2006-2008 budget cuts will total $9.15 million is a news release from the Presbyterian Church (USA). For you Presby-junkies this news release adds a little more meat to what we at the GAC have been wrestling with. I think the release also dies a nice job of tying together many of the pieces so you can get a more comprehensive view of the GAC strategy.
“This is clearly part of a longer trend in the church and probably most churches,” GAC Executive Director John Detterick told the Presbyterian News Service in a March 15 interview. “Presbyterians are funding mission differently — they are giving to their churches in larger amounts, but are more directly involved both in activity and funding.”
.....
“None of us can see the future,” Detterick said, “but I firmly believe that what’s being put in place — the Mission Work Plan, a restructured GAC and annual meetings between the GAC and synod and presbytery executives (a new component of the GAC’s restructuring) — all will have some payoff and will help bridge the gap between the national and local church. We’ll see the results, whatever they are, in the next four years.”
The role of the GAC must change, Detterick added.
“The real challenge for us is to work through these painful changes in ways that will help us prepare to support mission work in the future,” he said. “There is a role for the GAC, but it will be smaller, less resource-producing and more networking, less programmatic and more enabling of the presbyteries and congregations.”
To that end, the council adopted a 2007-2008 Mission Work Plan in February that narrows the focus of its programmatic work to just eight objectives. (The Mission Work Plan is appended below.) Since then, a core GAC staff team of 40 — augmented by many others — has been reassessing all of its mission programs in order to match the budget cuts with the MWP objectives. “The beauty of the Mission Work Plan is that it helps us focus our work on the eight objectives and directs that focus to the presbyteries and congregations,” Detterick said.
That work, which is taking place “across programmatic lines,” Detterick added, “while difficult has been undertaken with great energy and dedication.”
To date, that work has involved aligning all current programmatic work with the eight MWP objectives. The next stage, Detterick said, is to determine which work is “essential” to the MWP, which work is “helpful” but not essential and which work does not align with the objectives and will therefore “not be done here.”
Comments