Jay Hudson, president of the investment program, told the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that the top question he’s being asked at this gathering is “How much did you lose during the banking crisis?”
The answer he gives is that 2009 was the program’s best year ever and that it has no delinquencies – primarily due to a careful investment approach that tries to help congregations “right-size” their loans, to make sure they don’t get more ambitious in their building programs than they can actually afford.
Hudson made his presentation today (July 7) during the report of the assembly Committee on Church Growth, Christian Education, and PILP.
The assembly voted during that report to renew its commitment to the “Growing Christ’s Church Deep and Wide” emphasis, and heard from Eric Hoey, the PC(USA) director of evangelism and church growth, who said that “missional conversations are becoming the fabric of our church.”
The assembly also approved several efforts related to the denomination’s desire to become more ethnically diverse – the PC(USA) is now disproportionately old and white. Those initiatives include:
* Affirming a multicultural church growth strategy;
* Initiating a conversation, at the request of the Committee on Theological Education, to develop a comprehensive strategy to address concerns among Hispanics and Latinos about church leadership issues; and
* Creating a nine-member task force to study the growth of racial-ethnic and new immigrant congregations, and report back to the General Assembly in 2012.
