wfn.org | GAC studying feasibility of raising $39.5 million for mission

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Note #6873 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

29-September-2001
01357

GAC studying feasibility of raising $39.5 million for mission 

Money would go for new-church developments, hiring of missionaries 

by Bill Lancaster

TEMPE, AZ - The Presbyterian Church (USA) is planning a $39.5 million
fund-raising campaign to support international missions and new-church
development projects.

The effort, called the Mission Initiative, will raise funds to sustain and
expand the number and categories of mission personnel and raise the number
of PC(USA) new-church developments in the United States from 33 per year to
100 per year.

The Worldwide Ministries Division (WMD) anticipates a revenue decline in
2004 but feels that it must respond to the growing needs of its partner
churches around the world.

The National Ministries Division (NMD) sees an urgent need for new churches,
especially to serve growing racial-ethnic and immigrant populations.

John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council (GAC),
and Marian McClure, director of the WMD, presented the case for the Mission
Initiative during a meeting Sept. 28 of the WMD Committee of the General
Assembly Council. It will be presented to the full GAC on Saturday, though
any action on the proposal will not occur before the Council's January 2002
meeting.

McClure, who began her second four-year term as WMD director in June, told
the committee that the fund-raising initiative is "a matter of great
importance to me, and to all of us." She said the division has completed a
needs assessment ordered by a 1998 overture to the General Assembly.

McClure said WMD officials asked themselves, "What do we need in the way of
mission personnel?", then reviewed the division's "regional strategy
statements, looking for the gap between what we are doing and what we need
to do in each global area ... (and) looked at what our partner churches were
saying to us." Their conclusion, she said, was that a major fund-raising
effort would be necessary.

"We are not just talking about sustaining the WMD program," she said. "The
vision here is to grow.
Our partners want not just money; they want relationships, they want people.
And we want the mission program to grow. There are exciting things for
mission personnel to do."

Detterick said former GA moderator Doug Oldenburg expressed "some
frustration" last year, during a GAC meeting at the Montreat Conference
Center, that the fund-raising project, which Oldenburg proposed in 1998,
hadn't started yet.

"We needed a feasibility study. We needed case statements first," Detterick
said. "It was a good learning process." After consulting people in WMD and
NMD and throughout the church, he said, they had identified a need for about
$200 million.

"We all choked," he said yesterday. "We spent some time thinking about it,
not wanting to go out and ask for an impossible number. We arrived at $39.5
million as a reasonable figure. The feasibility study will tell whether
there is (sufficient) interest."

The Mission Initiative originated with actions taken by General Assemblies
between 1996 and 1999 to call attention to the need for additional strength
in two key areas -new-church development/redevelopment in the United States
and mission support overseas. The 1998 GA approved an overture calling for
the investment of $80 million.

The GAC has hired the consulting firm of Marts & Lundy to conduct a
feasibility study and report on the results by Dec. 14 so that it can act on
the report during its January meeting. The campaign would likely be focused
on prospective donors, individual and corporate, rather than be directed to
the church at large. Discussion of a broader campaign, to raise as much as
$200 million, was deferred for the time being.

In connection with the feasibility study, GAC staff members have conducted
more than 80 interviews with potential donors to assess their interest and
ask them to meet with Marts & Lundy.

WMD staffers cited seven factors in explaining their expectation of a
funding shortfall of $3,353,821 for 2004. The most important were an
accounting change made in the early 1990s that forced the spend-down of
reserve funds previously treated as permanent endowments ("D Funds"); and
the depletion of receipts from the Bicentennial Fund.

"It would require removing from the payroll approximately 54 mission
personnel in order to balance the projected PIMM [Partners in Mutual
Mission] budget for 2004," Bill Simmons, WMD coordinator for administration
and finance, told the committee.

WMD would like to add 58 new mission personnel by 2006 and a total of 226 by
2010. The total estimated cost of the 226 positions is about $75.5 million
per year; the cost of the initial 58 is estimated at $10.2 million per year.
In addition, WMD would like to add 273 international volunteer positions by
2010, at an annual cost of about $10 million. The total number of new
mission positions comes to 499, with an estimated annual cost of more than
$85 million.

The PC(USA)'s current annual mission budget is about $144 million.

If the denomination cannot find new sources of funding, McClure advised the
committee, it will not only have to forgo expansion of its programs, but
"will have to stop doing some of the things it has been doing."

McClure said the additional mission personnel would include educators,
health consultants, English teachers, frontier workers (to start new
churches or support fledgling churches), disaster-response trainers and
community development specialists.

Detterick noted that Marts & Lundy did the feasibility study for the 1989
Bicentennial Fund Campaign (recommending against it) and for a previous $50
million drive that was a success.
They won the contract through a bidding process, he said. "I think that is
great news," he told the committee. "They have experience, both with a
successful campaign and one when their advice was not listened to that was
less than successful."

Detterick said the church's process for funding mission "hasn't changed
enough."

"Seventy percent of WMD revenues are restricted (designated) funds," he
said. "It's the same for the GAC as a whole. For GAC, only about 30 percent
is unrestricted. You've got a $144 million budget, only 30 percent of which
you have any control over how you spend it. We've got to rethink how you
fund the mission of the national church.

"I look at the feasibility study to help us structure that ongoing
dialogue," he added. "It will tell us a lot about attitudes and giving
patterns, about what the church may be willing to do. It is a great
opportunity to get some data and information.
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