Flimflammery with ECUSA’s Draft Budget

A.S. Haley
March 20, 2012

At the end of its meeting in Maryland this past January, ECUSA’s Executive Council adopted a draft budget for the next triennium. The draft was immediately handed off to the Church’s Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance, which has the final responsibility to propose a recommended budget to the 77th General Convention at its gathering this July, in Indianapolis.

I wrote at the time about the Council’s somewhat tortuous process of producing the budget (see here and here). Anyone could read between the lines to see that there were different factions vying to implement their respective agendas, and that their clashes at the Council meeting produced confusion, despair at the disjointed process, and general disgruntlement with the leadership.

Having spent some time with the draft budget in the interim, I now understand more clearly the frustrations to which the news reports of the Council’s meeting alluded. The end result of three days’ deliberations was not a real budget at all. Instead, it was what the Executive Committee could cobble together in haste before the meeting ended, and then get the members to vote for because they were all out of time, and had their planes to catch. (Yes, the Executive Council of the Church—meant to function as the interim arm of the General Convention during the 154 out of every 156 weeks in the triennium in which the latter is not meeting—itself has an Executive Committee, to function in the interim of the 50.7 out of every 52 weeks every year during which the Council is not meeting. Are you beginning to see how all this works?) the rest