Ellen Cooke Resigns as Treasurer of National Church
Episcopal News Service. January 19, 1995 [95001]
Ed Stannard
Ellen F. Cooke, who was recently reelected to her position as the national church's top financial officer, surprised much of the church when she abruptly resigned last month.
Cooke had served since 1986 in the dual positions of treasurer of the General Convention and senior executive for administration and finance of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, the national church's corporate name.
Even her closest colleagues were caught by surprise when Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning issued a statement to Episcopal Church Center staff January 6, which said she was resigning, effective January 31. Her husband, the Rev. Nicholas T. Cooke III, rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Montclair, New Jersey, had accepted a call to the Diocese of Virginia.
The Cookes, former residents of Virginia, will live in McLean, Virginia, where Nicholas Cooke is rector of St. John's Episcopal Church. Before joining the national staff, Ellen Cooke was Virginia's diocesan treasurer, and Nicholas Cooke served a parish there.
Browning named assistant treasurer Donald Burchell as interim treasurer and said he would bring a nominee for senior executive to Executive Council when it meets in Providence, Rhode Island, February 15-17. He and Pamela Chinnis, president of the House of Deputies, also will appoint a replacement for treasurer of General Convention.
In a statement, Browning said, "This church has been very well served by Mrs. Cooke's professional gifts and her commitment to faithfully carrying out the responsibilities with which she has been entrusted. . . . The negative economic conditions, and the subsequent downsizings we have experienced, have been much less severe than they might have been -- and indeed have been for other mainline denominations. This is a tribute to Ellen's prudent and wise fiscal management."
Since 1991, the Episcopal Church Center has undergone two waves of layoffs and a shrinking budget, as a result of lower contributions from dioceses. Last summer, General Convention approved a $42.6 million budget, about $4.5 million lower than 1994, which cut or consolidated many national programs. The way the budget is financed also was significantly changed for the first time in decades, giving dioceses a choice in their asking between a portion of net parish income or a graduated percentage of diocesan income.
"When you think of the kinds of things she had to preside over, what she had to stay on top of, it's just enormous," said Bishop Donald Wimberly of Lexington, Kentucky, a member of Executive Council's administration and finance committee and a longtime member of the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance (PB&F), which proposed the budget to convention. "I think she did it magnificently."
Bishop Cabell Tennis of Delaware, another member of PB&F, also praised Cooke's abilities, calling the new budget "for the most part, her work."
"I can also tell you that... her ability to deal with vast amounts of complexity and to crunch numbers until the job is done made the work of PB&F less of a hell than it would have been last time. I will miss her in that particular hellish venue."
Vincent Currie of the Central Gulf Coast, chair of PB&F during 1991-94, said Cooke was a "tireless, extremely competent person" who made volunteers, such as himself, look good. "She did an extraordinary job of managing at a time when things were not as good as they had been, or as good as we hope they will be... She had a keen introspection in managing money."
Diane Porter, senior executive for program, is the third member of the church center's top-level management, along with Browning and Cooke. She cited the "intellectual stimulation and the intellectual challenge" Cooke brought to her job.
"Personally, I have enjoyed working with Ellen because she... has more energy than any three people I know and she kept my energy level high," Porter said.
But Cooke also had her critics. As one of the most powerful people in the church -- her $125,000 salary was second only to the presiding bishop's -- she was often the focus of those who found the church center inefficient or less than forthcoming in providing information.
Timothy Wittlinger, an Executive Council member from Michigan, while praising Cooke's overall performance as "a superb job," also has been a frequent critic of the reporting by the finance department in the past three years. Council often received information -- from the investment committee on trust funds and the auditor's report, for example -- that was both inadequate and received too late for proper review, Wittlinger charged.
"Over the last three years, I don't believe members of Executive Council got adequate information as to a lot of financial aspects of the work of the church and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. But we were at the point of trying to resolve the issues and had reached some agreement on how to work toward them," he said.
Bishop Charles "Ci" Jones of Montana, another PB&F member, said, "I am sad Ellen has resigned. She has done an excellent job during some very difficult times. Our church, as well as others, has faced major financial hurdles during her tenure. She has met these challenges in competent and caring ways. Her style has been somewhat defensive at times, but she has also been subjected to some pretty severe criticism."
He observed that "our financial problems in the future will require innovative and creative approaches if we are to continue to be effective in doing Christ's ministry."
"There's a lot of power when you're dealing with money," observed the Rev. Ann Coburn of the Diocese of Connecticut, who served as vice chair of PB&F for eight years. "I do think it tends to polarize people and make things political. I think Ellen was able to handle that, and handle it with grace."
Browning said Cooke will continue as a consultant for a limited time "to wind up the financial affairs of the last triennium."
A 1969 economics graduate from Georgetown University, Cooke served two years as business manager of the National Cathedral School in Washington D.C., and was assistant treasurer of the Diocese of Massachusetts as well as Virginia before her appointment to the national church position in September 1986.
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