I was disheartened to see this on Fr. Terry Martin's blog:
A drastically reduced budget has been approved by General Convention. Among the cuts are various programs at the Episcopal Church Center.To think that "the entire Evangelism program ... has been eliminated from the budget" of the Episcopal Church! And with "no explanation given"?
I'm sorry to have to inform you that the entire Evangelism program, including my position, has been eliminated from the budget.
Other program officer positions eliminated include Worship and Spirituality, Women's Ministries and Lay Ministry.
All together, 37 positions at the Episcopal Church Center have been cut. No explanation has been offered as to why these programs were chosen for elimination.
One of the most frustrating things about this unexpected development was that it follows right on the heels of the positive time I spent last week with the Evangelism Legislative Committee as they carefully crafted various resolutions. There were plans in place to host evangelism events with our ecumenical partners, create an innovative evangelism "toolkit," and develop training programs for evangelists, among other things. All these resolutions passed both Houses.
We Episcopalians love to tout the Baptismal Covenant in The Book of Common Prayer. As we should. So what about the Baptismal Covenant promise to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ" (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 305)?
In light of how often during the year we typically renew this covenant promise to be evangelists, as well as the general ineptitude of most of us in the Episcopal Church when it comes to claiming and living out what it means to be an evangelist, what does it say that we will not be putting our money where our mouths are?
If, as Jim Wallis has often pointed out, "a budget is a moral document," then the values expressed in a budget that cuts the entire Evangelism program are crystal clear. It says that evangelism is not sufficiently valued at the highest level of our Church to merit funding. Which means it's just not that important, period. Sorry, folks, you'll just have to figure this out on your own at the provincial, diocesan, or parish/mission level.
So what is more important than evangelism? Perhaps this report from The Living Church, which shows that litigation funding was dramatically increased, suggests an answer:
Virtually every department saw a reduction in funding from what Executive Council recommended with the exception of the Presiding Bishop’s Office, especially legal funding. Legal Support for reorganizing dioceses was increased 900 percent to $3 million over the next three-year period. Title IV and Legal Assistance to Dioceses was increased to $4 million, an increase of 122 percent. These items are all categorized under the Presiding Bishop’s Office, whose overall budget increased 15 percent.This suggests a strong maintenance as opposed to mission mindset. The message this sends is that we will protect the institutional Church at all costs, even if that means failing to do the most basic work the Church exists to do: effective proclamation by word and example of the Good News of God in Christ.
All of this renews my concern that the leadership of our Church has failed to heed the wake-up call issued by C. Kirk Hadaway, our Director of Research for the Episcopal Church Center, in the recently issued "Episcopal Congregations Overview: Findings from the 2008 Faith Communities Today Survey," as well as the report submitted to General Convention by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church. Both of these documents very clearly show the crisis we are in, a crisis which we are failing to adequately address. As I've noted on a previous posting, that crisis can be summed up as follows:
Aging membership + conflict + declining financial health + little interest in or understanding of evangelism = no viable future.
It sounds like we are responding to the reasons why we are losing membership and money by not funding efforts to deal with the loss of membership and money.
There may be an elephant in the Episcopal Church living room ...
5 comments:
This really does make no sense whatsoever. But as I asked on Phil Snyder's blog, what exactly did 815 do about evangelism? What effect does this have, except putting Fr. Martin on the job market?
A lot of Episcopalians are put off by evangelism because of bad models already in the public eye. But I think that a large portion of our problem is that we simply do not think that we have anything to share.
We talked about this at our Rector's Forum on Sunday. And we all finally concluded that evangelism is fundamentally a parish responsibility, and that it is more effective to develop local programs than to rely on the folks in New York.
As a teacher - and I suspect Billy has similar experiences - I see so much money which wasted at the district level to develop policies and curriculum which are never really implemented because they are not really aimed at any specific student population and because the people who are supposed to be implementing them resent it being imposed on them from above. Real educational reform seems to happen when an administrator and a group of teachers get excited about an idea and decide to do something about it.
Parishes are similar. Real renewal and commitment to mission is fundamentally a local phenomenon. When a clergy person and a group of lay people really get excited about something, change happens. That does not occur because somebody from the national church trains somebody from the diocese who holds meetings with people in the deanery.
That does not mean there is not a role for people who knowledge and expertise like Terry Martin. There is. But I think we need to move to a model where people like that are brought in my parishes ready to grow and flourish. Like Paul, they need to come and work with a community for a while and then move on to help other ones.
Maybe in the 1950's modeling our church life on General Motors seemed like a good idea. But it does not work any more. I want the Episcopal church to flourish and believe it can. But I do not think it will as long as we hold on to top-down thinking.
Very sad news indeed. Could someone link to a clear summery of were the money is coming from and where it goes? I know that legal costs are out of control but what are the other sink holes? In addition what portion of the revenu comes from endowments?
God Bless
Steve in Toronto
I would say that evangelism is something that has to be done at ALL levels of the church from 815 to each and every individual, but each of those levels has a different role to play. The work at the national level should be that of overall strategy and the facilitation of evangelism by others within the church. Unfortunately, the "strategy" now seems to be of the same mindset as "red door evangelism."
It has been said above but bears endorsement. Evangelism exists at the parish level or it does not exist at all. Even at 815 it is a function of what staff, including the PB, say and do as leaders of the church, and is not the function of a department. If the PB is not an evangelist then there is no evangelism at 815. If the bishop is not an evangelist then there is no evangelism in the diocese. It's not much different at the local level. If the clergy are not evangelists then it's unlikely that parishioners will take up the challenge. Sadly, even the best of evangelism programs coming out of an evangelism department are most often used as excuses (scape goats if you will) for not doing the evangelism we already know how to do and don't.
CP
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