Executive Council Meeting will Address Budgets, Convention Reports
Episcopal News Service. December 19, 2005 [121005-1]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Completing its report to General Convention and acting on Episcopal Church budgets top the agenda for the next meeting of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church.
The council will gather at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, January 8-12.
The council's time in Des Moines will include dinner on January 11 with Iowa's Bishop Alan Scarfe and members of the diocese. The council's meetings normally include time with the hosting diocese.
Scarfe said having the Executive Council in his diocese is exciting. "It gives opportunities, especially with the open sessions, to see the [Episcopal] Church at work which, for some people, is to see their money at work," Scarfe said.
He said the clergy and people of the diocese "greatly appreciate" the chance to spend time with the Presiding Bishop.
"We also look forward to the opportunity to share our own life. We have some innovative approaches to ministry organization in Iowa," Scarfe said. "We seek to emphasize teams at every level including the episcopate. It places emphasis on the motion of ministry being multi-layered."
Scarfe said Iowa's most recent diocesan convention focused on the diocese's extensive mission outreach. "Our understanding of mission is that we are an episcopate-centered expression of how Christ makes disciples, focused on his call to share His love for neighbor and enemy alike, with a special eye and heart on those who may never pay us back but who always remind us of the greatness of the creation of God in which we so undeservedly find ourselves," he said.
The church's 2006 budget will hold the council's attention for part of the meeting. The council will also act on its draft version of the church budget for the 2007-2009 triennium. Once approved by the council, that version goes to the General Convention's Program, Finance and Budget committee for further refinement. The budget is eventually approved by both the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops during the convention's next meeting in June in Columbus, Ohio.
The draft budget "really still is a working document as it leaves council and is open to amendment at the will of the Convention," said the Rev. Dr. Gregory Straub, executive officer of the General Convention. The version gives the convention a "running start" at preparing a final budget for the next triennium.
Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, who chairs the council, has said that council members are called upon to look at the budget not just as a set of numbers but as the embodiment of a theology of mission. He said that each program funded in the budget must be looked at in terms of it does further the church's efforts to be a healing agent in the world and an agent of reconciliation.
The Very Rev. George Werner, president of the House of Deputies, said the council and the church have been moving in this direction for more than a decade.
"My hope is that we will really have a budget that is strongly driven by mission, strongly driven by mission opportunities and strongly driven by the desperate needs in our world and in our church," he said.
The council's report to General Convention, which will be published in the upcoming Blue Book compilation of the reports of the church's committees, commissions, agencies and boards, will be a summary of the progress it has made on the work given to it by the previous General Convention.
Among the many reports that the council will hear during its Des Moines meeting will be one on the Episcopal Church's commitment to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals "which seem to have caught fire in the church," said Straub.
Other reports will come from Bishop Suffragan Catherine Roskam of New York and the work of the International Anglican Women's Network. Werner had high praise for the network, saying it gives him more hope than any other international activity he's aware of. "I really think the women are on the right track," he said.
There will also be an update from the Rev. Canon Stephen Lane of the Diocese of Rochester about the Episcopal Church's on-going relationship with the Anglican Church of Canada. Lane is the Council's liaison with the Canadian Church. The council will also hear from the church's chancellor David Beers about canonical matters, according the Straub.
The Executive Council carries out programs and policies adopted by the General Convention and oversees the ministry and mission of the Church. The council is comprised of 20 members elected by General Convention (four bishops, four priests or deacons and 12 laypersons) and 18 members elected by provincial synods.