Second thoughts on the special offerings proposal

As a former General Assembly staffer who worked with special offerings for more than 20 years, I appreciate this opportunity to share my reflections on what I learned during that time and what light that experience may shed on the proposal this GA will be considering concerning the future of the offerings.

From the fall of 1988 until the spring of 2010, I worked on the GA staff in Louisville in the Office of Special Offerings. For most of that time, I was the manager of that office and, from the middle ’90s through 2006, I represented that office before the General Assembly and the General Assembly Council. It was a sign of the changes to come that, on arrival at the 2008 GA, I was informed that I would not be speaking to any of the issues concerning the special offerings at that Assembly. From that time until I was fired in 2010, senior management in Louisville never asked my opinion on any matters relating to planning for the future of special offerings, despite (or perhaps because of) my long experience in working with them, in commissioning and interpreting surveys about them, and in conversing about them with a large number of pastors and committee chairs. While I acknowledge that the management at the Presbyterian Center has every right to choose its representatives and spokespersons, I also believe that some of what I learned may offer a different and perhaps useful perspective. I am grateful now to be free to offer that perspective for whatever it is worth.

I first want to point out that I do not intend this letter either as an critique of the task force that prepared this proposal or the current administration of the Office of Special Offerings, or as a defense of “the ways we used to do things” in that office. I know many of those involved in the conceptualization of this report, and they are intelligent, committed Presbyterians striving for a way to breathe new life into an old structure. Moreover, I believe they were open to making as few or as many changes as they might find necessary to enable that to happen. I have the same regard for those who currently work in that office, as they try to accomplish a herculean task with diminishing resources. To the extent that this letter is critical, those critiques are not directed at any of those involved in creating this proposal.

All that being said, what exactly are my concerns about this proposal, and what informs that reaction?

1. One of my first concerns is that the current proposal focuses on the offerings almost exclusively as a means of funds development. Of course, the offerings have always been an important means of funding different kinds of mission. What’s different with this proposal is that it focuses almost exclusively on the bottom-line aspects of the offerings without paying sufficient attention to the wellsprings that have fed them since their inception. The focus on “developing” individuals capable of giving large amounts, the intent to use credit-card giving, etc., are all reasonable modes of funds development, but they risk violating the traditional sense of special offerings that my individual gift is as essential to the success of the offering as anyone’s. If I know that the Special Offerings office is targeting the two biggest givers in our congregation for a five-figure gift, that may well make my two- or three-figure gift seem unimportant. This would potentially both demotivate the many smaller-gift donors and erode the ethos of offering as a community activity. It could also vitiate the potential for the special offerings to continue to be a convincing channel for discipleship or stewardship training.

2. The proposed changes would loosen the important connection between my gift and the “final” recipient. I’m sure this disconnect was not the goal of the proposal to eliminate the “program allocations,” but it seems likely to have that effect. If I assume that my gift will go, at least in part, to help the young farmer in the photo get her produce to market, I may be disconcerted and possibly outright suspicious if I learn that the GAMC subsequently decided to allocate gifts away from that project and toward one more in line with its biennial goals. Suspecting that “Louisville” has decided to replace my own decision with its own, I may therefore succumb to the temptation to see it as just another national bureaucracy out of touch with the grassroots.

This underlines two of the lessons I learned while working with the offerings. First, offering advocates in the congregations where the offerings were most successful saw their relationship with Louisville as one where Louisville helped them accomplish their goals rather than the other way around. Secondly, for an increasing number of those I spoke with, special offerings were the only area where the national denominational structure was seen as an asset rather than a hindrance to their ministry. For the GAMC to override a congregation’s intent could seriously undermine that relationship and damage this last line of open communication.

3. The proposal continues the increasing centralization of power and authority. I believe that the intent behind the decision to remove specific program allocations was to address a real problem—the tendency for unquestioned allocations to engender rigidity and turf protection among long-term beneficiaries. I agree that the longer a program or entity comes to rely on a specific funding source, the more it sees itself as the sole rightful beneficiary of those funds. As programmatic survival becomes more and more its aim, a program may even begin to respond in ways that subvert its own mission. Yet, while acknowledging this danger, I believe that the proposed cure may do more damage than the disease. In order to break up this sense of programmatic entitlement, the current proposal would give the GAMC the authority to choose the beneficiary programs based on what would best support its current goals. Unfortunately, in the name of eliminating “turf protectorates” on the GAMC, the Council has been systematically distanced from the kind of detailed, first-hand programmatic knowledge that might enable it to perform this judiciously; furthermore, its own power has been largely reduced to that of support for the decisions of senior leadership in Louisville. Therefore, giving the GAMC authority to make these decisions really means giving that power to those who have budget gaps to fill. Does anyone really believe that, presented with budget gaps on one hand and a wad of more-or-less fungible money in the other, most members of the GAMC won’t do the apparently dutiful thing and fill those gaps? The fact that this action may diverge from givers’ intentions will probably not even be within their field of vision.

My concerns about this prospect are numerous. First, on the face of it, this kind of concentrated authority violates many of the basic assumptions of the Presbyterian ethos and polity. Second, it goes against the very nature of the special offerings, which have tended to be a way for people to support those with least voice at the world’s decision-making tables. Third, it will undermine faith in the responsiveness of the offerings themselves, without which they cannot long remain viable. Finally, it discards far too casually the opportunity for the national structure to do what I believe it must if it is to have any meaning, i.e., evolve a new way to serve the larger church (by which I do not mean large-membership churches.) More on this last point in a moment.

4. My last quarrel with the current proposal is with the notion of having one person serve as the “face of special offerings” around the denomination. This is not inherently a bad idea; more visibility for the offerings at the local level certainly wouldn’t hurt. It’s more a question of priority: again and again, congregational mission and stewardship and outreach chairs trying to get questions answered and delivery issues unkinked told me that their concern was the difficulty being heard and responded to by Louisville, not the difficulty hearing or seeing Louisville’s perpective. In other words, they were more concerned with the number of ears and hands in Louisville devoted to the offerings than to the number of opportunities to hear from the offerings’ “face.” While this may seem like cheap wordplay, I think it’s not: with pressure to keep administrative overhead as low as possible, the cost of funding a high-level person to travel around the church on behalf of special offerings would almost certainly be drawn from the costs of delivering the services that offering advocates in congregations depend on.

Let’s go back for a moment to a point I made above, that my biggest concern about this proposal is that it is a missed opportunity. My intention here is not to present a fully elaborated vision of what changes I would suggest in place of those the task force has put forward. I do have one general suggestion, however: take this one important area where there is still considerable good will toward Louisville among congregations and build upon it. Recognize that the source of that good will is connected with the fact that the GAMC and its staff are uniquely able to help congregations achieve their own mission goals and that we respect the congregations’ ability to discern, articulate, and implement those goals. Reframe Louisville’s role as a structure that exists to help congregations, as well perhaps as a clearinghouse that can share both good new ideas and lessons learned the hard way in congregations rather than as the self-appointed authority on all issues. By doing so, Louisville could go a long way toward earning respect and goodwill, which would form a much firmer foundation for discussions about funding the church’s common mission than has existed for a long time.

I don’t know how many times I heard the term “servant leadership” invoked in 100 Witherspoon. For years this struck me as a hopeful sign, because I believed then as I do now that this was the one niche left unoccupied in the evolving ecosystem of the 21^st-century church. If the national structure attempted to serve, unite, and advise congregations, helping them achieve their own visions, there might be a role for it; if it continued to see itself as directing the show, it would continue its fall into irrelevancy. Unfortunately, despite all the lip service I have heard given to the concept of servant leadership, the church has continued to slide more and more toward a corporate model of centralized authority. I’m very concerned that the current proposal for changes in special offerings will accelerate rather than brake that slide.

I hope that some of these reflections are helpful. In any case, I wish the 220^th General Assembly the greatest wisdom and discernment as it wrestles with these and other issues in the coming days.

Alan Krome served on the General Assembly staff in the Mission Interpretation area for more than 22 years, working in the Office of Special Offerings for that entire time and as international editor of the Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study for about 10 years.