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The heart of the matter

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The Presbyterian Layman Volume 33, Number 2, Posted April 3, 2000

Williamson

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
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