The Coordinating Table – made up of 15 top Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) leaders – met via Zoom May 13 and reached consensus on a few things:
- When the 2022 General Assembly meets, there will be a unified presentation of the various PC(USA) budgets, but not an attempt to create one single unified budget in which all the revenue sources are combined and agreement reached on how the money should be spent.
- A staff group will begin looking at donor-restricted funds to narrow down which ones might be investigated further to see if those funds could be used in different ways. Some caveats: Doing that work will take a lot of time, although the plan is to have an initial review done by the end of 2021 to suggest which funds to look at more intensely. When a deeper dive is attempted, it’s not at all clear that big dollars would be freed up for new uses. And there may be some church funds with restrictions placed long ago that are now viewed as racist — work is needed to figure out what to do about that.
- The Coordinating Table itself – the brainchild of the Moving Forward Implementation Commission – might go on hiatus for a while, or go away, because at least some of the participants think it’s just not needed.
Diane Moffett, president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA), and J. Herbert Nelson, the PC(USA)’s stated clerk, say they have a strong, collaborative working relationship and that both PMA and the Office of the General Assembly (OGA) have heavy workloads and not much time.
“We are one church,” Moffett said. “We are going to help one another, and we are incredibly busy” – as the denomination struggles with the financial and ministry realities of a pandemic; with OGA preparing for a hybrid General Assembly in 2022; and with PMA mid-stream in its vision implementation process, trying to reorganize the agency to better do the work of being a Matthew 25 church.
“There is cooperation that is taking place” regarding the budget, even with concerns about the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nelson said.
But “do we need this Coordinating Table in order to do that?” asked Shannan Vance-Ocampo, chair-elect of the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board. “Do we need another layer of bureaucracy and structure” when coordination and collaboration already are happening?
There also was a sense that there’s not enough time to develop a unified budget.
Kathy Lueckert, president of the PC(USA), A Corporation – the entity that provides administrative services for OGA and PMA – said proposed budgets for 2023 and 2024 need to be ready for consideration by the boards of the agencies involved by January 2022.
“I just don’t think you can ask the staff to undertake something that is drastically different” before the 2022 General Assembly, said Chris Mason, co-moderator of the A Corporation board. “I don’t think it’s a reasonable request at this stage.”
While Debra Avery and Mathew Eardley of the Moving Forward Implementation Special Committee voiced some skepticism about whether the current collaboration on budgetary issues is sustainable – especially if money is tight – Mason said that the PC(USA) has different leadership now than it did several years ago, when Moving Forward began surfacing its concerns.
“Just let them dance a little bit,” instead of constantly telling them “one, two, three, four,” he urged the Moving Forward representatives. “It feels like they’re dancing, and maybe they don’t need us to yell the steps at them right now.”
While “I don’t think we have a utopian budget, I think it’s a better budget than we had before,” Nelson said. PC(USA) leaders are “just trying to get through what is a very, very tough time” of pandemic and a changing church. “That’s hard work.”
Restricted funds. The PC(USA) leaders expressed a deep interest in taking a closer look at restricted funds, which make up the biggest portions of the denomination’s budgets, and determining if there might be more flexibility in how those funds, held by the Presbyterian Foundation, might be used.
But that’s complicated work. Lueckert said there are more than 2,000 restricted funds. She showed just one page of a 93-page document outlining individual funds and their restrictions — saying that work to look more deeply into the exact language of the restrictions would involve a review of the original donor documents. Kerry Rice, deputy stated clerk, said an examination of the restrictions of about 20 funds being considered for use by the Presbyterian Historical Society took months.
Sara Lisherness, interim head of PC(USA) World Mission and director of PMA’s Compassion, Peace and Justice Ministry, gave a few examples of difficulties with some of the restrictions the donors imposed:
- A fund specified for education of white people from Appalachia.
- A fund for support of a specific hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a hospital that has closed.
“There are 93 pages like that,” Lisherness said, “just to let you know the immensity and challenge of the task.”
Lueckert said the first level of work – proposing which specific funds to look at more deeply – needs to come from a cross-agency staff team that she, Nelson and Moffett would appoint. Even investigating the restrictions on 10% of the funds would be a lot of work, and would need to be balanced with other responsibilities — including planning for an estimated $1 million in renovations of the PC(USA) office building in Louisville to accommodate the 2022 General Assembly; PMA’s vision implementation work; and OGA’s planning for the next assembly.
While the review will take a lot of work, “I do think it’s a priority to know what’s in there,” said Stephanie Anthony, chair of the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA).
“To me, it’s incredibly disappointing to know I’m a part of a denomination that’s continuing to carry openly racist bequests,” said Eliana Maxim, COGA’s vice chair. “To allow it to remain on the books in a way that does not reflect who we say we are — I think we need to own that.”
Vance-Ocampo said: “I don’t think we need money like that in this denomination.”
Avery asked in the Zoom chat: “Isn’t it also possible to give the money back?”
Lueckert replied in the chat: “Not always. Some of the most racist funds date back to the last century or even the 1800s. The original donors are dead.”
And Rice wrote: “It may take a great deal of research to find family members, etc., to be able to give it back.”
Mason, who’s a lawyer from New York, said some of the work to investigate donor restrictions could involve what are known as cy pres actions, which involve seeking permission from a judge to use a fund for a different purpose than the donor originally stipulated, in a way that’s “as near as possible” to what the donor intended.
An example he gave: his congregation, Brick Presbyterian Church, filed such an action regarding a fund given in the 1830s for the education of enslaved men. The court gave permission for the funds to be used for educating disadvantaged Black men.
“It takes time” to pursue cy pres adjustments of the original restrictions, Mason said. “It’s expensive. There are lawyers involved.”
Even if it’s determined that a restricted fund could be used for an alternate purpose, the board of the agency involved would have still have decisions to make — including whether to take the funding from one PC(USA) endeavor and use it for something else, said Barry Creech, director of policy, administration and board support for PMA. In other words, “which one of these is most important?”
And Lueckert cautioned against the perception that “there’s a lot of restricted money to be freed up here — that may just not be the case. … We need to manage the expectations around what the outcome of this will be in actual dollars.”
So what’s next for the Coordinating Table? asked Marco Grimaldo, co-moderator of the Moving Forward committee. And if there’s not going to be a unified budget for 2023 and 2024, what about down the road?
“We’re on our way, one step at a time,” Moffett responded. The agencies are collaborating —with PMA and OGA having struck agreements for allocating costs and revenues for 2021 and 2022 – and are doing the best they can, given the difficult work before them. “Just let us dance, please.”
