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Joan Brown Campbell, the retiring general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the United States (NCC), remains optimistic about the future of the NCC despite what has been, by all accounts, an extremely difficult year for the nation's biggest ecumenical agency.

In an interview with ENI about her nine-year tenure as general secretary, Campbell, 68, acknowledged that the council's much-publicized financial problems remain a serious challenge.

But Campbell, an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and former director of the US office of the World Council of Churches, defended her tenure as a time in which the council had faced up to a long history of financial difficulties.

The council's problems include widely-criticized financial management systems and a deficit reaching almost US$4 million. Major restructuring is planned in order to close the deficit and solve the financial problems.

The NCC's financial troubles largely dominated headlines about the agency's fiftieth anniversary celebrations last month, particularly when the United Methodist Church temporarily suspended its financial support of the council in October.

"Unfortunately, that [the financial crisis] became the story of the fiftieth," Campbell said, adding that she expected the UMC suspension to be lifted, and noting that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) had recently pledged $300 000 to help the NCC cover its deficit.

"A businessman would say a $4 million deficit in a budget of $70 million is not high tragedy," Campbell told ENI, but added that "there was enough blame to go around" about the council's financial problems, and that she was not sparing herself from any criticism. "It's equally well-shared," she said.

Campbell noted that her tenure was "bracketed" by two suspensions—at the end by the United Methodists over the issue of finances and, in the beginning, from 1991-93, by the US Orthodox churches, which were unhappy with a number of NCC policies and public pronouncements. Campbell was widely credited for improving relations with the Orthodox churches, as well as with the predominantly black denominations among the NCC's members.

Still, many of those unhappy with the state of the NCC during Campbell's period of office have been within, rather than outside, the US ecumenical movement. United Methodist Bishop Roy Sano of Los Angeles, for example, recently told the Los Angeles Times that Robert Edgar, an ordained Methodist minister who will succeed Campbell as NCC General Secretary in January, was "going to an institution that is such a mess, some people think we should close it down."

Campbell said it was possible that her efforts to make the black and Orthodox churches "feel at home" may have contributed to a feeling among the bigger mainline Protestant denominations—the council's biggest financial backers—that their influence within the NCC was waning somewhat.

But Campbell said that the large US mainline Protestant churches might be nostalgic for an earlier time when they represented "the churches of the predominant [US] culture," which was overwhelmingly white and Protestant.

"The hegemony of the mainline churches is over," Campbell said, referring to an increasingly diverse religious, cultural and ethnic arena in the United States. "But they're still reluctant to give that up. And it's not the fault of the churches themselves. It's embedded in the culture."

While celebrating the diversity of the 35-member NCC, Campbell said some of the council's problems were endemic to Protestant-based organizations in general.

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December 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 14