Denomination may spend more money to continue $40-million fund campaign
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, December 4, 2006
The Presbyterian Church (USA) is pulling out all stops to try to redeem the Joining Hearts & Hands fundraising campaign from a bottom line that has been submerged in red ink for four years.
The $40-million campaign, which is supposed to be paying its own costs, may soon be propped up by $700,000 more from the denomination, and Tom Gillespie, the retired president of Princeton Theological Seminary, has been named honorary chairman.
Allison Seed, the chair of the General Assembly Council, announced at the recent meeting of the campaign steering committee that she will recommend that the council establish an escrow account of $700,000 that the campaign can draw on until it makes its final report to the 2008 General Assembly. The Presbyterian News Service reported her announcement, but did not say where the $700,000 will come from.
Because of declining gifts for ongoing mission and per-capita costs, the council has already eliminated dozens of jobs at the headquarters in Louisville and cut several programs. Some of the largest cuts have been in world missions – with full-time assignments being reduced by 24 percent since the campaign began (from 330 to 251).
When the campaign was established by the 2001 General Assembly, the goal was to raise $20 million for world mission and $20 million for new church development. But world mission gifts and pledges have been low ($2.8 million), and, of that amount, only $1.2 million has been collected.
In the quarterly report for the three months ending Sept. 30, officials say they have raised $25.6 million since the campaign began in 2002. But only $2.6 million has been in cash contributions, and most of the total represents pledges by presbyteries to undertake new church development, particularly for racial-ethnic congregations.
Seven presbyteries have made 76 percent of all the pledges, all for new church development, which is undertaken by presbyteries with or without a denominational fundraising campaign. Meanwhile, many of the presbyteries say they are pinched financially because local church sessions are sending them less money.
There has been no monitored report on how much money the presbyteries have actually spent on new church development, but none of the presbytery money is used to offset campaign costs.
Meanwhile, the campaign costs since 2002 have been $3.8 million – $1.2 million more than the cash intake.
Nonetheless, the Presbyterian News Service, responding to Seed’s proposed $700,000 escrow account, which must be ratified by the council, announced recently, “Completion of the campaign is now assured.”
In September, campaign officials told the General Assembly Council that they would have to close the campaign office unless the denomination picked up the tab for the expenses, which have averaged more than $700,000 a year.
During that meeting, the council raised pointed questions about the high costs and low returns. That’s when Gillespie warned against folding the campaign. “I speak out of 21 years of institutional fundraising,” Gillespie said. “There is an absolutely cardinal rule.You never, never have an unsuccessful campaign. We will regret it if you do.”
Gillespie is used to success. According to Christianity Today, Princeton Seminary’s endowment was $738 million in 1997 – more than triple the second-closest seminary, Candler School of Theology (Methodist) at $232 million.
The PCUSA’s news service quoted the Rev. John Huffman of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, Calif., as describing Gillespie’s appointment “as very good news, based on Tom’s enthusiastic endorsement of completing the campaign at the [General Assembly Council] meeting in September.”
Huffman said Gillespie is a “door-opener” who should be able to help the campaign in its new plan to focus on soliciting money from large congregations for foreign mission. But the news service said Huffman also expressed concern that those same congregations are “deeply distrustful of the denomination. … I tell them that what they want to do is the Mission Initiative and they just shrug. The money’s there and some of them are still approachable but the estrangement is so great …that it’s going to very tough to get them on board.”
An example of that difficulty arose recently with an action by the session of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas. According to denominational statistics, Highland Park had a membership of 4,324 and a budget of $9.7 million in 1995.
The congregation’s session voted on Nov. 27 “to suspend all contributions to the higher governing bodies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) until the session completes its study and deliberation on the issue whether to redirect in a new way all or some of the funds we have historically given to the PCUSA. This action is the latest taken by the session in response to the adoption by the 2006 General Assembly” of an authoritative interpretation that undermines the fidelity/chastity ordination requirement in the Book of Order.