Okay this is going to be a really churchy post, and it requires a lot of background to set up.
Saturday, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago called all the “assisted” congregations together for a pretty much mandatory meeting to discuss a big problem: namely, that the budget for assisting congregations that ask for grants from the Diocese was exceeded by the amount of requests by about $96,000. Rather a lot, really. Clergy and board members (it’s called “Vestry” if your congregation is a parish, “Bishop’s Committee” if your congregation is a mission) were strongly encouraged to attend and give 5 minute presentations on what we’re doing, and pretty much to justify getting assistance by demonstrating what we’re doing with it.
Holy Moly is an assisted mission and I’m on the Bishop’s Committee; in fact, the way things are going, we’ve got enough money to get through 2006 and then we’re done unless something miraculous happens this year. And frankly, there’s hope, because we members of the
B.C. have gotten energized by several events that we’ve attended or participated in in the last 3 months or so, and we feel like we’ve got a plan for energizing the remaining members and attracting new ones. It’s pretty simple: you have to do more to get more. We can’t continue to sit back and wait for people to come through the door – we have to demonstrate that we’ll welcome them and give them something to do to help people.
We’ve operated on the “Church Club” principle at Holy Innocents for decades. It goes like this:
- The first rule of Church Club is, you do not talk about Church Club.
- The second rule of Church Club is, you DO NOT talk about Church Club.
This reluctance on our part to badger or buttonhole people about coming to Church Club is pretty typical of Episcopalians: we often have a lot of trouble with the E-word (evangelism).
The point of Saturday’s meeting was for all the assisted congregations to get together, talk about what they were doing with the diocese’s money, and then do a sort of reverse pledge drive to reduce the shortfall. We started off with a pretty inspiring piece of news: the rector of one congregation that’s been getting a LOT of money the last few years (we had handouts and knew exactly what everyone else has been getting and was asking for) called the meeting organizer the night before. She said “If I tell you that we’ve decided to reduce the amount of our “asking” to ZERO, do we still have to attend the meeting? We’re going to take a leap of faith here.”
So – that reduced the defict by more than $15,000 right there. This put a lot of energy (and pressure) on the rest of us.
We went through the “un-pledge” process twice. Each delegation had been directed to bring all their financial information with them so they could quickly find something fat to cut in their budgets, or if there was no fat, figure out what could be cut and funded in some new creative way, or to network with another parish to reduce costs by sharing them. This encouraged a lot of cooperative horse-trading amongst the tables. Fortunately, the energizing events we’ve attended in the past year meant that we had a few “buddies” in other delegations – this would not have been true even last year.
Every delegation had to file a form with an amount at the head table, then by turns a spokesperson stood up and announced the figure and justified it, so everyone heard what everyone else was doing. The figures were tallied up and totaled to see how much the shortfall could be reduced. The goal was to totally balance it out, but in the end the organizers declared victory after a 2/3 reduction in the deficit. They felt that even though not all the congregations were there to represent themselves and offer a reduction to their “ask” amounts, our response was inspiring enough for them to think about going back to the diocesan budget and looking for more money for the assistance program and possibly ask the wealthier parishes to increase the amount of their pledges.
Then something really… galvanizing happened. In our diocese, support of gay clergy is really, really strong, because it’s a liberal diocese but also because gay clergy have been mainstays here for years in parishes, missions, and downtown. We depend on them and also a lot of churches depend on lay members who are gay. There are conservatives who grumble at this, but the position of the Diocese of Chicago is overwhelmingly on the “inclusive and affirming” side. This was made evident at the recent convention vote I attended as an alternate – gay-unfriendly propostions were handily swatted down.
Sitting at our table was one of our “church buddies” that we’ve bonded with in meetings recently – Randall Warren, our pastoral care officer from the diocese. He’s also running an assisted parish as a “one-day-a-week” priest, since that’s all they can afford to pay him. He came to Holy Moly earlier this year to run a meeting where we met with another local parish to discuss joint hopes, fears, and goals. That was one of those energizing things I was talking about, so we have a lot of affection for Randall. Also, at a service we hosted for Ascension Sunday last year, he was guest preacher. Let me tell you, he gives great sermon – funny, inspiring, eye-opening, and totally ex tempore. He’s amazing.
So Randall gets up during the post-reduction discussion session, after several others had risen to comment on numbers or whether we needed to get rid ourselves of the need for pretty “Church Club” stuff, and he raises the issue that’s behind a lot of our church’s financial woes: the gay clergy issue.
He said that although we had all heroically stepped up and reduced our askings by a large amount of money, that total amount was still less than the amount normally pledged by just one very wealthy parish that was apparently withholding payment because of its disapproval of the diocesan stand on gay clergy.
A huge and relieved sounding round of applause went up. Yes, we must stand up and speak out on this issue, even here in Chicago.
Boring? Sorry. At the time, this was all very inspiring.
The meeting was called by our new Canon to the Ordinary, Scott Hayashi. His position is sort of like a liaison to the people from the diocese. I think he was overwhelmed by our response to the way we were empowered to help work on reducing the budget shortfall for assistance.
I for one said in a commentary sheet that I’m actually looking forward to next year’s meeting, because I thought it was a really valuable and energizing experience. I got to talk a little about my Christmas bag thing for Holy Moly, and people from other parishes wanted to know more about it afterwards. I wanted to know more about some of the things they were doing, too – so it was much more than just a budget meeting, it was more like a networking lunch with math.
