All day Monday and Tuesday I was in committee meetings. It was an interesting experience. I started out trying to take notes like I did in the first plenary sessions, but the situations and business were much more complex and entailed and I decided an over-all recap would be the easiest. If you really want a lot of detail of what I did those two days, go to PC-biz.org, click on the ‘committees’ button and go to committee #8 – Mission Coordination and Budgets.
I thought I knew what my committee was to do, but I really was surprised after I got into it. Obviously mission was the focus, but I guess I didn’t fully understand the complete structuring of the national church until this week. My committee could have as easily been called the General Assembly Council (GAC) committee. This is the branch of the church that is to carry out the work of the church’s mission.
The PCUSA is made up of 6 agencies. The Office of the General Assembly (OGA) and the General Assembly Council (GAC) make up the Presbyterian Church (USA), A Corporation. The other 4 agencies are the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program (PILP), the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation (PPC), the Presbyterian Church (USA) Foundation (FDN), and the Board of Pensions (BOP). While I do not fully understand what being a corporation means and the other ‘legalese’ sections, based upon some of the business we had in committee, the cliff notes version is that the GAC is charged by the over-all General Assembly (which is in essence made up of the congregants and ministers of the all churches, presbyteries and synods, represented by those of us here in this meeting) with the task of providing the organization and structure of the church’s various missions and the Foundation is charged with providing the funds. These were the two main agencies that we dealt with.
I know it gets confusing with all the “General Assembly” language in so many different groups. One of the actions of my committee that will be presented before the assembly is changing the name of the GAC to more fully reflect its duties. If it passes, the new name will be the General Assembly Mission Council. Within the GAC, there are 6 ministry offices: Office of Theology, Worship and Education; Office of Evangelism and Church Development; Office of Compassion, Peace, and Justice; Office of Racial, Ethnic and Women’s Ministry/Presbyterian Women; Office of World Mission; and Office of Vocation.
After getting a briefing of the church’s structure and the GAC structure to help understand what my committee was charged with, we got to work on a lot of items. We dealt with the pattern and recipients of the 4 special offerings taken throughout the year – One Great Hour of Sharing, Christmas Joy Offering, Pentecost Offering and Peacemaking Offering. We approved an overture on reinstating another offering – the Mission Season Offering – that would go primarily to our world missionaries. Evidently, giving to world missions has dropped considerable as people make more and more designated gifts to particular entities within the church that have not included world missions. The other item pertaining to the mission giving that we approved was to create a “season of mission interpretation” through which local churches would be provided information about the many and varied missions that our PCUSA leads and/or supports.
Our biggest item that we spent the most time on (an extra 6 hours so that our “free” night Tuesday was spent back in committee until well after 10:00PM) was to be a mediator in a long-time argument between the GAC and the Foundation. While it was reiterated over and over that the majority of the time there is no problem between the two agencies, there has been issues that they could not come to terms on. The situation boils down to a ‘turf war’ between the two over who has final say in the administration of funds. Each seemed to be rather childish in their stance. We ended up crafting a substitute motion, which took forever when there are 60 people offering their amendments to amendments to ‘better’ the grammar and clarity. Finally we had a document that we all agreed upon. Our substitute motion requires creating a Restricted Funds Resolution Committee to address any disputes, thus not allowing either side to have the final say if they could not agree. The situation is much deeper and more complex that I can get into here, but I have to say that by the time we finished, the two sides were agreeable to what we passed and were acting more collegial toward one another. Several people, including our Synod Exec, Judy Fletcher, said they were embarrassed that the two couldn’t work out their own problems and that we had to intervene.
A big part of the problem came out to be a need for better communications between all the agencies, but especially these two. Another big part of what we did was to rework the manner in which each agency is reviewed. There will be a new review committee made up of people outside of the agencies that is charged to work during the next two years to look at the over-all structure of the church and its agencies and see if there is some stream-lining, reductions and/or changes that can be made to help our national church work more productively, efficiently and with the best stewardship of resources in mind. The feelings of many is that several of our agencies have, over the years, taken on more authority and power than the GA originally gave them. There has been an attitude of mistrust within our church that this assembly is trying hard to address and rectify and if what my committee did is approved on the floor when it is presented, I think this mistrust can begin to be healed. We’ll see…I know that was very lengthy and maybe convoluted, but that is the essence of what we did those two days. I’ll get you caught up with the plenary sessions from Wednesday and Thursday soon, but sleep is more important at this time.
Laurie
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