An observer and monitor in a committee at General Conference witnessed a truly disturbing plan that makes PlanUMC look like a reasonable proposal. The scary part? It passed committee, so it only needs to pass the floor of 864 delegates to be enacted in The United Methodist Church. Read on for info and informed commentary.
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The $20million Coup in The UMC
Rev. Sara Baron
A coup is being attempted at General Conference–a coup that will cost TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS [1]. The people attempting the coup are trusting the rest of you to ignore the details. So I’m here to explain it. (Just blink a few times if your eyes start to glaze over. I beg you: stay with me.) Most people in the church just give up on budgets and numbers. They disengage, ignore and trust that the people in charge will do the right thing.
Budgets are moral documents. The use of our resources is the way that we live God’s love in our world, and this applies to our money as well as our time and our talents. When we make budgets, we are deciding what our priorities are. That’s the hard part, as there is so much good to be done and not enough money to fund it all. Budgets are decisions about priorities. They are a set of decisions about what to fund and at what level. They express what we really care about.
The Budget
Here is a very simplified overview of The United Methodist Church’s budget:
- At the General Church level, The United Methodist Church has a four-year budget. For 2017-2020 the budget is approximately $600,000,000.[2] This is the cumulative amount of seven different funds.
- In round numbers, about half of the budget is the World Service Fund.[3] The World Service Fund, very simply put, supports the budgets of the program boards and agencies.[4]
- Because money apportioned comes into the General Church at a rate of about 90 percent, around $270,000,000 is used to support the boards and agencies over four years.
There has been a difficult process over the past four years to decide how that money will be split up to support the priorities of The United Methodist Church. The church wants to do many things—UMCOR, Imagine No Malaria, educate clergy and laity, make sure the church dismantles its own sexism and racism, etc.—and figuring out how to balance all those needs is very hard work.
Four years ago the budget got cut by $40,000,000. This year the proposal is to cut it by another $4,000,000.[5] These cuts make sense; we’re losing membership in The United Methodist Church in the United States, and the churches in the United States pay the lion’s share of the apportioned funds. With fewer people in the church, we don’t need the same infrastructure.
I’m at peace with these cuts, as difficult as they make the mandates of the General Boards and Agencies. I have advocated for them, and strongly at that. At the same time, I know that in reality, when we keep the same mandates for the boards and agencies while decreasing their budgets, what really happens is that we put more and more pressure on fewer and fewer employees and burn them out. That part doesn’t feel great.
The Coup
You are now able to understand the coup (proposal PDF Don House Proposal GC2016, resulting amendment here on the budget here)
In the Financial Administration Committee of General Conference last week, a proposal was made to take another $20,000,000 out of the World Service Fund to support a new thing. That is, another 7 percent of the money in the World Service Fund would not be available to the boards and agencies to fulfill their mandates. But this time, the decrease is not reflective of a decline in church attendance or giving—it is reflective of a very small group who think they can fix the church because they’re smarter than the rest of us.
They want to use $20,000,000 of the money that is designed to do the work of being The United Methodist Church and fulfilling our expectations of what matters to us as a whole and try an experiment with it. They’re selling it as “saving the church,” but they really don’t know why the church is in decline. They only know that it is in decline, and rapid decline. By frightening people about the reality of the decline, they manage to convince people that they also have a solution.
They don’t.
Instead, they want to spend the money to support a group of 9-20 “experts” who will “strategically” design and implement a plan to revitalize 1,000 churches. They say that if this happens, we’ll be able to stop the decrease in attendance and members and start to grow again.
The Reality
That is only wishful thinking. Simply doing revitalization and evangelism won’t fix the fact that most people in younger generations think of the church as irrelevant, homophobic and a dinosaur of an earlier era. Unless we fix the church itself, and actually look like Jesus who we claim to follow, people will not be attracted to this movement.
Worse yet, the money is a duplication of services already being done in the church by experts. The only things different about this plan are:
- it will be better funded (by impoverishing everything else),
- it will reflect less of the diversity of the church,
- it doesn’t even pretend to care about the global Church, and
- it will have no accountability to anyone for the next four years.
Oh, and the plan’s creators claim that the revitalization plan works best on churches with average attendance of over 1,000 and doesn’t work at all for churches with attendance of less than 125. Therefore, this is a plan whereby we use the collect resources of all churches to give more money to our biggest (and best funded) churches. And this assumes that this could work, at all, for any church, which hasn’t been substantiated.
The Slush Fund
This is not a radical new plan that will finally get things right and turn around the church.
This is a slush fund, or a blank check to a super-empowered small group. This is more of the same: white men telling everyone else what is good for them. This group proposes to take money off the top to continue to use their power and decrease everyone else’s. They can’t turn the church around, because they aren’t helping the church to focus its priorities (and its budget) on bringing justice into the world.
And if we aren’t bringing justice into the world, can we really pretend we are a church that reflects God’s priorities at all?
Rev. Sara E. Baron is a United Methodist clergyperson, a former member of GCFA, a current board member of Methodist Federation for Social Action, and a believer in paying attention to the details
Footnotes
[1] Well, actually, $20,000,000 in this four-year cycle with an intention of spending another $30,000,000 the following four years.
[2] For those who are more technically minded, two points: (a) the actual proposed budget number is closer to $599,000,000, and (b) we actually don’t pass a budget amount. What gets passed, in GCFA Report 8 is a constant called the “base percentage.” The apportionment formula shall consist of three factors: A = E x (P + i) where A represents an annual conference’s general Church apportionment, E represents the annual conference’s “net expenditures” (as an estimate of local church income available to meet local church expenses), P represents the “base percentage,” and i represents the annual conference’s “Percentage Adjustment.” Thus I say $600,000,000 because it is close enough for those whose eyes easily glaze over during budget conversations.
[3] Details: The other six funds are: Ministerial Education Fund, Black College Fund, Africa University Fund, Episcopal Fund, General Administration Fund and the Interdenominational Fund.
[4] General Board of Church and Society, General Board of Discipleship, General Board of Global Ministries, General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, General Commission on Religion and Race, General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, General Commission on United Methodist Men, United Methodist Communications along with the Connectional Table.
[5] More if you account for inflation.
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Thoughts?
Thanks for reading and sharing with the delegates at General Conference 2016.
Just a note–it doesn’t appear that the proposed committee is composed of “white men” as the author asserts.
Race and gender should be irrelevant. The author completely lost credibility when they threw that comment in.
Agreed. But don’t gloss over the truth of what she is saying because of one poorly chosen phrase. Thank you Rev. Sara for sounding the alarm.
The author broadly condemns a new idea without proposing her own idea to stop the bleeding. We all know the classic definition of insanity is the continuation of the same efforts with the hope that somehow the results will change.
The “white guys” slur in immature, but irrelevant; bringing in experts in fixing problems the existing folks haven’t been able to solve, or even dent, with the present budgetary priorities simply makes good sense. And the tiny percentage of the overall budget certainly makes the emotional furor enormously out of proportion to the impact of the opportunity!
What concerns me is the fact only HUGE churchs are going to be helped. They already have money. What about the rest of us.
That’s worked surpremely well for the Oklahoma Annual Conference.
Where is the roll-y eye smiley around here?
That has been the way Oklahoma has approached the decline for a couple of quadrenniums. And we still aren’t seeing the results.
I am also skeptical. Granting money to the largest churches is silly. Conferences can stop apportioning on a sliding scale if they want to give big churches more resources.
Picking up for UM Insight and to disseminate widely.
I’m working on my doctorate in church revitalization (in the research phase) and any revitalization model that can’t be applied to churches under 1000 attendance is ill conceived and limited. The are ways to successfully revitalize churches of any size. In fact, smaller churches can be turned around more quickly. Just looking at the churches that have successfully been revitalized in the past (Ginghamsburg is a prime example) shows that size is not a limiting factor.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. The beautiful messages of John Wesley and what Methodism has to offer are drowned out by the fact that the only press coverage the denomination gets is for the homophobic oppression of the old guard. The church will change. Whether the change is positive or a continuation of the death spiral is up to us.
Isn’t the Vital Church Initiative addressing declining membership? Are church politics the cause of declining membership?
It certainly seems that would be the major cause!
These are two totally different things.
1. The Benchmark program is a smaller segment of a larger report. It is a self-investing program designed around 998 churches willfully entering. It is actually pretty old. You can read more about it in a 3 year old article here.
http://umcconnections.org/2013/07/30/united-methodists-must-invest-in-growth/
2. What House proposed today appeared to be entirely different. It is asking for 20 million to fund a group that can operate outside of general agencies to investigate and disseminate growth strategy.
Seriously. This article and the social communication coming off of it is misleading.
These two are totally the same thing. Read the 2016 proposal, read the 2013 article featuring Bishop Cynthia Harvey, and read the website: http://www.churchbenchmark.com/.
Read this: https://www.umnews.org/en/news/economist-united-methodist-church-in-crisis
Totally all the same.
The 2013 Article describes marketing the benchmark plan to 998 churches, creating $1.24 M in revenue for Donald House. A serious breach of ethics in episcopal oversight, Episcopacy Committee Chair Donald House was “enlisting bishops to identify churches” for the plan. He was asking the bishops whom he oversaw in committee to generate revenue for him. Similar article in 2015, in which Bishop Mike McKee likened House’s plan to the “Voice of God”, when it was announced the Connectional Table had given $100,000 to House.
By 2016 House had invested three more years in his “study”. He was asking the Church to give him $3.55M for the study report, and fund a team of entrepreneurs for another $13M~$14M.
Was this benevolence, or, did the bishops receive something in return?
I have been in a Methodist congregation for 13 years because I married a long-time member, but I see no use in the church as it it structured. Sitting in a room for an hour hearing the same 15-minute sermon I’ve heard on the same Sunday of every year for decades (in various denominations) is just a waste of time. This isn’t about revitalizing church, it’s about finding the religion that has been buried under the failing structure people are trying to prop up.
AnneB, you must be a “carpenter” at heart because you just “squarely hit the nail on the head”!!
Anne, if you mean you’ve been hearing the same sermon on the third Sunday in advent (for example) in every mainline church year after year, then you can bet the ministers at those churches are married to the lectionary. However, if you mean every sermon sounds the same every Sunday regardless of the church calendar everywhere you go, I’m wondering if preachers are all riding the same hobbyhorse and preaching the only thing they know.
Regardless of which is the case, the Apostle Paul told us that God uses the “foolishness of preaching” to “save those who believe” (I Cor 1:21). I’m thinking a good start to revitalizing the church is to get back to Spirit-filled preaching of the “whole counsel of God”. God bless!
Who are these people?
Throwing money and effort to try to steer society back into the old models and expectations we have associated with “church” is a lost cause. We have to trust that God is doing exciting new things ahead of us that we’ve not yet figured out. We need to be the church that serves and loves people now, today, exactly where they are. Until then, we are simply managing decline.
More and more local churches encounter the difficulty of paying their mandated apportionments which have now become the whipping boy just so the local church can survive enough to support Pastor and staff and a few activities. Local churches are loaded with tired grayheads and not much else. The idea of sucking 20 million from the national budget to “turn things around” should be “dead on arrival”. It would be a waste of our national monies.
As oneof the gray heads you are entirely correct! My local church now is full of children , teenagers, young adults and 35-40 year olds. We have about 25-30’grayheads ( as u like to call us) and a membership around 1000! I could make a plan for revitalization and not charge anything !!!
Hmm.. Thank you again for reminding me why I no longer attend. Love the Methodist religion but this machine is out of control. You complain this group is a duplication of a group that already exists,… Wow, how are they doing? It’s quite evident that group along with this author are the normal closed minded hipocrits that clog all UMC’s today. I also find it interesting that in this article you are concerned with church’s of 125. I thought normal policy for our Districts was to watch these slowly die on the vine, with an aging attendance, financially strapped, multiple pastor assignments and no thought of ever consolidating to be stronger. Wow… 600,000,000….. what to do, what to do….
Well, here it is. The reason for decline is more difficult to define than just a few problems. There are two reasons: congregational issues and clergy issues. Will take the second first: The 11th commandment for clergy has been, “Thou Shalt Not speak badly about another clergy.” In reality we have a church full of clergy with no people skills, no pulpit ability, no leadership, arrogant, and most of all, no vision. I was Pastor of a medium large urban church which had experienced growth in 6 of the previous years I was there. The guy who followed me killed everything: wouldn’t shake hands after worship, disappeared during the week with no one being able to locate him, looked at the ceiling while preaching a sermon he mostly read (I know that’s contradictory, problem is could not make eye contact with the people in the congregation.) His idea of leadership, as shared with me, was “Whatever you want to do.” In two years lost over half the growth of the previous seven years. Needless to say, he remained less than two years only to be followed by a Pastor who had a serious moral failure.
The same issues are afflicting local congregation, often as a result of leadership. Most UM church are still small, family centered congregations. It doesn’t matter if rural or urban. One of the reasons I’m a UM Clergy with 41 years since ordination is my parents moved their membership to a UMC congregation after fighting the two families powers that were in a smaller mainline denomination. It was the Church in which my Mom had grown up. Might add, that church no longer exist.
Many congregations are run by power hungry laity who love the status quo, have no interest in growth (they lose power) but mostly are not interested in the Gospel.
This is alarming. A church of 40 people in a poor urban or rural community cannot use the same methods of a large suburban congregation. Very different dynamics.
Should close by saying, my conference has had a dramatic shift toward mega churches. In 1990 all the churches in the top ten of membership and attendance were “old First Church” downtown. By 2000 half the large churches were start up’s of less than 10 years age. The conference applauds the growth, but no one seems to ask, how many churches have we closed in the past year. In our community, four UMC churches have closed in the last 10 years. One is now Baptist and full every Sunday. Another which was forcibly closed is now an independent church which is growing slowly, and the third has become a satellite congregation for summer residents (this is a summer home area in the mountains). Finally, one had a long history of two year appointments going back decades. They were set lose and remain a small family chapel.
We’ve become so fearful of conflict we are no longer able to confront real issues afflicting both churches and congregations.
Shifting money around never solves the problem if it is only duplicating efforts.
What an absolutely ridiculous idea, for many reasons. The current UMC is not worth saving.
I’m totally against it! IMO one of the major things that’s wrong with the UMC now is that we’ve already listened to too many “church growth experts” and consultants. Having to lessen the mandate because of a smaller budget, which already has to be done to some extent, is no way to “fix” the UMC.
I am not aware that the resurrection is a trickle down strategy.
There is a substitute motion coming that I think will be much more palatable. It establishes a work area called Path Two, that focuses on strengthening local congregations. It adds accountability, and sets goals to measure effectiveness. None of the congregational developers in our denomination will tell you that they have all the answers, but they are a gifted group of women and men and it is beneficial to have a group who are studying and focused on best practices to help guide and advise local churches in navigating the twenty-first century. Developers in our denomination are not simply propping up dead or dying churches, but really challenging them to transformational change and experimental expressions of worship and community.
The substitute motion will ask for 10 million instead of 20. I am not sure how that will affect the overall budget, or the ministries of our boards and agencies, but if we claim that the local congregation is the primary expression of the church (and where the source of the funding comes from), it seems to me to be a good place to invest ministry dollars. Many conferences are already investing ministry dollars to this end, and would benefit from denominational support.
I do not understand where concern is coming from that this motion is for only large churches. That was not in the original motion, and there are many congregational developers who are making great strides in small membership churches.
Hopefully the substitute motion will offer a little more direction and will be considered as a resource to help annual conferences help local congregations.
Who are these experts? People from other denominations who have turned their church around? Christ Ritter has an interesting suggestion. https://peopleneedjesus.net/2015/07/06/seven-principles-for-another-methodist-turn-around/
Interesting coincidence. . . UMC Judicial Council Decision 1320 is two characters transposed from Decision 1230. This money-thirsty rogue, Donald House, should have been stopped at 1230.