Are UMC Apportionments Too Darn Low?

on December 4, 2014

Like any denomination, the United Methodist Church has a denominational hierarchy supported by “apportionments” skimmed from the offering plates of local congregations.

According to a report last year by a member of our denomination’s Connectional Table (CT), the UMC spends four times as many dollars per member on our denomination-wide bureaucracy as the Presbyterian Church (USA), “the Protestant denomination with the second largest Protestant bureaucracy in our nation.” That CT member, Pastor Andy Langford, described a situation of more regional and local United Methodist ministries “being squeezed between the rock of high general church apportionments and the declining income of local congregations.”

Yet some UMC officials believe that United Methodist congregations need to be forced to pay even more for our denomination-wide “general church” apportionments.

At last month’s CT meeting, it was reported that a special sub-group they had empowered to make this decision decided in August that for the 2017-2020 quadrennium, total denomination-wide apportionments should be raised from $603 million to $611 million.

This overall budget figure will be used to guide the denomination’s numerous general agencies as they prepare their 2017-2020 budgets, which will ultimately need the consent of the 2016 United Methodist General Conference.

There was some discussion when CT member Marc Brown, Director of Connectional Ministries for the Virginia Conference, noted the difficulty of going home to tell people about this increase when his annual conference had not had a budget increase for five years and had had to make some major financial cuts.

Bishop Bruce Ough of the Dakotas-Minnesota Area, the CT Chair, defended the increase as partially restoring the financial hit our denomination took in the Great Recession. It does not completely restore the relatively modest decline in denomination-wide apportionments from their 2009-2012 high of $640 million. But I observed no one at last month’s CT meeting attempt any explanation for how increased apportionments are sustainable in the face of decades of consistent annual declines of U.S. membership.

Scott Brewer of the General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA) did share that mechanisms were being established to begin collecting global apportionments from overseas United Methodism to pay for bishops and General Administration (but not general agencies). But he admitted that this yet-to-be-tested revenue stream could only be expected to contribute about $4 million of the $8 million proposed increase.

More recently, most United Methodist bishops were approved by GCFA for a 3 percent raise (well ahead of current U.S. inflation rates). This will bring American United Methodist bishops’ salaries to $145,665 – which, according to globalrichlist.com, puts them among the top one-tenth of one percent of the richest people in the world, before their housing benefits are factored in.

It is worth noting that some bishops have quietly chosen to take a voluntary pay reduction (with the rejected portions of their salary going back to fund UMC ministries) and that in 2010 our U.S. bishops collectively decided to take a modest pay cut in response to the global financial crisis.

At last year’s Council of Bishops meeting, Bishop Michael Coyner of Indiana, who serves as GCFA president reported that the widely cited figure of general-church apportionments only consuming two percent of a U.S. United Methodist congregation’s budget actually did not always hold true.

Of course, a lot of great work is done by our general-church apportionments. And I recognize the necessity of some basic, unglamorous administration for as large and active a global denomination as ours.

But when so many congregations are being forced to cut their budgets for vital, life-changing ministries and freeze staff salaries, it seems worth asking why this “shared sacrifice” of declining funds must be placed entirely on the backs of our local churches, without any decrease felt by the upper echelons of our denominational hierarchy. And how much unquestioned credibility our denominational bureaucracy can continue to feel entitled to when their rhetoric about promoting “vital congregations” and valuing the local church as the central place for Christian-disciple-making is coupled with the unsustainable choice to put greater burdens on these same local congregations.

  1. Comment by eric pone on December 4, 2014 at 6:13 pm

    The first goal should be to zero out the budget and then rebuild it. How much overhead does the church really need? I am sure every board and agency can justify their existence to some extent but the question becomes this. Is it worth losing a local congregation over?

  2. Comment by Phil Griffin on December 4, 2014 at 7:28 pm

    Just because they pass a budget doesn’t mean the amount will be collected…

  3. Comment by John S. on December 8, 2014 at 6:54 am

    Increase the apportionments and even more congregations will fail to meet it. Perhaps if the bureacracy would do more for the congregations the congregations might do more?

  4. Comment by Pudentiana on December 9, 2014 at 7:13 pm

    You eat the fat,
    you clothe yourselves with the wool,
    you slaughter the fat ones,
    but you do not feed the sheep.

    – a portion of Ezekiel 34:1-6

  5. Comment by MatWeller on December 10, 2014 at 9:12 am

    If you give your tithe, and the church spends more of it on administration than service, are you really giving a tithe?

    Maybe it’s time to start making churches pay standard income taxes with deductions for charitable donations. That way, if they spend $X of income on service, they continue to pay no tax, but if they let too much swing toward overhead, they pay the penalty

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