Partnership to be Decided in 1967
Diocesan Press Service. August 3, 1966 [45-11]
Note to Editors: Responding to Council's partnership interpretation program, we will send along various articles. The next will be for publication in October, an article based on the experience of "partnership dioceses," disclosed in a churchwide survey. Because this plan will be voted on in Seattle, I urge you to assist in this interpretation program. JC
PARTNERSHIP TO BE DECIDED IN 1967
"Partnership" may assume new significance in the Episcopal Church, starting in 1968.
If General Convention approves, the many-faceted missionary program at home and overseas will be financed by the voluntary pledges of the dioceses and missionary districts. This action would abolish the 44-year-old system of quotas.
The Partnership principle, which says that "each parish and mission: each diocese and missionary district should give to others at least as much as it keeps and spends on itself," is to be recommended to the Church's bicameral governing body by the nine-member Joint Committee on the Partnership Plan.
The chairman, the Bishop of Ohio, the Rt. Rev. Nelson M. Burroughs, announced that the committee has decided to recommend implementation of the Partnership Plan in 1968. General Convention meets in Seattle in October, 1967.
General Convention twice has acted favorably on the Partnership principle of 50-50 sharing.
The 1961 convention at Detroit urged that vestries work toward "the goal of giving one half of the ordinary income of their parishes to work outside their parishes on national, diocesan and local programs."
The 1964 convention at St. Louis went a step further. It approved the report of a Joint Committee on the Study of Quotas that the present quota system be continued for the next triennium with the recommendation that the Partnership Plan be adopted in 1967, to go into effect in 1968.
The Executive Council voted to join with the Joint Committee in recommending implementation of the Partnership Plan in 1968.
Bishop Burroughs' committee was authorized by the 1964 General Convention and instructed specifically to work with the Executive Council "in planning how new methods of giving may be most effectively presented and carried out through the Church."
The Joint Committee's resolution would "direct the Executive Council for the calendar year 1968 and thereafter, to seek from each diocese and missionary district a pledge, in the spirit of Christian brotherhood, to the General Church Program, in lieu of the current practice of apportioning to each such diocese or missionary district its proportionate share of the program adopted by the General Convention."
It will propose the Church's canons be amended to eliminate reference to the quota system which was adopted in 1922.
The assessment for General Convention and the Presiding Bishop will remain intact.
Full discussion of voluntary giving and the Partnership principle in the months before General Convention is being encouraged by an interpretation program, initiated by Executive Council in response to the General Convention action.
Members of the Executive Council, the Joint Committee and other Church leaders are participating in a speakers program to personally visit diocesan councils and executive boards and other meetings of Church leaders. They will discuss the Partnership Plan and its implications, and the survey of dioceses and districts that have adopted it. The views and suggestions of diocesan leaders will be shared with the Joint Committee.
Members of the Joint Committee on the Partnership Plan, in addition to Bishop Burroughs, are: the Ven. Charles D. Braidwood (Diocese of Michigan); John P. Causey (Virginia); the Rt. Rev. Ned Cole (Central New York); the Very Rev. L. E. Gressle (Delaware); William G. Ikard, III (New Mexico & Southwest Texas); the Rt. Rev. Henry Louttit (South Florida); John R. Sherwood (Southern Ohio); the Ven. Dean T. Stevenson (Bethlehem).