Facing an estimated shortfall of $5 million in 1995, the Episcopal Church plans to cut off support of its missionaries.
The church’s executive council announced the proposed missionary cuts in February, which initially will save the church $420,000 per year. As appointed missionaries complete their terms or retire, the church will save $520,000 over the next five years. The cuts await the approval of the general convention, which will meet in August.
Missionary support is but one area, across a broad spectrum, that is facing cutbacks. Other programs targeted include: all social grants ($795,000); assistance to historically black Episcopal colleges ($150,000); the Episcopal Church Center’s office for AIDS ministry ($130,000); and the South Africa Partnership Program ($90,000).
Some Episcopalians involved in missionary work hope the general convention will reverse the recommendation of the executive council and continue support of missionaries.
But Walter Hannum, executive director of the Episcopal Church Missionary Community, doubts if the general convention can perform that financial miracle. “The pie is smaller,” Hannum told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “Even though they would say that’s where money ought to go, there isn’t much money to put there anymore.”
“I think it’s heartbreaking,” says Tom Prichard, executive director of South American Missionary Society (SAMS), the largest independent missions agency in the Episcopal Church. “This represents the end of a long, sad decline of the church’s commitments to missions.” The Episcopal Church supported 480 missionaries as recently as 1965, but that number has plunged to 20.
SAMS has 48 missionaries on the field or in training, Prichard says, with more than 300 Episcopal parishes supporting them. Both Hannum and Prichard believe the cuts will encourage more parishes to see missionary work as their responsibility, rather than a ministry the national church does for them.
Hannum believes missionary support will be more effective through small missionary societies than through the centralized bureaucracy of the Episcopal Church Center.
“I doubt if many people in the church know the real name of the church, much less that they all belong to a missionary society,” Hannum says. The Episcopal Church has also been known by the name, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.
Prichard is enthusiastic about the late April “New Wineskins for Global Mission” conference that Episcopal missionary agencies are sponsoring. “I think the timing of the conference is providential, because it’s an opportunity for voluntary missionary agencies and parishes to come together,” Prichard says. “Since the 1920s, local churches have been told it’s not their job to send missionaries, that it’s the national church’s job. Now everything will depend on local churches. The mantle is being passed to local churches in cooperation with volunteer missionary agencies.”
By Doug LeBlanc.
