Episcopal Press and News
Indigenous Ministries Committee wants Executive Council to rescind budget cuts
Episcopal News Service. April 28, 2008 [042808-02]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The Episcopal Church's Executive Council Committee on Indigenous Ministries plans to ask the Executive Council to restore to the church's 2008 budget money cut from block grants that help fund ministry to Native Americans.
At its last meeting in February, the Executive Council approved a revised 2008 Episcopal Church budget that included reductions to several programs, including a five-percent cut in the money that South Dakota, the dioceses of Alaska and North Dakota, the Navajoland Area Mission and the Indigenous Theological Training Institute expected to get from the church's Domestic Partnership block grant program.
The committee's decision to ask that the money be restored came during ECCIM's April 25-26 meeting in Sioux Falls in Diocese of South Dakota. South Dakota Bishop Creighton Robertson, a member of the committee, will lead the work to draft a resolution to present to the Executive Council at its next meeting June 13-15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson told the committee that she is prepared to ask Council at that meeting to reconsider the 2008 budget to restore the five percent cut.
The reduction was needed after it became apparent that while diocesan commitments for 2008 would be four percent more than in 2007, they were $400,000 less than anticipated when the 2007-2009 budget was approved by General Convention in June 2007, Episcopal Church Treasurer Kurt Barnes told ENS April 28.
"As a result, [in February] Executive Council approved a budget in which many programs and administrative expenditures have been reduced between one percent and five percent in order to accommodate lower income," he said.
Josephine Hicks, chair of Council's Standing Committee on Administration and Finance (A&F), told ENS on April 28 that "there was never a deliberate effort to cut back the funding for Indigenous Ministries."
When the entire Council considered the 2008 budget during the February meeting, it agreed to restore $340,000 of the nearly $1.6 million resulting reduction to the so-called program portion of the church's budget.
"Rather than have the Executive Council decide how to allocate that money, Executive Council asked the Center heads, who are closest to those ministries, to determine how to allocate those restored funds," Hicks said.
The Domestic Partnership program resides in the corporate/canonical portion of the Episcopal Church's budget, which is canonically required (Canon I.1.4.4(d)) to "have funding priority over any other budget areas subject to any decreases necessary to maintain a balanced budget." Barnes said he tried to point that requirement out to the Executive Council, but that "virtually everything" in the corporate/canonical portion of the budget was reduced.
Cut called 'very devastating'
Robertson noted during the ECCIM meeting that while the cuts will affect each diocese differently, they are "very devastating" and "affect us all in a very negative way."
The Rev. Canon Ginny Doctor, Alaska's canon to the ordinary, said the $17,000 in her diocese may not seem like a lot of money. It is, however, she said, in a diocese with 29 Native congregations reaching from outside of Fairbanks in southern Alaska to the Artic Coast. Priests must fly to reach many of those congregations and, with rising fuel costs, the cut will mean fewer trips and thus "the only time we can get priests out there is for funerals and the high holy days," she said.
Members of the Native congregations already often only receive the sacraments within the context of a funeral, Doctor said.
"There are many places in Alaska where the kids when they see a priest ask 'Who died?'" she said.
The council of the Navajoland Area Mission earlier this month sent to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori a copy of a resolution it had passed deploring the cuts and asking that they be rescinded, ECCIM member the Rev. Rosella Jim reported. ECCIM's resolution will affirm the sentiments in Navajoland's letter, the committee agreed.
The Rev. Canon John Floberg of the Diocese of North Dakota, said that this budget cut, on top of previous years' cuts and the lack of any increases to take into account inflation pits Native Americans against non-Native in his diocese in terms of whose ministries would be funded or cut. "These cuts really do harm within our diocese," he said.
Budget cut seen as symptomatic of larger issues
"The larger issue is that [the plan for reducing the 2008 budget] was not even discussed with us," Doctor said, calling the lack of communication "disrespectful" to the committee members as Native Americans and as a part of Executive Council's structure.
"That's not how we do business," she said.
Barnes told ENS that the lack of consultation was prompted because the 2008 portion of the triennial budget was being revised concurrently with the reorganization of staff at the Episcopal Church Center. The heads of the four new Mission Centers were not chosen until "very late in the budget process," he said.
"Consequently, the budget for 2008, unlike previous years or what we expect in future, was a top-down, management-driven proposal, subsequently reviewed and adjusted by A&F and Executive Council," Barnes told ENS.
Other ECCIM business
- Earlier in the meeting, Anderson told ECCIM about the three-day fact-finding trip she took prior to the meeting with Robertson and Janine Tinsley-Roe, the Episcopal Church's program officer for Native American ministry and racial justice, to the Crow Creek and Lower Brule reservations in central South Dakota. Anderson said she had "renewed relationships with relatives," whom she called "relatives in Christ Jesus," among the Episcopalians on the two reservations.
Episcopalians elsewhere in the church need to "renew our understanding of our responsibility and our kinship with Native people," she said.
Noting that the Episcopal Church once "conspired with the federal government" to force Native Americans to assimilate into the white settlers' culture, Anderson said it is important for the church "to apologize again and again with humility with regards to our relationships with Native people."
- ECCIM recommended releasing $86,000 in 13 grants through its New Opportunities program. New Opportunities is meant to "assist Native people throughout the Episcopal Church to develop new and innovative approaches to their ministry." The grants, many of them for work in the areas of youth and women's empowerment, went to the dioceses of Alaska, Central Gulf Coast, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Long Island, Los Angeles, Nevada, North Dakota (2) and Olympia, as well as Navajoland and the Anglican Indigenous Network (AIN). The committee was uncertain if the program had been included in the 2008 budget cut and agreed that, if it was, to reduce the individual grant amounts evenly by that amount.