New goals at the NCC

Christian Century, Oct 18, 2000

THE NATIONAL Council of Churches, relieved to see a promised $400,000 gift from the Presbyterians even while it looks at more staff and budget cuts, also is gazing out of its New York headquarters at a new, hoped-for ecumenical landscape. The NCC's executive board, itching to put past troubles behind at its meeting October 2-3, adopted a resolution on "expanding the ecumenical vision." It calls for a gathering in 2001 to bring together small delegations not only from the mainline Protestant, Eastern Orthodox and African-American churches that make up the NCC but also from Roman Catholic, evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

The idea of replacing itself with a cross-denominational structure was first launched last May by the NCC executive board, and will be discussed at the council's General Assembly in Atlanta November 14-17 along with a proposed "mobilization against poverty" that could generate interest among non-NCC church traditions.

Meanwhile, Barbara Ellen Black, the NCC general manager (chief financial officer), outlining the current financial picture before the 50-member board meeting, reported that audits showed the 1999 year-end budget deficit was a $5.9 million shortfall--neither the early estimate of $4 million nor a later figure of $6.4 million.

Of the new total, about $2 million in special donations were pledged by several member denominations. After a seven-month wait, the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted September 23 to release $400,000 in promised funds, bringing the Presbyterians' total gift to a half-million dollars. The Presbyterians said that the NCC had met four organizational and financial accountability tests. The fifth criterion was that the United Methodist Church would have fulfilled its similarly hefty pledge to the NCC. The Methodists pledged $700,000 in special contributions, but of that amount has forwarded only "a little under $100,000," said Clare Chapman, executive director for finances with the Methodists' Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns. "Our intent is to work very hard to meet that commitment," she said in late September.

Another $2 million of the 1999 deficit has been resolved, primarily with nearly $1.4 million from Church World Service and Witness as its share of transition costs during its long-planned separation from the NCC on June 30 this year. The remaining $1.9 million of the $5.9 million deficit is being carried as a loss on the 1999 financial statement, according to Black.

Robert Edgar, who began as the NCC's chief executive on January 1, said in an interview that "the whole debt issue has been mislabeled." Since money to meet bloated expenses and administrative mismanagement was borrowed from reserve funds, "it's not money that we owe to someone else, but money we owe to ourselves," Edgar said. In the first half of 2000, the NCC balanced the budget with current income, and the same should be true for the last half of this year, he said. "The financial hemorrhaging that was occurring has been stopped."

Nonetheless, in late September the NCC confirmed that three staffers in middle management positions had been laid off, including Roy Lloyd, director of broadcast news. Last December, ten NCC employees were cut. "It's unfortunate, but organizations of 70 employees often have to tweak and adjust their staffing," Edgar said in the interview.

The pared-down organization has to meet a payroll of about $225,000 every other week. Black told the board that the NCC expects to be short about $1.7 million in income to meet expenses in the first six months of 2001. "Between now and the General Assembly in November there will need to be additional decisions on staff and budget cuts," she said.

Black told the board that as many as 11 staffers might be cut, but Edgar said the next day that the number was very uncertain and likely to be less, according to Carol Fouke, NCC director of news services.

Financial reforms instituted at the NCC were praised by Cliff Kirkpatrick, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), at the board meeting. "This is the most encouraging and hopeful financial report [we've heard] and also among the most painful. Very hard decisions have to be made." He also said the moment appears to be one of "rebirth and rebuilding."

Edgar, a onetime Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, was president of Claremont School of Theology in California when he was elected last November as the NCC's general secretary based on his reputation as a fund raiser and administrator.

The vision of a new ecumenical structure "makes some of my friends nervous," said Edgar. "It may mean stepping aside to create the larger table. The National Council of Churches has done enormous good--the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, civil rights, antiwar work, and advocacy in Washington for the poor, but obviously after 50 years [an organization] gets a little moldy around the edges and needs to be reborn."

Asked by the board how the ecumenical vision and the antipoverty campaign were linked, Edgar said that in talking to Kevin Mannoia, new head of the National Association of Evangelicals, and in preliminary conversations with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, "we affirmed that the one issue we're all committed to is working, doing and speaking to the issue of the poor."