LOUISVILLE — It’s a question of what’s in and what’s out.
What’s fair to count — and what’s not — in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands campaign?
With only about nine months remaining in the fundraising effort, a public debate has bubbled up about what the rules ought to be.
The General Assembly Council, meeting in Louisville Sept. 21, was being asked to approve changes in the parameters for the five year campaign, which is attempting to raise $40 million for church growth and international mission. So far, with the campaign scheduled to end when the General Assembly meets in June 2008, the campaign still has about $12.5 million left to go.
Thomas Gillespie, the former president of Princeton Theological Seminary and the campaign’s honorary chair, told the council on Sept. 19, “We are committed to a full-court press” and hope to raise the full amount.
But later in the meeting, which ran Sept. 18-21 in Louisville, the council was asked to consider making formal changes in the parameters for the Hearts & Hands campaign — basically, to state in writing, for the record, changes that have evolved informally as the campaign has progressed. Those changes affect what types of donations are counted towards the totals and which are not, and what will be considered acceptable uses for spending the money Hearts & Hands raises.
Linda Valentine, the General Assembly Council’s executive director, explained that understandings of how the money might be raised have shifted somewhat since the General Assembly initiated the campaign in 2002. For example, presbyteries have ended up playing a much more significant role than originally anticipated.
“We thought it was critically important to put on a piece of paper what’s in and what’s out,” Valentine told the council. “I think it’s critically important that there be a clear statement, because we haven’t had clear guidelines as to what’s included.”
But Bill Saul, a council member from California and former co-chair of the Hearts & Hands steering committee, objected strongly to the changes being proposed. When the campaign was initiated, Saul said, donors were made promises of what the money would be spent for and how the campaign would be run.
Saul said when people told him they didn’t trust that the money would be spent for the uses promised, saying they suspected things might shift, “I said, ‘I promise you it will not.'”
He gave his word that “the money can only be used for these two things” — church growth and international mission — and “over and over and over again, we’ve promised people, ‘This is the way it will be.'”
Saul told the council: “This is the first time I’ve come to the mike with real fear and trepidation. No one wants this to be successful more than me.”
But he said, “We’re on a slippery slope. We have a trust problem.”
Valentine and Eric Graninger, a lawyer for the PC(USA), attempted to explain how the parameters, or rules for what will be counted in the Hearts & Hands campaign, have evolved.
The original proposal presented to the 2002 General Assembly said the campaign would fund church growth and international mission work. That assembly added a caveat that the money had to be used to fund new international mission workers — not to fund existing positions, Graninger said. In other words, the assembly didn’t want money diverted away from the existing mission budget; so it required that any new money raised would go to new positions — to expand the scope of the PC(USA)’s international mission work, not to pay in a different way for what was already there.
Over time, however, that understanding changed somewhat.
Graninger said minutes of meetings of the Hearts & Hands steering committee reflect that the committee began to define new mission co-worker positions as either positions that had never been funded before, or had not been filled in at least three to five years.
And as presbyteries became more involved in raising funds for Hearts & Hands, the decision was made that church growth funds raised by presbyteries could be spent by those presbyteries, rather than being given to the General Assembly Council and allocated from there, Graninger said.
Another change was that the Hearts & Hands campaign originally said it would not accept endowments. It now does.
With these “broadening of parameters,” Graninger said, the decision was made to commit the changed understandings to paper and to ask the General Assembly Council to approve them.
But some council members — most noticeably, Bill Saul — squirmed at that idea.
“If we’re going to have a new way for a new day, this is a great place for it to start,” said Joan Gray, moderator of the 217th General Assembly.
Gray said as she travels around the church, she hears from Presbyterians that “we have a transparency problem, we have a trust problem, we have a consistency problem. … We must bite the bullet at every turn and not choose the easy way, but choose the transparent way.”
Gray said she opposed the changes being suggested.
Valentine said the Hearts & Hands campaign is trying to respond in some cases to “unique situations” and to the “fervor for mission” that’s in evidence around the denomination, which has meant gifts sometimes have arrived in ways the campaign organizers had not originally anticipated.
“We’re not throwing the gates open wide to include any and all things,” she said. But the campaign does want to acknowledge “various expressions” of support for mission “in a way that can be celebrated and claimed,” Valentine said.
Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly and a council member, provided a way forward when he suggested that a decision on endorsing the parameters be postponed until more thought can be given to the issue. “I deeply respect the point that Bill is raising,” Ufford-Chase said of Saul. “A lot of handshakes have been offered” during the campaign. But he also agrees with Valentine that “our terminology has been slippery” and the Hearts & Hands campaign needs to clarify its rules.
Valentine said if the council decided to put off the decision on this day, it should prepare to have its Executive Committee act quickly in the near future. Time, she said, is really short.
“It’s a waste of everybody’s time to be out soliciting gifts that are not going to be included,” Valentine said. “We need to give clear direction,” and soon.
