Episcopal Press and News
Budget committee asks convention for prayers
Episcopal News Service -- Anaheim, California. July 12, 2009 [071209-07]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
In an "extraordinary step" July 12 members of the Program, Budget and Finance (PBF) committee sent a special letter to both houses of General Convention asking for their prayers and informing them that they will be asked to reduce the diocesan asking and the costs of the next General Convention.
"We appreciate your ongoing prayers for us and we view this as an opportunity for creative and positive change in our church," the 27 members of the committee wrote in their letter.
The committee said the letter was sent "in order to achieve a more transparent process" for producing the Episcopal Church's 2010-2012 budget.
"We don't want anyone surprised" during the committee's budget presentation at 2:30 p.m. on July 15, PBF chair Pan Adams-McCaslin said in an interview. A vote on the budget is expected July 16, the day before the end of convention.
"Some really hard stuff is going on," she said of the process of crafting the budget.
"We have learned from past conventions that it's the Holy Spirit that guides this work and we couch our work in prayer, but because we're crafting the budget for the Episcopal Church, we invite the church to be in prayer," she said.
The committee said that it began its deliberations last week with an approximately $24 million gap between projected income and projected expenses. That amount included $15 million less in income that original anticipated and the funding implication of resolutions facing the convention.
PBF members reported in the letter that they are now dealing with a gap of approximately $14 million.
Despite that gap, the members said they will propose a reduction in what is known as the diocesan asking, the request for money that the convention makes of its 110 dioceses, which supply the bulk of the church's triennial income.
Each diocese is currently asked to give the church 21 percent of its income, after subtracting $100,000. That formula has not changed since it was set by the General Convention in 1997.
At the July 10 funding hearing, witnesses were told that each one percent reduction of the 21 percent ask would mean $925,000 less in income and every $25,000 increase in the $100,000 exclusion would reduce annual income by $583,000. However, some witnesses at the committee's funding hearing July 10 suggested that a reduced assessment formula could result in more dioceses paying the full "ask."
The members also said that they "are preparing to make innovative proposals in regard to reducing the cost of General Convention."
Adams-McCaslin said she could not discuss details of either proposal, or any other measures the committee has taken, until the presentation, which traditionally takes place during a joint meeting of the houses of Bishops and Deputies.
The Executive Council's draft 2010-2012 budget forecasted in January that nearly $96.6 million of the budget's $161.8 million in income would come from the dioceses.
Twenty-eight dioceses have committed to paying that amount, according to the most current information available. Six dioceses committed to slightly more than that. Twenty-six dioceses have not filed the required reports that allow for a calculation of their operating income. Each year's annual giving is based on a diocese's income two years earlier.
If each diocese gave the full 21 percent, the church would have $6.5 million more in annual income, PBF member Holly McAlpen (California) told the committee's funding hearing July 10.
PBF members have spent a "difficult, difficult two days" considering the 2010-2012 budget in light of what it heard in hearings on spending and funding held on July 9 and 10, Adams-McCaslin said.
The committee's "unprecedented" letter "came out of our need to ask both houses to pray for us and we thought it was important to lower the level of anxiety by being factual [and] by saying: 'this is our struggle and we invite you into it,'" she said.
According to Adams-McCaslin, the committee is considering all parts of the budget through the lens of the 2010-2012 budget priorities, which have passed the House of Deputies and are pending in the House of Bishops.
In addition, she said, the members are paying "a whole lot of attention to what we have heard from the church about what they are struggling with in their own parishes and dioceses."
Adams-McCaslin acknowledged that the committee's decisions have come "in response to the economic situation and it's in response to convention and those who came to the hearings were very clear: we can't do business the same way we've always done it"
Instead, she said, the committee is trying to take "a realistic look at the income for the triennium and designate its use in a way that the world looks at us as a missional church."
During an earlier news briefing on July 12, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori echoed her opening remarks to the convention as she suggested that the Episcopal Church "should only be doing things church-wide that are not better done at the diocesan or congregational level and that we need to look seriously at our structure."
House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson had told the media on July 11 that there needs to be a balance between the so-called corporate/canonical and program/mission sides of the budget.
"We have to maintain the infrastructure of the Episcopal Church in a responsible and careful way, because without the maintenance of the infrastructure, the mission and ministry are also diminished," she said. "So there is a balance there between maintaining a responsible, careful infrastructure that enables a dynamic and creative mission and ministry to happen. We can't cut one to the detriment of the other."
Adams-McCaslin said that balance "is not an either/or. We are really pushing for an 'and' and … we're sharing in this downturn together."
Evoking the Chinese character for crisis, which literally means danger and opportunity, Adams-McCaslin said that "if we get into the danger side, we live in fear and anxiety, but we're a church that is grounded in the Gospel and so we are working from [a sense that the budget] is an opportunity to be an outward and visible sign of God's mission."
The budget faces demands from many different directions. Resolution D019 calls for restoring the budget line item for Millennium Development Goals and increasing it from .7 percent to 1 percent of income.
When Executive Council passed its draft version of the 2010-2012 budget in January, it eliminated the MDG line item in a budget-balancing effort. In the 2007-2009 budget that line item amounts to about $924,000, and $15.5 million are attributed to direct and indirect spending on the MDGs.
Meanwhile, the House of Bishops has passed Resolution B018 calling on PBF to cut in half the budget for all interim meetings of all committees, commissions, agencies and boards during the next triennium.
The resolution calls for using the money saved to increase in funding for domestic and foreign missionary projects, including the MDGs.
Then there's the issue of the many resolutions still in process that require funding.
On July 12 as bishops were about to discuss Resolution C080, a program development proposal, Jim Mathes of San Diego noted "we just passed two resolutions, we're about to pass a third, which are not in the current budget and we've just been told the deep, deep gap between expenses and income."
"Are we writing fiction here?" he asked. "Just wondering if at some point we are going to stop and say what is it we're actually doing with our time and with these resolutions. I guess I'm going to vote against these unfunded resolutions that we're passing on when we know we have millions of dollars in deficits already."
To which Jefferts Schori replied, "It's not unusual for this to happen at General Convention."
Witnesses at PBF's July 9 spending hearing were warned that many resolutions asking for money would not get any and some may be funded at reduced levels, outcomes that have been seen during previous conventions.