The Birmingham News has coverage this week of the Presbyterian Church (USA) firing missionaries around the world and ending its foreign mission agency. The 1.09 million member mainline Protestant denomination counted more than 3 million members at the merger of its predecessor bodies in 1983 and has experienced a membership decline of nearly 65 percent since that time.
Birmingham News Reporter Greg Garrison writes that the PC(USA) has drastically cut its mission staff from about 60 missionaries. As recently as 2010, the denomination supported about 200 missionaries worldwide. The recent cuts are reflective of broader continued mainline Protestant decline also seen in recent reorganizations within the United Methodist and Episcopal churches, among others.
The total PC(USA) mission budget for 2025, passed at the 2024 biennial General Assembly, is $95 million.
Earlier last year, Stated Clerk The Rev. Jihyun Oh, the denomination’s top executive, signalled what was ahead while announcing changes to achieve a balanced 2025–26 budget, including $5 million in cuts.
“We shared information with World Mission staff as well as partners around the world that we anticipate significant changes to how we engage our partners in the future, and we are in the process of examining how our organization will be structured in 2025,” Oh disclosed in November 2024. “We anticipate that there will also be reductions in 2025, once that process is completed.”
Those reductions have since been made. In February, 54 mission “co-workers” were notified that they would be laid off and offered severance packages. Some will be eligible to be re-hired for other roles.
“The gravity of the church worldwide has shifted to the global South,” Oh stated in November. “We are at most half the size compared to when the current structures were set up.”
A January 30 letter addressed to PC(USA) leaders and signed by former mission co-workers and seminary officials (viewable here on Presbyterian Outlook) questions the decrease in number of mission co-workers and “a lack of consultation with global partners before changes were announced.”
The letter doesn’t lament missionary cuts resulting in less people hearing the gospel message, but instead expresses concern that “When progressive Christians, communions and mission sending organizations leave a mission field, their absences are inevitably and invariably filled with voices, personnel, and mission partners who view Jesus and his ministry differently, in less inclusive and liberating ways.”
The letter’s authors write that at a “crucial moment” PC(USA) officials have withdrawn staff when they should be “continuing to confront injustice and nationalism” and that “the choice to cut so many mission personnel is one way to continue the tragic and deadly tradition of top-down, colonial approaches.”
The Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) underwent a series of reductions in total annual giving towards supporting missionaries, peaking at $16 million in 2000 and declining to about $6 million by 2023. It was recently eliminated and merged alongside the Office of the General Assembly into a new entity, the Interim Unified Agency.
The equivalent of the Presbyterian Mission Agency within the United Methodist Church is the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) overseeing the denomination’s global mission and ministry work in addition to relief and development. The United Methodist GBGM allocated $11,146,922 towards missionary services in 2022, the most recent year that audited financial reports are available.
The much larger Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board reported $332 million in expenses in 2024.
The American Baptist Churches U.S.A. World Mission offering was projected to be $1,745,943 in 2024.
The Episcopal Church’s international mission structure is less centralized, but the closest equivalent to the Presbyterian Mission Agency in The Episcopal Church is Ecumenical and Interreligious Ministries. The Episcopal Church recently moved to cut staff through layoffs, early retirements, and the elimination of vacant positions in a reorganization announced in February.
More:
Presbyterian Church (USA) fires missionaries, ends mission agency
Presbyterian Church (USA) Notes More ‘Genderqueer’ Members Amid Overall Decline
Comment by Dan W on April 23, 2025 at 5:27 am
In the third paragraph it says the total PC (USA) mission budget for 2025 is $95 million. Is that for foreign missions? How much has the shutdown of USAID, and cuts to foreign aid by the Trump Admin affected this decision? I’m not second guessing the USAID decision, I’m just curious how deep the ties were to these NGOs.
Comment by Jeffrey Walton on April 23, 2025 at 11:34 am
No, foreign missions would be one part of the overall PC(USA) mission budget. The PC(USA) supports refugee resettlement through Global Refuge and Church World Service. I know that both CWS and Episcopal Migration Ministries were hit hard by the foreign aid funding freeze.
Comment by Tim Mc on April 23, 2025 at 9:18 am
Quote: “The United Methodist GBGM allocated $11,146,922 towards missionary services in 2022, the most recent year that audited financial reports are available.”
This number will be cut in half, is my guess if not more, very soon.
Comment by Different Steve on April 23, 2025 at 9:35 am
That letter…wow. It’s like, it’s not top down colonialist when WE do it. Evidently they’re hoping there’s a secret bag of money that’ll fall from the sky if they rheee more. Worked in the past, why wouldn’t they try now. I suspect the general cutoff of federal funds mentioned in the prior post is on point. Trinity Wall Street has more money than God, maybe they’d like to finance this (wrong denomination plus not all that generous).
Comment by Jeffrey Walton on April 23, 2025 at 11:03 am
Trinity Wall Street is the only Episcopal parish that I am aware of (and I’m aware of a lot) that elects the bulk of its vestry from outside of the parish congregation. It’s more of a real estate holding corporation than a church ministry, so don’t expect them to finance missionary sending.
Comment by Mark Siegman on April 23, 2025 at 12:12 pm
Sad, but not surprising. I recently saw a social media post describing the PCUSA as a “rapidly declining, boutique denomination, consisting primarily of octogenarians”. Snarky, but accurate. The Juicy Ecumenism article references a 65% decline since 1983, but if you go back not much further, to 1965, the combined membership of the denominations that merged in 1983 to form the PCUSA had 4.5 million members, reflecting a decline of 75% in less than 60 years.
Comment by Different Steve on April 23, 2025 at 1:10 pm
I have heard tell of them occasionally assisting individuals going to seminary or a church internship but should be Episcopalian, from a “marginalized community”, actually do the work and be cheap. As for missionary work, I suspect they may have subsidized the occasional clergy tired of church work to hang out in Africa to show the woke flag. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future outcomes. None of that includes propping up a bureaucracy with lots of niches for lots of bureaucrats. But something like that will be an option for those that think they were doing the Lord’s work, are willing to do it on an individual basis, submit lots of proposals, do lots of follow up, and work for not much.
Comment by Td on April 23, 2025 at 7:51 pm
Thanks be to God that the presbyterians will stop bringing the works of the devil to foreign countries.
Comment by David Gingrich on April 29, 2025 at 8:08 am
Dying…
Comment by Cal on April 30, 2025 at 12:32 am
“…in less inclusive and liberating ways.”
Yes, like “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through him”. Gosh the PCUSA must think that is awfully narrow minded, non-inclusive, and non-liberating. What a self-parody of a degenerate organization.
Comment by Loren J Golden on May 2, 2025 at 10:24 am
You are quite correct, Cal. In 2010, when the church of which I was a member at the time, Colonial Presbyterian in Kansas City, was in the process of disaffiliating from the PC(USA), the church held four town hall meetings, in which members of the Colonial Session (board of elders) presented their case for disaffiliation, members of the Presbytery Administrative Review Committee (ARC) were invited to come and present their case for Colonial to continue its affiliation with the denomination. In response to one member’s question, one of the ARC members replied,
In my humble opinion, to claim to “believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord,” and yet to publicly deny the truth of what He said about Himself in the context of holy Scripture, is the height of hubris.