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06393 August 4, 2006
PC(USA)'s commitment to international mission unwavering, WMD official tells missionaries
Fundraising, communication are key issues, Browne says
by Toya Richards Hill
LOUISVILLE * Funding international mission personnel in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) remains a problem, but the denomination is not backing down from its commitment to sending out missionaries, a top staffer in the denomination's Worldwide Ministries Division (WMD) said Wednesday.
"The need for mission personnel has in no way decreased," said the Rev. Will Browne, WMD's associate director of ecumenical partnership. "We are in no way getting out of the international mission business."
That was the message Browne communicated to a group of deployed PC(USA) mission co-workers gathered at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Aug. 1-7 for WMD's annual missionary sharing conference.
About 30 mission staff members from a variety of outposts, including Brazil, Thailand, India, Malawi and Mexico, are here to share and receive training and information.
Browne outlined the current situation in WMD since the recent budget reductions approved by the General Assembly Council (GAC), and also talked about the future as the council restructures operations to fit its 2007-'08 Mission Work Plan.
The second-largest employee layoff in PC(USA) history took place May 1 as the GAC sought to cut $9.15 million from the budget. No current missionaries were affected by the downsizing, but 40 mission co-worker positions were eliminated by attrition.
"This really has been a traumatic kind of time for us" and especially for you living at a distance, Browne said. "We really had some hard decisions to make."
But "without mission personnel, we're nothing," Browne told the group. "We didn't want to lose any of them."
Instead, two key areas were sacrificed in the budget cutting * the ecumenical and mission partnership team and the global education and international leadership development office were both eliminated.
International geographic coordination was also realigned, with area offices now relying more heavily on regional liaisons. The realignment included:
Combining the two Africa offices,
Combining the two Asia offices,
Dividing the Latin America and Caribbean office into two,
Dividing the Middle East/Europe office, with the Middle East coordinator working part-time as director of the Jinishian Memorial Program and the Europe office handling relationships with ecumenical councils, and
Organizing work in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Central Asia under the International Evangelism Office.
"All of that was necessitated by those cuts," Browne said.
Perhaps the biggest change in the GAC restructuring is the elimination of WMD, as well as the GAC's two other divisions, Congregational Ministries and National Ministries. On Oct. 1, GAC programs will be reorganized in a manner yet to be determined and will all fall under one deputy director for witness. The new structure is expected to be outlined at the next GAC meeting, scheduled for Sept. 26-30 in Louisville.
Browne assured the group that "we will have a structure that deals with international mission," adding of WMD's "skeleton staff" of people now focusing on international mission, "We feel like this is as small as we can credibly go."
Browne said the issue for the future is creating a "sustainable base" of funding for mission sending. "We really need to be thinking about how do we do this."
He said part of the answer lies in using the mission co-workers themselves as "communicators and fundraisers. Our greatest asset in international mission is mission personnel," he said. "We need all of us working on a communications strategy."
Meanwhile, Presbyterians outside the denomination infrastructure are moving to fill what they see as a void in what WMD is doing regarding international mission work.
A group of more than a dozen congregations in May formed the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, "a fellowship of congregations seeking to reclaim the missional purpose of the church," the group says on its Web site.
"This fellowship is our sincere attempt to steer a different course amidst today's PC(USA) crisis," the site says. The group will hold its first meeting at Peachtree Church in Atlanta Aug. 17-19.
In addition, the Outreach Foundation and Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship (PFF), two validated mission support groups that work in covenant relationship with the PC(USA) General Assembly, are forming a "strategic alliance" for the purpose of sending missionaries into the field.
"The Presbyterian Church (USA) faces a missionary sending crisis. The number of PC(USA) missionaries continues to shrink at a time when global partners are telling us that more are needed," the two organizations said in a press release. "Efforts to reverse the decline have not succeeded."
Browne said the Outreach Foundation and PFF have said they will "do mission sending that we can't do," like, for example, missionaries who also want to have outside jobs that fall in the category of tentmaking.
"That might, indeed, be complimentary," he said. "We don't know yet."
Browne said he and other PC(USA) leadership will be attending the Presbyterian Global Fellowship meeting in order to discern what the fellowship's issues are.
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