A.S. Haley: The Budgetary Gargoyles of ECUSA: Intricate, Detailed, but Ultimately Useless

September 9, 2010

In order to accomplish one of its major purposes for existing, the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America passes a triennial budget at each of its sessions. The budget so enacted (by both the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops) supposedly sets the financial framework of the Church for the next three years.

However, due to its ephemeral existence, General Convention is physically incapable of doing anything other than taking certain numbers which have been assigned to certain line items, either adjusting them or leaving them as presented, and then approving the whole shebang in a single vote. Having thus given birth to the Church's budget, General Convention adjourns and forever passes out of existence. It leaves the implementation and monitoring of the budget to the management at 815, and to the Executive Council, who have zero accountability to the now defunct body that passed the budget. Executive Council revisits the budget each year, and rewrites it freely as it deems fit, providing the Treasurer assures it of a source of funds.

Meanwhile, the Presiding Bishop and her staff evince a certain schizophrenic attitude toward the budget. On the one hand, they make a sincere attempt to live within its means, and in recent years have made draconian cuts in staff and mission in order to deal with steadily declining revenues. But when it comes to funding the Church's litigation, all bets are off. Litigation expenses are allowed freely to mushroom, and the preferred method of covering them has been to have the Treasurer "find" the resources in unspent appreciation and accumulated income sitting around in the Church's thousands of donated trust funds, most of which were designated by their donors to fund the "mission work" of the Church. the rest

In sum, the history I have drawn in this and the earlier posts in the series, show a legal budget for ECUSA which is under no one's objective control, and is being determined solely by the Presiding Bishop in consultation with her Chancellor and her Special Assistant for Church Litigation and Discipline, who is also a former member of Goodwin Procter, the Chancellor's own law firm.