Parker T. Williamson
Watching the General Assembly Council (GAC) summarily dismiss
more than a thousand communications – hundreds of them from local
church sessions that were themselves speaking for thousands of
Presbyterians – was a baffling experience. Presbyterians from every
part of this country pleaded with the GAC not to squander $400,000 of
their mission gifts on a deficit bailout for the National Council of
Churches. The margin exceeded 9-1 at the time of the vote. But the GAC
showed no sign that it cared what people in the pews said about this
issue.
How does one explain this apparent insensitivity of elected leaders to
the will of their people? A possible explanation came to mind as I
examined the denomination’s 1999 financial reports. The GAC’s
program budget received more money from dead people than it did from its
congregations!
Living Presbyterians gave $24,061,366 to the mission budget (excluding
special offerings and emergency/disaster appeals, which are essentially
passthrough funds). But past-tense Presbyterians gave $43,451,927
(bequests, annuities, interest and dividends) to the mission budget.
As the mission budget’s investment income grows, the GAC’s
accountability to living congregations shrinks. Extending membership and
contribution rates over time, one may project an absurdity: a
denomination with no people in it, a bureaucracy acting on behalf of
empty churches, sustained by investments from an earlier age.
That image is no fantasy. My wife and I attended a worship service in
New York recently in which the congregation consisted of one minister,
four paid choir members, and a tiny handful of visitors huddled in a
cavernous sanctuary. At the conclusion of the service I expressed my
condolences to the minister regarding the pitiful turnout. “Oh no,”
he said, “this is about normal.”
“Then how do you stay in business?” I asked.
“Endowment,” he said.
I do not mean these reflections to be critical of the Presbyterian
Foundation, an entity of our national church that has an excellent
reputation for honoring donor instructions. I am more concerned about
unspecified bequests that fund broad-spectrum endowments. Such gifts are
a double-edged sword. Employed appropriately, they can empower vital
ministries of Christian witness. But they can also buffer church leaders
from their people, enabling those leaders to do what the people would
never approve.
That’s what happened in Louisville, when GAC leaders ignored the
people and shared a year-end windfall with the National Council of
Churches.
Church officials may take some comfort in the fact that dead people don’t
talk. But as I sit at the press table on occasions like this, I can’t
help but wonder what might have happened if they could. How would those
donors have felt about bailing out the NCC?
Parker T. Williamson