Budget woes don’t deter NCC’s 50th anniversary celebration
By Jerry L. Van Marter, Presbyterian News Service, September 17, 1999
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Despite a $3.4 million budget deficit for 1999, the National Council of Churches (NCC) is proceeding with its gala 50th anniversary celebration Nov. 9-12 in Cleveland.
The celebration, entitled “Unity in Christ: Gift and Calling,” will feature an array of workshops, caucus meetings, service projects, tours of ecumenical projects in the Cleveland area, a business meeting, a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra and an anniversary banquet that will include the installation of Andrew Young as the new president of the NCC.
Young was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Carter administration and has also served as mayor of Atlanta and as a member of the U.S. Congress.
Keynote speakers will be United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White.
Events will follow five “tracks” – Exploring Our Faith, Sustaining Our Environment, Transforming Our Society, Shaping Our Culture, and Celebrating Our Unity. Weaving themselves around and into the anniversary fete Nov. 7-13 will be “Equipping the Saints,” a seminar for theological students and young pastors in the history, tradition and contemporary challenge of ecumenical thought and witness, coordinated by the Fund for Theological Education, based in Atlanta, Ga.
Gifts underwrite celebration
Concern about the event has been expressed this summer and fall as the NCC’s budget deficit mounted. However, the $300,000 cost of the anniversary celebration, which is not a part of the NCC budget, has been fully underwritten, so the gala will go ahead as planned. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has contributed $25,000 to the event. The largest single underwriter is the United Methodist Church, at $50,000.
The NCC Executive Board met Sept. 7 to address the budget crisis. According to PC(USA) associate stated clerk and ecumenical officer the Rev. Eugene Turner, “the NCC has been in [financial] trouble for quite awhile.” He said the council, which has an annual budget of about $56 million, has used up all of its unrestricted reserves, and thus “the budget problem is a cash flow problem and a serious cash flow problem.”
Turner, who represented stated clerk the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick at the meeting, added that the depletion of reserves was due in part to huge expenses run up by financial consultants who were called in to help restructure the financial operations of the NCC.
The Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory of the Presbyterian Washington Office, who also sits on the Executive Board, told the Presbyterian News Service the NCC’s financial problems “are really our problems – the member churches created the NCC and it is our responsibility to see that the council is adequately funded.” She said “a lot of proposed solutions were on the table” at the Sept. 7 meeting.
PCUSA contribution
Turner said the current proposal asks the United Methodist Church to advance $2 million to the NCC, with the other 30-plus member churches reimbursing the Methodists for half that amount. He said a group of Presbyterian officials will meet Oct. 6 to set an amount for the PC(USA) and to identify sources for the PC(USA) contribution, which he said “needs to be several hundred thousand dollars.”
The remaining deficit under the proposal would be covered by Church World Service (CWS), which would be asked to absorb up to $1.4 million of its administrative costs, which total between $4 million and $5 million annually. More than 80 percent of the NCC’s total budget is CWS-related.
The PC(USA) contributes $408,000 annually to the NCC’s operating budget and about another three-quarters of a million to various programs of the council, mostly to CWS. More information about the National Council of Churches 50th anniversary celebration is available by calling 1-800-328-NCCC or by e-mail at [50th@nccusa.org].