For some, the question they’d most like to ask about the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s big fundraising campaign is: Is it working? Will they reach the $40 million goal?
But another question that seems to be growing organically from the campaign itself is: What’s being learned? What is this campaign teaching folks about how Presbyterians think?
Because in the two and a half years since The Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands campaign started, it’s seen a few extreme makeovers. What started as a “deep pockets” fundraising effort, targeting wealthy Presbyterians with the ability to make substantial gifts, has shifted to a much more diversified approach, with considerable involvement from presbyteries and individual congregations.
Jan Opdyke, the campaign’s director, asked what’s changed since the campaign’s beginning, told a group of Presbyterian communicators that it’s gone “about 180 degrees in the opposite direction” of where it started.
But she added that, about halfway through the five-year effort, more than half the $40 million has been pledged — about three-fourths of it through partnerships with presbyteries. As of September 30, the campaign had reported more than $22.5 million in pledges, and had collected more than $1.3 million of them, with some of that money already being used to put mission co-workers out in the field.
And some of those pledges have come from Presbyterians who’ve had doubts about the direction of the PC(USA), Opdyke said.
“We have people we’ve thought of as dissidents, churches and even presbyteries,” she said in an interview. “We’ve found almost unanimously that those people, even though there are things that bother them, see themselves as Presbyterians, as loyal Presbyterians. … Not only were they willing to support it, they were very happy there was something in their denomination they could support.”
The General Assembly approved the Joining Hearts & Hands campaign in 2002, with the intent that the PC(USA) would raise more money for international mission work and for new church development and the development of multicultural churches in the United States.
It’s been a sort of a roller coaster ride.
Ron Lundeen, an experienced fund-raiser, was brought in to run the show for the campaign, but within a short time he had quit. The campaign staff learned early on that some Presbyterians seemed miffed at the idea that the PC(USA) should rally only certain persons to give to international mission and church growth. There didn’t at first seem to be a place for those who couldn’t afford to write a check with a lot of zeroes at the end.
And the Joining Hearts & Hands staff had difficulty coming up with the names of enough wealthy Presbyterians to get things rolling toward the $40 million goal. In a typical fundraising campaign, 20 percent of the donors give 80 percent of the money, and “Presbyterians demographically are some of the wealthiest people in the country,” Opdyke told the communicators.
But “there were no names” for the staff to begin contacting, she said. “You can’t raise money from people you don’t know.”
And even when people with significant resources are identified — Opdyke said her office has 500 names of “heavily-blessed” Presbyterians who could each afford to give $250,000 or more — it takes time to establish a relationship and to make the case for what the church needs. “We can’t just knock on the door and someone will write us a big check,” she said.
“I do think there was a misunderstanding on someone’s part that we would simply ask for very large gifts and we would be able to secure them in a very short time,” Opdyke said. “I never did think that was going to work.”
Often, it’s the local pastor or presbytery executive’s connection with a potential donor that makes the big difference, Opdyke said — and a sense in a local church of what ministry those people feel called to do. With the biggest individual gift so far — a woman who gave $1 million to fund the needs of a seminary in Africa — the conversation took more than two years and her pastor was a crucial factor. The details of this gift are expected to be disclosed this spring.
Local Strength
In many ways, it’s been exactly that shift towards local fundraising, towards partnerships with presbyteries and congregations, that has given the campaign its momentum. Often the donors have had their own specific ideas of how they wanted the money to be spent — reinforcing the understanding that a top-down denomination, with decisions made at the PC(USA) national offices in Louisville, is not what many at the grassroots want.
So, as Hearts & Hands has sorted things out, money the presbytery campaign raises for use locally stays in the presbyteries — but is still counted towards the Joining Hearts & Hands totals, Opdyke said. The goal is not only to raise money, she said, but “to establish relationships” that will build a stronger church over time.
New funding that supporters send for PC(USA) mission personnel also is being routed through Joining Hearts & Hands, so the campaign “will credit their gifts,” Marian McClure, director of the denomination’s Worldwide Ministries Division, wrote in a letter in October to mission co-workers.
She wrote that because of the PC(USA)’s financial crunch — more layoffs are likely to be announced this spring — new mission personnel won’t be appointed through her division’s “core budget,” but only through Joining Hearts & Hands.
In working with presbyteries and congregations, the Joining Hearts & Hands staff provides marketing expertise, stewardship education materials, and vehicles for telling the story of the work in which the PC(USA) already is involved — and what more it wants to do.
“It’s truly a partnership, in that we are helping them raise the funds they need for local needs, and they are willing to share some of those resources at the national level,” Opdyke said in an interview.
So far, the campaign has announced partnerships with seven presbyteries:
· Los Ranchos, which has promised to raise $4.5 million;
· Santa Fe, $2 million;
· Peace River, $8 million;
· Mid-Kentucky, $1 million.
· Santa Barbara, $3.5 million;
· North Central Iowa, $250,000;
· Minnesota Valleys, $60,000.
Each presbytery campaign is structured differently — “there’s no cookie-cutter approach,” said Bill Saul, a car dealer from California who is co-chair of the campaign’s steering committee.
“We need to ask them what they’re drawn to” — to have conversations about the ministries or needs to which people feel heart-and-soul commitments, Opdyke said.
Congregations are making pledges too. Among the biggest:
· Grace First Church in Long Beach, where Saul is a member, will give $1 million to help rebuild congregations blasted by Hurricane Katrina;
· Memorial Drive Church in Houston has pledged $1 million;
· Brick Church in New York has promised $500,000, with half going to New York City presbytery for church transformation and half to the national church;
· Westminster Church in Minneapolis has pledged $250,000 to fund a health-care worker in Cameroon. The congregation has about 100 members from Cameroon.
“The trend is that giving has to be very personal,” Opdyke said. “Donors want it to be specific giving, designated giving.”
As with the Long Beach congregation’s gift of $1 million for hurricane relief, “they want to give the money, but they want to be part of it,” Saul said. “They want to go down there and maybe work on those churches. … They want to talk to those people” who were affected.
That gift grew out of a capital campaign at Grace First, and the decision that “we can’t sit here and spend all this money on ourselves when other people have no place to worship at all,” Saul said.
It’s not only big churches participating, either.
The session of Tennessee church in Tenaha, Texas, voted to send $5,000 to the campaign — that’s 20 percent of the congregation’s operating budget, said Emily Odom, Joining Hearts & Hands’ marketing director.
“That’s really an example of Presbyterians saying, ‘We need some things here in our church, but other people need other things more,'” Opdyke said.
The Hearts & Hands campaign also is exploring what Opdyke termed “Presbytery Lite,” for presbyteries that aren’t ready to sign on to a full-fledged, three-year partnership with the campaign, but are willing to make a smaller pledge.
When it comes to ideas, “we’re open, we’re flexible,” Opdyke said. “We’d love to do 50 of these.”
That sort of locally-driven priority setting doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the passions at the grassroots in the U.S. match the most urgent needs the PC(USA)’s international partners have identified. The partner churches have asked for several times more international mission co-workers than the PC(USA) has been able to provide, Opdyke said. And “every day they have people who want to go,” who feel called by God to work overseas, she said, but the money just isn’t there.
The money may not be enough, but it’s a start — and Jim Collie, executive presbyter of Santa Fe presbytery, said people at the grassroots seem excited about supporting that work.
One church sold property and gave part of the proceeds to Joining Hearts & Hands. Individuals are giving what they can — and the money is adding up. Half the money Santa Fe presbytery raises will go to the national church and half will be used locally, with two-thirds of the local money going for new church development.
“It feels like everybody’s a winner,” Collie said. “We get to help international mission … and I can make a difference in my local church.”
