the denomination, McClure said, in essence having to compete for scarce money with all the PC(USA)’s other programs.

Because of PC(USA) membership losses and tight finances, which already have caused several years of cutbacks and layoffs, the denomination is spending down some of its permanent restricted funds, McClure said in an interview. “We’re quickly using up the least restricted funds,” she said. “We’re going to be left with the most restricted funds in the next couple of years.”

The denomination is following the requests that donors have made in giving the money. “We’re definitely honoring the restrictions,” she said. But some benefactors give only general restrictions — saying, for example, that the money must be used in some way for worldwide ministry — so those funds are easiest to tap into.

But McClure said that as the funds are spent down, she sees far less flexibility ahead — and she wants the denomination to begin talking now about how to deal with that. “If we wait two or four years to think of some new ways to reinforce the funding of the denomination . . . General Assembly Council will already be having to thump out a new budget” and it will be too late to find a different way, McClure said.

She also hopes that the experience of Worldwide Ministries might provide some food for thought for the funding task force. Most of the restricted funds Worldwide Ministries receives “are coming from living, repeating donors,” who continue to give money, not from the estates of those already dead, she said. “We’re kind of proud of that,” McClure said. “We’ve got some donor relations. We have programs with name-recognition that have been telling their stories and getting a response.”

And that can be “positive evidence of a direction in which we can go” as a denomination, McClure said. But there also are limits on the ways in which the denomination can approach Presbyterians asking for money, she told the committee. For example, money that congregations earmark for extra-commitment opportunities — targeted for specific programs — could subtract from their unified giving through the presbyteries.

“We’re in this ironic era when all kinds of non-Presbyterian causes can go directly to Presbyterians” and ask for money, McClure said, while it’s difficult for authorized programs of the PC(USA) to do that.