Episcopal Press and News
Restructuring discussions continue after House of Bishops meeting
Episcopal News Service. September 23, 2011 [092311-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The on-going conversations about whether and how to restructure the Episcopal Church got a boost this week when the Rt. Rev. Stacy Sauls, a member of the House of Bishops who is also the church's chief operating officer, presented his fellow bishops with what he called a way of testing the "grassroots support" for such change.
On Sept. 23, the PowerPoint of Sauls' presentation and the model of a resolution that diocesan conventions could submit to General Convention were made available online here. The Spanish version of the resolution is available here. Sauls' transcription of the notes he used to narrate the PowerPoint presentation is here.
Sauls told Episcopal News Service during a Sept. 22 interview that what he offered "was in no way intended to be a proposal or resolution or even a suggestion, particularly. It was more that these are the ways that we might could go about doing something." Sauls added that his presentation "didn't begin to be the sum total of ideas" that have been and are being discussed elsewhere in the church.
"This is not a bishop-imposed [initiative]; this is testing to see if there's a grassroots support for this kind of thing," Sauls said.
A range of reactions has greeted his presentation made Sept. 20 to the House of Bishops meeting in Quito, Ecuador. Some people have commented on the broad outlines of his suggestions while others have focused on his decision to make such a presentation to the bishops.
Sauls suggested that bishops engage the laity and clergy in their dioceses in conversation about potential structural reform that he said could shift the church's focus toward mission.
He also offered them a model resolution that dioceses could submit to the 77th General Convention in 2012 for consideration. It would have convention call for a special commission to be charged with "presenting a plan to the church for reforming its structures, governance, administration, and staff to facilitate this church's faithful engagement in Christ's mission…." Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson would appoint members to the commission.
The resolution would have the commission present its recommendations to a special meeting of General Convention before the 78th General Convention in 2015. A special convention may be called by a majority of the church's bishops for a specific purpose and the meeting can consider no other business. The scope of the agenda for the 2012 meeting of convention has nearly been set and the 2015 convention will feature the election of a new presiding bishop.
Thus, a special convention is seen in this instance as a way to allow bishops and deputies to concentrate on the restructuring issue. In addition, any needed constitutional changes must be approved by two successive meetings of convention. A special convention would allow that approval process to end in 2015.
Sauls' presentation to the bishops included an overview of trends in the church's income and how that money is currently spent. He told ENS he outlined some changes that would reduce the cost of administration and of General Convention, including having the governing body meet every four or five years instead of the current three-year cycle, reducing the size of both houses and changing the way business comes to the convention.
He said that his concern "is not as simple as cutting up the existing pie the right way." Instead, he suggested that rebalancing the percentages of what the church spends on administration, governance and mission had the potential to "make the whole pie grow larger."
"One of my fundamental faith beliefs is that the people of the Episcopal Church want to fund the church's engagement in God's mission and I think that if they were confident that that [engagement] is what they were giving to, I think the size of our resources would increase," he said.
He said he wants to help the church live into its corporate name as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society as what he called the "trustees" of its resources for the poor in ways that engage the members of the church. However, he said, "at the church-wide level we are not leveraging our resources to that end."
Sauls told ENS that his presentation to the House of Bishops was meant to follow up, at his colleagues' request, on remarks he had made at the group's March meeting.
House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson told ENS by e-mail Sept. 21 that she had not seen the substance of his suggestions, but is "encouraged by the knowledge that Bishop Sauls shares my appetite for reforming our structures in the service of God's mission, and hope we can collaborate more closely in the future."
"The laity and clergy of the church look forward to seeing what he has shared with the bishops," she said.
Executive Council member Bruce Garner noted Sept. 21 on an e-mail listserv open for discussion to bishops, General Convention deputies and Episcopal Church Center staff, that Sauls' presentation is "nothing more than an idea, a proposal, a suggestion" that hasn't been put to a vote.
"Ideas and plans do not come out of large committees," Garner said on the listserv. "They initially come from the thoughts and ideas of one or two people who think about something and then go from there. Once an idea has been 'floated' it then goes to the next step to be discussed, fleshed out, altered, thrown out or whatever."
Garner gave ENS permission to quote from his e-mail but cautioned that he was speaking for himself and not on behalf of Executive Council, which, he noted, had been receiving and discussing throughout the triennium reports about changing the governance structure of the church.
Council has also been considering a "long-range financial modeling tool," which the council's Finances for Mission Committee Chair Del Glover said showed annual multi-million-dollar deficits from 2012 through 2015 and "growing to a substantial amount in 2021" if changes are not made. Council has changed the way it will develop a draft 2013-2015 budget. That work has included a survey about the church's programs and its funding priorities. The results of that survey are due to be released soon.
The Rev. Canon Mark Harris, a council member from Delaware, told ENS in a telephone interview Sept. 22 that Sauls' presentation was part of the calls for structural change that are "bubbling up" all over the church. He noted that both Jefferts Schori and Anderson have "challenged" the church's structures since the beginning of the 2010-2012 triennium.
Still, he wrote Sept. 21 in his blog, "Preludium," it took "considerable courage" for Sauls "to put the proposition on the table."
In his most recent post, Harris said "the upcoming General Convention could begin the process by using a budget-making process that does not simply build (or deconstruct) its line items from an internal contest among offices and duties for the remnants of the pie."
Harris warned that restructuring "should not be about cutting spending, although it does require a realistic understanding of budget limitations" but, rather, coming to a "clear understanding of just who we are as a church and what we understand our work to be."
Diocese of Nevada Bishop Dan Edwards wrote Sept. 20 on his blog that the point of Sauls' suggestion of structural change "is not just to spend less."
"It is to redirect money and human resources from governance to mission, from centralized to local, while streamlining the governing bodies of the church," Edwards wrote from Quito, Ecuador, where the bishops met.
Conversations about changes in the church's structure are already occurring elsewhere in the church. John Cheek, a lay deputy from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, told ENS via e-mail Sept. 22 that his deputation had spent part of its meeting the night before Sauls' presentation talking about structural change and what he called "misplaced budget priorities." It was clear from that discussion, he wrote, that "future development of these ideas would involve (as stated by Sauls) extensive conversations with laity and clergy as well as bishops."
Cheek said reorganization has to be aimed beyond "merely putting more people in the pews to pay our bills."
"If we do not offer something really worthy of the Gospel then we deserve to die out," he wrote. "Putting mission first would be a huge step in that direction."
Sauls said that several bishops have told him since his presentation that they intend to begin discussions of it in their dioceses with their convention deputations. He called for even wider discussions.
"I don't think this conversation can happen in too few places," he said, adding that his suggestion for conversation about structural change is not meant to "pre-empt" other conversations that are taking place, "but it is intended to broaden the conversation."
Restructuring ideas have indeed been floated or formally proposed for years. General Convention has been traditionally reluctant to make major changes in structure and governance. Ideas that have reached convention included various proposals to reduce the size of the House of Deputies or change how deputies are chosen (those suggestions date to as early as 1874) and reduce the length of convention (in fact, council asked that the 2012 meeting of convention be eight days instead of 10).
There also have been periodic calls to move the Church Center out of New York City. The church center staff has been reorganized more than once in recent years, beginning in 2007 in an effort to "provide greater flexibility, decentralization, and increased responsiveness toward the mission of the church," according to a council resolution at the time.
Sauls' proposal comes close to four months after the church's Standing Commission on the Structure of the Church, at the council's request, gathered representatives of the church's committees and commissions that have been discussing strategic planning and possible changes in the structure and governance of the church.
Sauls told ENS that some of the ideas he discussed with the House of Bishops are similar to a presentation he made to the Budgetary Task Force last October. He was a member of that group when Jefferts Schori appointed him as COO.
Becky Snow, Structure's chair, has said that the commission would include a report on the gathering in its report to General Convention in 2012.
Snow told ENS Sept. 21 that the commission discussed reports about Sauls' House of Bishops presentation that day during a previously planned telephone conference.
"Making a proposal at this moment in [the convention's three-year] life cycle essentially guarantees that it's not going to be actionable by anybody else – by any of the existing structures – before General Convention," she said.
En español