One of the most important items of business at General Convention is the adoption of a new three-year budget. According to this story by Episcopal News Service, the Episcopal Church has to cut about $23 million dollars from its 2010-2012 budget.
(The church’s proposed budget predicts total triennial income of $141,271,984, with $79,161,193 coming from the dioceses and $27.6 million from investment income. Expenses are budgeted at $140,856,531.)
So there was a lot of angst today as General Convention considered approving this greatly reduced budget.
As I said in Thursday’s print column, what the budget committee got right was that we need to prune the national Church structure, and that the right tool for the job is a chainsaw, not hand-held loppers.
(Or as Belton Zeigler of South Carolina told me this afternoon, for this job, “we need a bulldozer, not an oil can.”)
In other words, we’re still trying to make the horseshoe factory of General Convention and 815 (Episcopal Church headquarters) more efficient and responsive so that horseshoes are more affordable for local congregations.
And most of us switched over to automobiles a few years ago.
What do I mean by that? I mean just as “all politics is local,” most mission and ministry is local. Or as Bishop Lee points out in Friday’s Center Aisle, “mission should occur at the level closest to the people who are called to engage in that mission.”
It has long struck me that the further “up” we go into church structures — from the local parish to regions/deaneries to the diocese to provinces to the national church, the more things like bureaucracy, policy, politics, and procedures grow, and the less actual mission and ministry happen.
I’m not saying there is NO use for the national church, dioceses, or regions. But like a historical house that has been added onto over the decades — a remodeled kitchen in the 1950′s, a two-bedroom addition in the ’60s, a room above the garage in the ’70s, a screened-in porch in the 80′s, an in-home theater in the ’90′s, all without any thought to an overall architectural master plan, just so, church structures just tend to grow way beyond the needs of the current occupants.
So there comes a time when the current occupants look around and say, “wow…this place has gotten to be WAY too big, way too inefficient for us. What do we do? Remodel again?
“Or tear-down, and rebuild?”
Thanks be to God, painful as it is, the Episcopal Church may be reaching the latter conclusion.
posted by John Ohmer
