The Rev. Kennetha Bigham-Tsai

The General Council of Finance and Administration has affirmed a 17.4 percent cut in the base percentage rate that determines the quadrennial budget. Because of changes to other funds, this will result in a 22.7 percent reduction across the World Service Fund (WSF), the Black College Fund, Africa University, the Ministerial Education Fund and the Interdenominational Cooperation Fund. The WSF funds our general boards and agencies that are in charge of connectional programming, including Global Ministries, Church and Society, United Methodist Communications, Discipleship Ministries, the General Board of Higher Education and Ministries, the Commission on the Status and Role of Women, the General Commission on Religion and Race and United Methodist Men.  

It is the Connectional Table’s role to determine how this reduced funding is allocated across these agencies and funds, or, to use an analogy, the sizes of the pieces of pie we all get. With these cuts, the overall size of our pie has shrunk. It is the CT’s job to determine how that smaller pie is to be divided.

With a reduction of about $105.9 million in our allocations budget for the quadrennium, we are approaching this process with great humility and care. Indeed, the Connectional Table approved a process for making allocations at our fall meeting. That process is grounded in some key values:

• Prayerful discernment. Recognizing that this is not just an administrative task but a call to discernment, we are asking ourselves how we can intentionally invite the presence and awareness of the Holy Spirit into our discernment process.  

• The mission of the church. We believe that our mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world should ground us. We are looking at how we allocate funds with an eye to how these decisions will impact our ability to carry out our mission.

• Missional priorities. We affirm that the Four Areas of Focus are the missional priorities of the whole denomination and should give direction to our work. We know that the agencies and the funds also have missional priorities that consider their disciplinary mandates and guide their strategic planning around the Four Areas of Focus. We will ask ourselves how we can honor and affirm these priorities.  

• Core Mission Sustainability. We want to ensure we maintain the core mission of our agencies and funds. We must ask ourselves questions like, “What of the agencies’ or funds’ work is crucial to sustaining their mission and the mission of the church? What is the core mission that we cannot lose?”

• Emerging Missional Priorities. In line with the CT mandate in ¶905.3 of the Book of Disciple, we must consider emerging issues. We must ask the question, “What is emerging that needs special emphasis at this time?” As that paragraph notes of the Connectional Table’s essential functions, “Consistent with actions of the General Conference, to coordinate the program life of the church with the mandates of the gospel, the mission of the church, and the needs of the global community by listening to the expression of needs, addressing emerging issues, and determining the most effective, cooperative, and efficient way to provide optimum stewardship of ministries, personnel, and resources.”

• Fairness and justice. We will frame our work in terms of the Social Principles and consider power differentials and differences in impact.

• Stewardship. To be good stewards of increasingly limited resources, we will try to get an accurate picture of the financial health and capacity of each of the agencies and funds. We will explore alternate income sources. We will look at reserves. And we will consider program efficiencies and partnerships.  

• Transparency. We will seek in every way to be open in our communications and to invite feedback

We believe these are good values to guide the work. Still, this work is difficult. There are no easy answers to the questions and challenges that we face. We all know that we cannot continue as we are. Yet, we must balance that realization with wise choices that maintain our identity as United Methodists. We must ask ourselves questions about what connectionalism means at this time in the life of our church. We must grapple with how we maintain our sense of identity as a connectional body in light of fewer anticipated resources. And we must gauge our ability to make disciples who transform the world at this time of consequential change.

We welcome your prayers and your feedback as we engage these hard issues. We will continue to share about the values that will guide our work. We hope that you also will continue to engage with us in this conversation.

IN PRAYERFUL DISCERNMENT

Our first meeting as a CT Allocations Team was grounded in worship and prayer. We asked ourselves questions such as, “What do we need to shed or let go of to really discern the will of God?” To help us with that discernment we engaged "A Guide to Spiritual Discernment" by the late Bishop Rueben Job. A reflection from that resource noted,

“We have been given responsibility for decision making. It is a large responsibility, and the issues are complex and seldom clearly one way or the other. Even when we have gathered all the facts and looked at and listened to all the evidence, the answer may still be unclear. We bring our best thoughts and all of our previous experiences to the decision-making process, and still we find that prejudice, half-truths, insufficient evidence, and lack of wisdom leave us uncertain about God’s way in the matter.

At times like this we long for the assurance of God’s presence with us. We yearn to ask Jesus, who always reflected God’s will, what our decision should be, what really is God’s will in this matter. We would seek to know how we can discern that our decisions are not our own, not where the popular opinion is, not what is easy or cheap, not even what will please the most persons or defeat someone we don’t like. Rather, one might ask, “What is God’s will? What does God desire around this concern I have? What decision would I make if I were to block out all other interests and seek to please only God?” Reuben P. Job, "A Guide to Spiritual Discernment," pg. 58

We pray that our whole connection will be able to live into the intent of this reflection, because we are all faced with decisions that will impact the life and ministry of our church.  As we face these decisions, let us yearn to be like Jesus in all humility and sacrifice and love.

“Let each of [us] look not to [our] own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself.” Philippians 2: 4-7a

Let us empty ourselves, like Jesus did, of regard for our own will and desires – for the popular, the easy or the cheap. Let us ask God to help us to empty ourselves of everything that distracts us from seeing clearly what God would have us to do to further the great mission of our church.

Holy God, let it be.

Budget Allocations Team: 

• Bishop Christian Alsted

• Kennetha Bigham-Tsai

• Lyssette Perez

• Thomas Kemper

• Brad Brady 

• Amy Coles

• Dave Nuckols