The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation approved its proposed 2025-26 budget on May 2, 2024, a precursor to a May 7 vote on the “unifying budget” that includes the new agency to be formed by the combination of the Presbyterian Mission Agency and the Office of the General Assembly.
If approved at the May 7 joint meeting, the Unification Commission will need to endorse the budget before it heads to General Assembly (GA) 226 this summer for final approval.
If approved at the May 7 joint meeting, the Unification Commission will need to endorse the budget before it heads to General Assembly (GA) 226 this summer for final approval.
Studies of the combined single agency were initiated at GA 222 (2016) in Portland, Oregon, with the formation of the Way Forward Commission, All Agency Review Committee and the Vision 2020 Committee. Work by these groups resulted in reports that ultimately led commissioners to form a Unifying Commission at GA 224 (2022) with a broad mandate to:
…oversee and facilitate the unification of the Office of the General Assembly (OGA) and the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) into a single agency, revise the Organization for Mission to reflect this change, and work to align the entities, boards, committees, and constituent bodies of the General Assembly toward long-term faithfulness and financial sustainability of its mission within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The narrative budget, presented by budget priority, includes a combined expense of $91.2 million in 2025 and $93.8 million in 2026. These totals are inclusive of the Administrative Services Group budget and the existing OGA and PMA budgets.
As a comparison, GA 225 (2022) approved combined budgets of $88,365,740 for 2023, and $89,557,635 for 2024. At the same time, the Assembly asked finance staff to account for inflation and other cost increases in future budgets.
A Corp Board co-chair Jason Micheli asked if there were any significant shifts in priority from current expenses reflected in the unified budget, or if details would emerge as the unification process occurs.
Ian Hall, A Corp’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, said, “There is some work in the budget that brings us closer to unification, and so we have allocated some resources to unifying. From a point of view of the big picture budget, it’s a stepping stone in that direction.”
The prioritized expense budget is arranged into nine categories with respective percentages: Additional Work (2%), Leadership Development (15%), Life of the Communion (14%), Mid Council Support (10%), Operations (35%), Reparative Justice (12%), Strategic Partnerships (9%), Unifying Work (2%), and an annual reduction objective (-2%).
“There is still a lot to be figured out,” said Hall. “We are in the middle of unifying the Presbyterian Mission Agency and the Office of the General Assembly, and there is a commitment from the executive team to, by October, bring a plan to the Unification Commission that achieves the stated goal of reducing $5,000,000 out of the budget by the 2026 budget year.”
The budget reduction objective – $3 million for 2025 and a $2 million objective for 2026 – were requested by the General Assembly to achieve a balanced budget following the unification of the agencies.
On the income side of the budget, expected revenue for 2025 is $94.2 million and $94.3 million for 2026. Revenue for the two-year period is broken down into contributions (43%), investment returns (23%), sales of services and resources (12%) and other sources of funding including insurance premium reimbursements and sales of Administrative Services Group services and rentals to the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program, Presbyterian Women and Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, are (22%).
Moving away from a budget based on organizational structure and toward one based on priorities as was presented is a work in progress, involving many groups said Kathy Lueckert, president of A Corp.
“I think we’ll get better at fine-tuning that over the years as we hone in on what those priorities actually mean,” she said. “We had had some priorities from the Unification Commission, leadership development, mid council support – moving forward with unification projects, particularly in technology – and so those are reflected, but then the joint team also came up with other priorities. Those [priorities] may change over time and that’s the challenge of doing a budget by priorities instead of doing it by organizational structure.”
The A Corp Board also approved a reserve policy that seeks to fully fund a unified financial reserve instead of the separate agency reserves reflected in previous budgets, a combined ASG, OGA and PMA staffing level of 429 full-time staff and 48 part-time staff, 3% salary increases each year and a 7.1% increase in Board of Pensions dues, recognizing changes to this dues structure will need to be revised after the recent changes to BoP pricing.
Other business approved included comments on two overtures in which the services of A Corp are requested. The first promises assistance in conducting a study of the rising cost of, and limited access to, church insurance (GAEC-25). The second offers support for the recommendations of the Special Offerings Review Task Force (FIN-12), which recommends reducing the number of special offerings from four to three and focusing on causes such as hunger, disaster, poverty, climate change, immigration, etc., instead of specific program areas.
