Keeping Trust, Respecting Consciences

A briefing paper on PER CAPITA FUNDING OF ECUMENICAL BODIES

The Issue:
Will per capita apportionments continue to be used for large unrestricted grants to controversial ecumenical bodies such as the National and World Councils of Churches? Or should such grants be shifted to the General Assembly mission budget, thus returning per capita to its original purpose of supporting essential decision-making processes of our denomination?

The Business:
Items 03-08 and 03-10 would direct that funding of the ecumenical bodies be transferred from the per capita budget to the mission budget. Item03-11 would amend the Book of Order to state that “[b]enevolences, ministries, ecumenical dues, or other elective spending for the work and mission of the governing body shall not be funded by the per capita budget.”

Presbyterian Action Recommendation:
The activities of the ecumenical bodies fall mostly under the category of mission, and therefore should properly be shifted to the mission budget. Item 03-08 is the cleanest way to accomplish the transfer, without an unnecessary constitutional amendment. To ease budgetary adjustments in 2009 would be too sudden, implementation could be introduced in phases.

Background:
The Book of Order specifies only two purposes for per capita: to “pay the expenses of commissioners . . . to attend the meetings of the General Assembly” (G-9.0308); and for “operating expenses, including administrative personnel” of the governing body (G-9.0404d). The interpretation has been consistent: per capita pays what it costs for the wider church to gather and seek together to discern the will of God. Actually doing the will of God is mission.

The Office of the General Assembly and General Assembly Council put it this way in Item 03-16: “Therefore, per capita is a fundamental way in which all of the nearly 11,000 congregations and governing bodies of the PC(USA) are connected.” Note the emphasis on “all.” Per capita is not meant to serve the particular agendas of particular groups in the church. It is for the common life of the whole church.

This simple purpose of per capita is the basis for the strong appeal that every congregation should and every presbytery must pay the apportionment.  That appeal has been successful so far: more than 96 percent of per capita is faithfully paid. Yet the withholding rate is quietly and steadily rising.

The moral obligation to pay per capita depends upon trust—and trustworthiness—in the church. Congregations trust that their payments will be used for the understood purpose. And because they have that trust, they can be trusted to pay the apportionment.

But trust is a delicate thing, and there are always temptations to abuse it. In 1977 the General Assembly Mission Council of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (one of the predecessor bodies to the PCUSA) warned, “Sometimes judicatories succumb to the temptation to fund some mission program or project by the per capita method because of its reliability.”

This is precisely what happened with the grants to ecumenical agencies. In 1981 the UPCUSA spent only $44,000 of per capita money for “ecumenical expenses.” These were almost certainly the costs of sending Presbyterian delegations to ecumenical meetings. But the next year the amount rose to $94,000. By 1987 in the reunited denomination ecumenical grants totaled $415,000.  By 1993 they reached nearly $1.5 million. This year the ecumenical grants are down a bit: $1.1 million in total, including $458,000 to the World Council of Churches (WCC), $300,000 to the National Council (NCC), and $233,000 to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC).

Why did church leaders of the 1980s ensconce the ecumenical grants in the “safe” per capita budget? For the same reason that those grants did not belong under per capita: because they supported activities that were not the common work of the whole church, that were in fact deeply resented in many quarters.

The WCC, NCC, and WARC are highly political. In a 2007 study of the NCC, we found that by far the largest category of program expense (39.1 percent) was “Justice and Advocacy.” Over a ten-month period, 94 of 133 NCC news releases dealt principally with political issues. And the politics had a sharp slant: condemning the Iraq war as “an arrogant first strike,” denouncing Republicans for “one of the most immoral budgets in American history,” and the like. Many Presbyterians would object to being told that they have a moral obligation to pay for such rhetoric.

But the virtual guarantee of per capita support has insulated the ecumenical bodies financially against any real accountability to the consciences of our church members. It is now time to undo that mistake of the last generation. It is time to restore the trust upon which the per capita system depends, and to return per capita strictly to its original purpose.

Responses to Objections:

• The agencies defending the use of per capita for ecumenical grants stress that per capita is a deeply-rooted tradition in the PCUSA. We agree, and we are trying to restore that tradition. What is not ancient practice—what is indeed contrary to the tradition—is the use of per capita for large unrestricted grants to outside bodies like the NCC and WCC. That was a development of the 1980s, and it can be reversed today.
• The agencies defending these grants contend that ecumenical involvement is an essential expression of our Reformed identity. We agree. But evangelism and worship are also essential elements of our Reformed identity, and yet we do not use per capita funds to support the evangelism office or the theology and worship office.
• The agencies assert that our denomination’s per capita money pays for “core functions” of the ecumenical agencies, comparable to what per capita underwrites in the PCUSA. There is no basis for this assertion. Our per capita grants are unrestricted.  They enter the general revenue stream and are used for the whole mission. In the case of the NCC, the Ecumenical Commitment Fund into which our $300,000 flows has a total annual take of about $1.2 million—far exceeding the costs of NCC meetings and overhead. Our per capita is most certainly paying for the NCC’s political advocacy. If we believe that kind of advocacy is an appropriate mission of the church, then we should fund it out of our PCUSA mission budget.