 
$530,000 from per capita proposed for official publication By Parker T. WilliamsonLOUISVILLE, Ky.– Labeled a hungry “900 pound gorilla” by communications director Gary Luhr, an every-household publication sponsored by the General Assembly Council will be fed through 1998. A task force will consider how to deal with the publication’s long-term appetite. One year ago, at its spring, 1997 meeting, then General Assembly Moderator John Buchanan told the General Assembly Council that the independently published Presbyterian Layman “is the chief source of news about the Presbyterian Church by a huge margin – no one else is even close.” He added that the Council simply must produce a competing publication. Responding to Buchanan’s urging that a decision be made immediately, Council member Pete Hendrick cautioned the group, suggesting that a careful analysis should be given to the cost implications of such a venture. Buchanan expressed confidence that the money could be found and offered to raise it personally if budgetary problems threatened to delay the publication’s launch. Circulation squeezes mission budget “Presbyterians: Being Faithful to Jesus Christ” made its debut on the eve of the 1997 General Assembly, and it has moved with dispatch to build a free-subscription circulation throughout the denomination. Gary Luhr, the General Assembly Council’s associate director for communication, announced in Dec. 1997, that the winter issue would go to 560,000 homes and an additional 15,000 would be bulk mailed to churches. The problem, Luhr told members of a December budget consultation, was that he had only $250,000 allocated for 1998 and that the scheduled three issues of the publication would cost an anticipated $750,000. Luhr said that Buchanan’s efforts to raise funds had produced negligible results. Per capita tapped The Committee on the Office of the General Assembly has come to the General Assembly Council’s rescue for 1998. Digging into its reserve funds, the committee will propose to the 1998 General Assembly that the 1998 per capita budget be amended to include $530,000 for the every-household publication and that the 1999 per capita budget be amended to include $100,000 for this purpose. Reporting to the General Assembly Council, Virginia Robertson, a liaison to the council from the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly, said that her committee felt it was important to help keep the publication alive until some plan for permanent funding has been developed. Concerns voiced Robertson indicated, however, that her committee’s decision came only after considerable discussion. She expressed the concern that the General Assembly Council had made a decision to launch the publication, “when all of the policy decisions had not been determined.” “This is something that the Council elected to do when there was no long-term plan for where the funds would come from,” she said. Robertson also indicated that there was some question in her group if funding the every-household publication was an appropriate expenditure of per capita budget funds. She told Council members that increasing pressures are coming to bear on the per capita budget, not the least of which is that this income is directly related to church membership which is declining at the rate of 30,000 to 40,000 per year. Ultimately, said Robertson, the Council must decide on a plan to fund the every-household publication, and that the infusion of per capita funds is only a stop-gap measure intended to buy some time for a task group to consider future funding options. |