Smaller triennial budget requires new ways of working
Episcopal News Service. September 16, 2009 [091609-03]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Employees of the Episcopal Church Center suggested this week that project- and team-based work with greater collaboration and better communication, all aided by increased use of technology, will help them serve the church with a smaller budget and fewer colleagues.
General Convention's decision to approve a 2010-2012 budget in July that is $23 million smaller than the current triennial plan prompted the need to rethink the work of church center staff. The $141-million budget will mean that approximately 40 staff positions out of 192 in the Episcopal Church's New York and regional offices will be eliminated.
The program staff of the church center gathered at the New York office in various groups September 14-16 to consider the impact of the cuts.
On September 15 Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori told the entire staff that "the depth of the financial situation caught us all off guard -- all of us."
The day before, she had acknowledged to the program staff that the cuts may have felt like "slash-and-burn agriculture."
"It's a pretty crude way of preparing the soil, but it does result in the ability to plant seeds and to see things emerge and be fruitful," she said. "Our task right now is to take this prepared ground and make sure that the seeds bear fruit. We live in a spirit that says there's always hope for that fruit. We know it. We've seen it. We've seen it, we've seen it for years and years and years. Each and every one of us has seen it and has been part of it. Our task is to work for the harvest."
She told the staff on September 15 that she was grateful for the very clear way General Convention focused on mission and the fact that people are "lit up and excited and on fire around the idea of mission." She praised convention for saying that the Anglican Communion's Five Marks of Missionought to be the Episcopal Church's top strategic priorities and the focus of the 2013-2015 budget. (The 2010-2012 mission priorities are here.)
The Five Marks of Mission, agreed to during meetings of the Anglican Consultative Council in 1984 and 1990, are: to proclaim the good news of the kingdom; to teach, baptize and nurture new believers; to respond to human need by loving service; to seek to transform unjust structures of society; and to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
Jefferts Schori said that multicultural awareness and engagement ought to be "at the top of the list" of how the church center staff serves those priorities. Among the characteristics she included in her definition of multiculturalism were ethnicity, age, class, language and theological positions.
The Presiding Bishop also called on the staff to be:
- networked with other organizations in the church;
- "flexible, agile, responsive" to the needs of the church and the world;
- strategic about discerning the work that it can do best and that dioceses and congregations cannot do;
- well-versed about best practices used elsewhere in the Episcopal Church and among its partners and then disseminate that knowledge;
- act in "ways that are congruent with our identity, congruent with the values we share;"
- work in ways "that are public -- not just transparent but a pro-active telling of our stories and telling the many, many stories that go on in and through this church" and
- "improve our collaborative efforts with other parts of the governance structures of this church."
The Presiding Bishop's list builds on comments made by the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance when it presented its budget proposal to the General Convention in July.
Details still to be defined
Meanwhile, details of the changes required by the budget still are being discerned. A reconfiguration committee, convened by chief operating officer Linda Watt after convention, has been working independently and in conjunction with the pre-existing Collaborative Initiatives Steering Group of church center employees formed in January.
The reconfiguration group was asked to "offer some models for reconfiguration that are focused on team- and project-based work that respond to the budget constraints set out by General Convention," said the Rev. Margaret Rose, director of the Mission Leadership Center and committee chair, during an interview.
On September 14, the committee suggested a possible model to the program staff, Jefferts Schori and Watt. Alex Baumgarten, interim director of the church's Office of Government Relations and a member of the re-configuration committee, told the gathering that the model, which combines a program-based structure with the opportunity for project-based teams, is a "broad-contour proposal" in need of more feedback definition.
Some of those details include questions raised by the staff about who will determine the substance of the project-based work and set its timetable, keep track of how many project teams on which any one employee serves at a given time, and review the results. Many of the employees' job descriptions would have to be re-written to incorporate the new emphasis on projects, and a new evaluation process would need to be designed.
The 2010-2012 budget was based partly on an expectation that church center staff only should do work that cannot be done better by dioceses and networks throughout the church.
Losses felt
Some church center offices lost funding entirely, and many others face cuts of various amounts. Among the program budgets largely eliminated are socially responsible investment, criminal justice, racial justice, lay ministry, ordained ministry development, women's ministry, congregational vitality and stewardship training programs, and worship and spirituality. The cuts involve program expenses and/or staff costs. In the case of diocesan services, a staff position was eliminated but the program's grant money remains, slightly reduced.
Other staff for the church center (including the General Convention staff, communications, finance and human resources) also face cuts as they reorganize and discern how to serve the needs of the program staff and the wider church, Watt noted in an interview.
She said she will discuss staff cuts and the proposed re-configuration with Executive Council members at their October meeting, the first since convention. (The council is the church's governing body between meetings of convention.) Thus far, citing privacy concerns, Watt has declined to release a list of staff members who have left the church center or who will leave by year's end.
"It is important that we guard everyone's dignity in this process," she said. "That is the reason we have been reticent to put out a list [of names]."
Watt noted "a lot of sadness" among employees leaving and those remaining.
"We're trying to be as respectful as we can for everyone," she said, noting that "generous severance packages" and out-placement counseling are being offered to help those leaving have "as soft a landing as possible."
Jefferts Schori acknowledged to the church center staff during the September 15 gathering that "we are saying good-bye to friends, we're saying farewell to people who have enriched this community with their abundant gifts and ministry, their presence and their friendship."
Rose said that her group's survey of program staff showed that some remaining employees feel discouraged while others express a sense of anticipation and eagerness to move on.
During remarks on September 14, the Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, who will retire at the end of the year as director of the church's Advocacy Center, said the reconfiguration committee heard loud and clear about the staff's "deep feeling" about "the need for rebuilding trust in the wake of action by General Convention and how we do our work here at the church center."
He said the committee heard that there needs to be "a culture of trust, respect, mutual accountability" at the church center. Building that healthy workplace is the responsibility of everyone who works for the Episcopal Church, he said.
Rose told ENS that "from some who have left and who are leaving, I cannot even tell you the grace with which they are moving."
"I'm overwhelmed by their sense of trust in what might happen next, in their willingness to work even harder in the time before they leave to make sure that what is going to be missing will be taken up by somebody else," she said.
Transition to a new structure
Given the staff cuts and budget mandates, the questions facing the Church Center include how existing staff will accomplish the work that will remain at the church center and what work must be handed to other church organizations – and how those transitions will happen. The groups also must consider another budget mandate to reduce the number of meetings and other events sponsored by the church center.
"This is going to be a transition because I think some people have been accustomed to looking to the church center for leadership in areas that the dioceses and the constituencies and the networks that work in these areas are going to have to pick up," Watt said.
"The question of how that will be done is very tricky" and requires ongoing communication with those organizations, she added.
Watt said she will brief the Executive Council about progress made on reconfiguring the reduced church center staff. The reduced budget, she said, is an "opportunity for very close interaction between the staff and Executive Council in new ways that are going to really lead the church center to a more effective ministry." She plans to ask council members to "really define in practical, realistic terms" the expectations for church center staff and to provide "very conscientious policy oversight."
The current work to reconfigure the church center staff comes two years after Jefferts Schori announced a complete re-organization of that staff, which included the establishment of regional offices and the ability of some staff members to work from other locations around the country.
On September 15, she said that work "has prepared the ground" for the task facing the staff. "The work we have had to do here in the last couple of months would have been much harder if we hadn't started doing it a couple of years ago," she said. "It prepared us for this time by tilling the soil. It began to challenge us all to be workers and collaborators in more productive ways. We learned to listen in new ways. We learned to connect with the large church in ways we hadn't always done before."
The reduced budget, while creating a sense of crisis, also presents exciting possibilities, according to Watt, Rose and Mary Brennan, chair of the collaboration group and associate program officer for mission interpretation and communication.
"The fact that we have a lower budget enables us to stop, think and build in a different way," Watt said. For instance, she said, "one of the things we have known but that really came to the fore at convention is that people really don't know what we're doing and they don't realize what resources are available to them."
"We need to do a better job of presenting what the church center has to offer to the church as a whole so there will be more utility to what we're doing," she said.
In the end, Brennan said, it's important to keep the work of reorganizing the staff in perspective.
"Let's face it: People outside of here don't really care how we're configured," she said. "They need what they need, and they want us to engage however they want us to engage … the way we're organized doesn't matter. [The question is:] Does the work get done, and does the work get done efficiently and effectively?"