No details have yet been made publicly available of the budget-cutting proposal that Linda Valentine, the council’s executive director, and her staff have prepared. But the council will be asked to cut nearly $10 million from the 2009 budget of $111 million – and Valentine has said some valued ministries of the church will end in what she described as “some very challenging times.”
The council is expected to vote on the budget reductions March 27, and those employees losing their jobs will be notified that afternoon. The council currently has about 370 employees. The last major reduction in the budget — paring back $9.6 million in 2006 — resulted in the loss of 75 jobs.
Also, this likely is not the end. Another round of budget cuts for 2010 may well come at the council’s meeting Sept. 22-25, which means that even those staff members who survive this round of job cuts know they may face more reductions in the near future.
The national staff of the General Assembly Council, which helps with the mission work of the denomination, also is being placed on a mandatory furlough week May 17-23 (a savings of $450,000) and is giving up any salary raises for 2010 (a savings of $900,000).
And the Office of the General Assembly (OGA) — the ecclesiastical branch of the church — is asking its workers to consider taking voluntary separations, because of a shortfall in the per capita budget as well. “Despite per capita receipts continuing at a traditional rate, the adjustment is necessary because of a drop in investment income created by the global economic meltdown,” said a news release from Sharon Youngs, communications director for the Office of the General Assembly.
The Committee on the Office of the General Assembly also is meeting this week in Louisville, on March 24-25, and will be asked to approve an adjusted budget for OGA for 2009-2010. The OGA is responsible for such activities as ecumenical relations for the PC(USA), putting on the General Assembly every-other-year, and providing constitutional services for the church.
Financial documents presented for the committee’s meeting state that expenditures from the per capita budget exceeded revenues by $641,476 in 2008. The Office of the General Assembly had budgeted to draw $335,296 from reserves, but ended up taking more than $1.72 million.
That figure includes an extra $306,180 taken from reserves, including additional costs for the 2008 General Assembly in San Jose and the accounting of two years’ worth of uncollectable per capita in 2008, according to the financial report. And “the unrealized loss on the value of investments held for the period 2008 was about $1,088,000,” the report states.
It also says that “in order to maintain the minimum 30 percent reserve level beyond 2010, the OGA and GAC together are considering a variety of measures that will impact the per capita budget for 2009 and 2010,” with details of those proposals still to be announced.
Trying to set the tone for the meeting, Valentine and Tom Taylor, the GAC’s deputy executive director for mission, posted a video on the PC(USA) Web site explaining their approach for coping with these difficult realities. Valentine refers to a familiar passage from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, that “for everything there is a season,” including, she says, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to keep and a time to throw away.
Valentine and Taylor describe the process the General Assembly Council has followed in the past few years to better focus the priorities for doing the PC(USA)’s mission work — and for making sure that the dollars spent follow those priorities.
In considering the budget reductions coming this week, they’ve asked questions such as “what can the church’s national offices do uniquely and best” and “what does the church most need at the national level,” Taylor said in the video.
Their answer: the national staff can inspire, equip and connect all Presbyterians.
“We are not here to regulate the work of the church or to develop costly resources or to exist as an ivory tower of ministry experts,” Taylor said. Instead, the national staff can serve and partner with congregations and middle governing bodies to support their best work.
In her remarks, Valentine hinted that this might be a time of both cutting back and reshaping the focus, perhaps by letting some areas go altogether.
“When the economic downturn began to impact this year’s budget projections, we saw not only an imperative to reduce expenses, but also an opportunity to accelerate the work we were already doing to reshape the mission and ministry of the General Assembly Council,” she said in the video.
“As we looked at how best to accomplish this, how best to meet the church’s needs with fewer financial resources, we realized we already had many of the answers. What do we do uniquely? What do we do best? What does the church most need from us?”
Valentine said in the video that the budget shortfall of nearly $10 million will be met by implementing suggestions from the staff and other church leaders, by identifying under-used or unused sources of revenue and through “minimal reductions in staffing.
“Change is never easy. And changes of this magnitude come with real personal pain,” Valentine said. “Some ministries which have been dear to us for many years will come to an end. Some of our colleagues will conclude their ministry here. Some already have. We take solace in the knowledge that a time to tear down can also be a time to build, that a time to plant can also be a time to reap that which has already been planted.”
Most likely, according to its agenda, the council will discuss the budget reductions in closed session the evening of March 26. Its meeting is scheduled to end at noon on March 27.
