Anglican minimalist

A Tale of Two Cons

I flew home Friday from The Episcopal Church's General Convention and spent Saturday at San Diego's Comic-Con.  I have staffed Comic-Con for the last seven years as a Guest Relations person and my whole little sub community there know I am a clergy person.  

While Gen-Con is a triennial gathering of a few thousand to chart the course of the Episcopal Church; Comic-Con is an annual event that charts the course of multiple universes by externalizing the sub-conscious of the 135,000 or so people, exhibitors, writers, artists, tv and movie casts who come to "imagine their way into the future.

This is what just a few thousand look like as they wander the booths. Thousands more are in screenings, seminars and fans-meeting-talent panels. These folk generate $162 million in retail sales and about $3 million in taxes and their efforts at imagining the future are the driving force in computer, gaming and publishing technologies.  They may look like geeks, but behind the scenes they heve been, in fact, imagining our future into being.  

What's more they all pay their own way here to delight in the imagining.  They are enthusiastic, engaged, smart, creative, thoughtful and persistent in sharing their visions of the universe and exploring the boundaries between good and evil, heroes and villians.  

If you want to see the diversity of God's children Comic-Con has them all. We would never ger them all into a list for a resolution!  This year for the first time in my memory there were fundagelicals outside with signs proclaiming the usual messages of sin, damnation and Jesus' love.  Inside there is a Christian Comic Arts Society handing out their Revelation Comic book and selling complete bibles in graphic novel form.  They are evangelicals and perhaps fundamentalists, too, but they understand that they must engage the world where the world is and represent Christ in the heroic form the Con goers relate to.  Not unsprisingly there were no main line groups like TEC there.

The attendance at Comic-Con is the equivalent to about one-seventh of TEC. Ponder how well we might imagine the future if, instead of resolutions, we had seminars inviting us into the spiritual worlds of our Native and Indigenous people's communities; panels of our best "people with great ideas", Indaba groups, music groups, people, like Matthew Moretz, showing their own videos and discussing the nuts and bolts of their creative processes.

Consider the fun we had with Bonnie-ball (www.bonnie-ball.org) and the fun we had eaelier this year with Lent-Madness crafted by Scott Gunn.

We are the best educated and wealthiest, per capita, denomination in the U.S. and I am completely confident that among our various parishes we have all the people with ideas we need to spark all of our imaginations towards ministry of one form or another.  If we brought them together in a place where they wanted to come (like San Diego, for heavens' sake not Salt Lake City) we might find that the synergy would become palpable.

Gen-Con 2012 made some amazing decisions, decisions that will change the lives of multitudes.  We made all mean ALL and resisted the sniping from the edges about how sinful and terrible that ALL was when filtered through their biases.  There are trolls at Comic-Con too, but they do not write Tweets or Wall Stree Journal articles.

Tomorrow we all jump back into our weekly cycle of celebrating the Good News and being in union with God.  I would invite us all to take the spirit that developed at Gen-Con and gather to it the spirit of Comic-Con's journeying to the far ends of imagination.    As we move into the future, we are free to embrace the power of love to triumph over all evil and present that love in such a way that halls get filled with super hero souls.

The Anglican Foundation in Liberation

In her message today, PHoD President Bonnie Anderson reminded us that William White was a student of John Locke as were other of our founding ancestors.
But who was it that John Locke studied? Richard Hooker and his magisterial "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity". Hooker is the grandfather of modern democratic consent theory, insisting that the consent of the governed infused authority from Monarchs to Scripture. Neither Scripture nor Government have authority of their own, authority is granted by the freely given consent of the people.

Locke read the judicious Mr. Hooker and brought that consent theory to the plate to fuel the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In that he was supported by The Rev. Gilbert Burnet, a proud latitudinarian, who grounded his own theological view in Richard Hooker as well. Burnet would become Bishop of Salisbury, but not before preaching at the Coronation of William and Mary. Burnet was a prolific writer on these issues, and especially on religious tolerance which sadly often stood in tension with the Church of England of the day.

Burnet would also write a serious tome on the 39 Articles in 1699, still a powerful book. But he, like Locke were Enlightenment People as were the founders of this nation. While they can be critiqued perhaps for pulling Reason too far away from Revelation, they are our ancestors in the faith and in our polity which liberates people from tyranny.

William White will carry on that tradition in the late 18th century as we insisted that people have the right to overthrow tyranny.

Hooker distinguished between tyranny, theocracy and democracy. Tyranny is the seizure of power by the powerful who impose their will upon the people. Democracy is the choice of people to be governed by one, some or many. But that authority is vested in the people and returns to the people when some form of government exhausts itself.

That same liberation is the gift of redemption, enslaved we were set free, never to be enslaved again. And today as we look at a much smaller world we must recognize that evangelism must include the word of liberation for all people from all forms of tyranny, from all forms of political or social control that does not allow their free, uncoerced conscience to make a choice.

The arc of liberty in our tradition began with the liberation of the Nobles from the King and expanded to the liberation of people within a nation, has now carried us to endorse the liberation of all people world wide from systems that enslave or diminish their capacity to grow into the full perfection God has in mind for them.

We celebrate the arc of this freedom as we gather here at General Convention and discuss weighty matters of internal import, like the budget and structure, but more significantly, matters of external import almost all of which have to do with the liberation of peoples from a wide variety of tyrannies. Those who suggest that this is somehow political and not evangelical miss how deeply we are grounded in freeing people from structures that bring death. There is an unbroken thread of continuity between Cross and Resurrection to the liberation of suffering people. If we are not about doing that, then we are not about Gospel work because we fail to understand that only by freeing people can they freely consent to love and serve God.

Wherever you are today, I hope you treasure the liberation you enjoy in a world in which tyrants of all sorts still seek to dominate. Celebrate it by working for the relief of those enslaved by malnutrition, illness, bigotries of all forms, oppressions and hatreds.

No one is free unless all are free.

A Nimble and Adaptive Gen-Con Restructure

Much of the restructuring conversation in the run up to Gen-Con has focused on the size and shape of deputations or bicameral versus unicameral deliberations.  While those are ways of restructuring, what they seem most likely to accomplish is a reduction of diversity in those who deliberate on our behalf and a concentration of power towards Bishops and Clergy.

I continue to believe, as I wrote in an earlier post, that we can also restructure by limiting what the legislative side of Gen-Con does to administrative and policy bare bones.  Were the legislative section limited to Constitution, Canons, Book of Common Prayer, Ecumenical relations, mind or teaching of the church (catechesis), and a budget constrained to those things we would radically change the size and scope of our centralized and legislative process.

Alongside that meeting we need to throw a Gen-Con TED.  TED, the acronym for Technology, Education and Design, organizes conferences of the best and brightest in most fields of human endeavor to highlight and explore "ideas worth spreading".  Sort of an evangelical intellectualism. Like Comic-Con, TED is so invigorating an experience that they have to turn people away from the conferences.  Thankfully they share the talks for free.

What we need are a few days every few years to gather all the imaginative thinkers and doers of the Episcopal Church under one roof and invite everyone who wants to come to come to share their successes and challenges. To come for inspiration and empowerment; to take what excites them and implement it when they go home.  Bring in our best people on scripture, history, moral and ethical theology, Theology, liturgy, theory and practice of ministry, contemporary issues, missiology, life long formation and etc. and have them run seminars and panels.  Bring in people with track records of making things happen to inspire others.  Bring in the "saints' who work among the Matthew 25 constituencies to teach and inspire.  

Think about what fours days of that might look like.  No particular structure, no agenda, just the thinkers and doers of the church sharing with those hungry to think more and do more. Add an exhibition hall of vendors hawking their goods.

During the course of that parallel gathering we would have present opportunities for attendees to help fund the programs that draw their attention.  We could video the panels and talks and make them avaialbe for congregational use, or stream them live as they happen through Ustream or another video sharing low cost option.

I think we might well discover the same explosion of energy and spirit that vibrates at TED and Comic-Con instead of appearing all too often as shell shocked zombies from the grinding schedule required to pass so much legislation.

Were we to restructure Gen-Con in this way, throwing open the widows and doors to bring in the incredible energy of our grassroots, we might well witness emergence as it happens towards a sustainable pattern for church life.

 

------And if we are going to resize or move to a unicameral body, my suggestion is: one Bishop, two clergy and four laity.  The option to vote by orders would be maintained with split votes counted as abstentions not "No".

The Institutional Scorpion

The scorpion wants to cross the river, but cannot swim.  Seeing a turtle floating in the shallows he asks to be ferried across the river.  Looking astounded the turtle replies, "But you're a scorpion, you would kill me!"

"No, no," the scorpion replies, "were I to kill you I would drown too."  Persuaded by this eminent logic the turtle offers him the ride.  

As he swims throught he deepest part of the river the scorpion's tail flashes forward stinging the turtle in the neck.  As he begins to freeze up and sink the turtle looks at the scorpion with pained surprise and cries, "But you promised. Now we'll both die."

"I know," says the scorpion, "but its my nature."

We live surrounded, embraced and even nurtured by institutional cultures. From total cultures like prisons to reasonably informal and partial cultures like clubs institutions develop cultures.  These cultures are more than the traditions, they are deeply ingrained psychologies of lateral allegiance.

They may carry out a mission, a business plan, or a service, but their deeper reality is that they exist to preserve the day to day denizens of the institution. And they will seek to preserve that culture even if it means the institution dies. It is no more malign a thing than the scorpion's sting; it is just their nature. For you postmoderns, think Matrix.

Institutional cultures natively seek to expand themselves and gather resources to themselves.  In doing this, even though they believe they are serving the mission, there is an underlying dynamic of preserve and protect life in the lunchroom and around the coffee pot.  Often times when jobs are eliminated the staff person who held the job will be shoehorned into other jobs even if ill suited for them, because we want to be nice. Restructuring is little more than redefining job descriptions to make them fit existing staff.

Every Rector and CEO knows the power of these internal cultures and knows that if they do not conform to them, the cultures will attack them, for the sake of self preservation.  Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was subsumed by the Lambeth Palace culture, which conformed him to it rather then the obverse. Again, there is no need to assign any malign intent to the actions, it is just their nature.  

The debacle of the EC and the staff is just such an example.  The EC moved to change the culture of having the staff propose and the EC rubber stamp a budget.  Somehow the staff could not interpret the EC's directions to them and produced a budget the EC says it did not recognize.  We heard of too many spreadsheets and too little time

Note that they did this even though the EC preserved all the staff positions. Their transgression was in trying to change the culture. Without breaking a sweat, however, the staff and the PB, who is part of that culture, produced a coherent and reasonably attractive budget that also preserved all the existing staff (cutting it seems 12.7 FTE of empty slots).

And now the institutional culture of General Convention is largely embracing the new and nice budget because of its seductive whispers of mission focus. And some voices are suggesting that other "angry voices" should calm down and trust and we should stop the hurt.

This too is institutional culture, and it is just its nature.  But its nature will kill us. We need to stop being the turtle.  We are expecting an institutional culture to be something it cannot be.  

It is not easy to break institutional cultures, we all know the power of "we've always done it this way".  But GC only meets every three years and unless we break it now we will just keep doing the same thing and expecting different results until TEC is gone. 

In this run up to GC there is not the slightest sign that anything nimble or adaptive is even on the screen.  The week's schedule is out and we have been invited to the PB&F hearings to discuss the content, but not the process of budget making.  Then dutifully we will vote on whatever PB&F final wisdom might be.  We will do the same with all the other Pink Book and subsequent resolutions that are submitted.  

Within the culture we will kvetch constantly about the rush, but do nothing about it.  We will not challenge the leadership to stand down from they way it always is and suspend business as usual.  We actually might just like being the turtle, for unlike the fable, we are resurrected after each drowning to come back and do it again.

 

 

Strategic Process part two

Lionel Deimel, one of our church's most passionate observers and commentators asked for more definition of Strategic Process. And though I am tempted to just ask, "What might it suggest to you?", he would see right through that. Here is a shot at a definition, but what is perhaps more helpful are the descriptive observations that follow it:

"A Strategic Process is a set of behaviors associated with discerning patterns of commitment and inspiration among one or more populations in order to develop resource clusters along the paths the groups are moving. A strategic process might have a meta-goal (Marks of Mission, Baptismal Covenant) but marshall's activity around supporting committed engaged groups without needing to create specific targets or outcomes."

Strategic process is grounded in listening and observing.  You listen to what people say, get them to tell you stories, ask what excites them and what challenges them. Gandhi famously spent his first year back in India doing nothing but listening and observing, it earned him the people's loyalty and trust. People will tell you everything when you leave them space. You are not listening to fix, but to hear.

A strategic process observes what people actually do.  If we presume, as I do along with Mr. Hooker, that God has built spiritual hunger into our very appetites, then eventually we will notice people feeding this hunger.  Right now there are uncountable numbers of teens and young adults using social media structures to raise funds and gather people for a variety of compassionate causes.  They have not the slightest need for us to plan something for them, because they can do it faster than we can plan it.

Follow the people and see how they do it.  Strategic process depends on understanding how small or large local successes are happening and assessing what is transferrable or not to other places.

Learn from how they network.  While I appreciate the bits of the PB's budget that talk about networking, people in the field are often already networked.

When people are stuck offer a hand not a plan.  There does not have to be a defined end to be achieved, journeying with people is more important than believing you are leading them.

Observe broader social and cultural patterns and trends and then place yourself or other resources in the direction they are heading.  Like the good souls who put water jugs along our side of the border we should be placing resources in schools, colleges and other events in the public square.

Plan to learn from people instead of making plans for people.  Gary Wills' "Uncertain Trumpets" has a powerful chapter comparing FDR with Adlai Stevenson.

Strategic process is patient and resilient and, dare I say, nimble and adaptive. Because it does not invest in an preplanned outcome (apart from the meta-outcome) it can help people appreciate that some things take time, require adapting to changing circumstances, or shifting to new ideas.  No part of it is failure since this nimbleness and patience is part of searching for the Holy Spirit's engagement.

We have this process actually going on in 1,000 places and a two tier GC as I propose would allow this generativity to celebrate, connect, collaborate and inspire.

 

We need a Strategic Process, not a strategic plan

I am not a fan of strategic planning.  For the most part such plans, however elegant and well prepared, find themselves overtaken by events.  Like mission statements and vision statements they use up a lot of time and energy in order to languish on a shelf.  Even when input is solicited from a constituency if the question is "What do you think we should be doing?" the most likely outcome of that are "mom, flag and apple pie" answers.

The Episcopal Church's strategic planning efforts resulted in "A Decade of Evangelism" and "20/20" which was aimed at doubling the size of the church by that date. Both were stillborn and then ignored because there was no grassroots buy in.

In the present moment strategic plans are hindered by the speed of change. Five years ago there were no smartphones, devices that are now so deeply penetrated into the world market and culture that revolutions are being run through them.  (Some of us geezers will remember that the Polish Spring uprisings were fueled by the fax machine!) iPad and/or tablet computing will change how we process information and book reading will move to digital devices.  Cable television, which eclipsed the former Network powers is now being eclipsed by other providers and we know not how that will sort out.  Social media is morphing faster than anyone can keep up; by the time Facebook gots its IPO out there it was already being eclipsed by other social media systems.

Oh, and by the way big corporate planning and big centralized "research" are being eclipsed by tinkerers with tools. A 15 year old High School freshman just developed an early detection cancer device that has  $50 Home Depot electric meter at its core! 

And the relgious/spirituality world is shifting about just as rapidly.  

 So the one thing we can be assured of if we go down the Strategic Plan road is that it will be useless once it's finished. And our track record just confirms it. So why go there at all.

What we need instead is Strategic Process. Such a process does a number things: it attunes itself to what is going on around it and it deploys resources in small bundles to groups of people who are actually doing something that is resonating locally.  Some of what resonates in local areas may be more generally applicable, but the key question is, does it resonate with another group of people in another place? 

What counts in strategic process is not the mom-flag-apple-pie of what we "should" be doing, but the true grit of what people are passionate enough for that they are already committing their time and resources to it.  Ideally they might never even need Central Funding. While strategic planning creates a framework made up by experts and invites people to come play some defined role; strategic process backs up and publicizes those things that are already working in local areas so that good ideas might go viral within our extended family.

Strategic plans are about control, strategic processes are about inspired collaborations. Gamaliel and Dick Gregory were both correct. If it is of God it will thrive and you don't have to shove it down people's throats they will steal it.  I would suggest that strategic plans are born of anxiety and need for justification by having a measurable outcomes.  Strategic processess are born of passion and commitment and have no needful interest in measuring outcomes, gauging success via participation not numbers.  Plans are time stamped, processess wait for the fullness of time. Plans are more rigid, processes more flexible.

At General Convention I submit that Strategic Planners will be sitting in the HoD and HoB, but the strategic process folks will be on the Exhibition Floor.* If we want to restructure perhaps we ought to have a dual track General Convention structure. On one track will be the governance wonks who will make sure that our Canons and other governance structures are coherent and consistent.  That track will have elected deputies and bishops perhaps even meeting unicamerally.  The parallel General Convention will be one that gathers anyone who wants to come to be inspired by what others are actually doing to "represent" Christ our world.  It will be a place where cross pollination happens, spirits are stimulated, where successes are shared and failures mulled over and doable low-funding needed plans exchanged.

Think of it as a Comic-Con for the faithful.  Y'all know Comic-Con, right? 150,00 people spending their own money to immerse themselves for four almost round the clock days of seminars, screenings, gaming, mingling with celebrities and talking about good, evil, heroic quests and the Dark Knight of the soul.  People from infants to nonagenarians collaborating in the spread of ideas. I staff Comic-con each summer and will miss most of this year's because of Gen-Con. But imagine all those people, on their own nickels enthused about powerful ideas and metaphors, gathering triennially to talk about our life in Christ. THAT is strategic process.

Imagine if our Faith-Con could bring together all the doers and inspirers for even four days and just let them mingle.  God knows what might happen!

 

* One of the shames of the past few conventions is that exhibition hours hardly allow time for people to mingle and process on the floor. As an exhibitor at three GC's I have been appalled at the operative notion that restricts exhibitors in order to keep people in their seats on the floor.  That is testimony enough to the paucity of our process. 

 

 

I'd Like the Truth, Please

We now have wildly different versions of events from the Presiding Bishop, the Chief Operating Officer, Katie Sherrod and other members of Executive Council.  

I expect all politicians to lie, but I do not expect leaders of my church to "spin" events to their own purposes.  What we have here is the perfect post-modern meltdown, I suppose, in which multiple perspectives are somehow masked as truth.  It is one of the reasons that postmodernism is so unsatisfying, it allows saints and sinners to all cloak themselves in notions of personal truths.  

As a deputy I have am deeply aggrieved that there are multiple versions of the truth of the genesis of the various budgets.  I am sickened to think it possible that one part of our church sabotaged another, presumably with the best interests of The Episcopal Church at heart. 

If I had my way I'd fire everyone and start over.  I do not want to waste the time it would take to adjudicate the competing claims. To everyone in our leadership I say.... own what you did or get out.

To my colleagues in the House of Deputies I say, let's take it away from them all and dictate to them what they will do. It would be great if the House of Bishops helped, but frankly we cannot allow this to go on.

As much as I think we need to reduce the Central Office staff it sickens me that they are caught in the middle of this internecine battle.  I have no time to parse out why this battle is happening and I do not care. Settle it before July 5th or resign, all of you.

I do not believe any of the budget figures we now have from any source.  I do not believe the projections of income and I do not believe in the constructs for expenditures.  Gomer Pyle famously said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." At the moment we are on Fool me 1.5.

It is scandalous that we walk into this General Convention with the possibility that all of our leaders have misled us. My Vestry and I do not lead the parish this way and I do not expect the muckity-mucks of our church to lead the church this way.  

I can not, in good conscience, recommend to anyone that they entrust any money to this enterprise. I have a dozen or more better, more transparent and responsible places, to give my cash than to put it into TEC coffers.

There are about ten days still we start meeting.  More than enough time to own up. A the moment, I can trust none of our elected muckity-mucks.  

A Nimble and Adaptive Fix for the Budget

At our deputation meeting Thursday, my Bishop challenged me to make more specific proposals for changing the budget than I had in my posting that morning.  This is always a fair challenge and so here are my suggestions in the form of a Nimble and Adaptive Budget Proposal.

One of the complaints all of us budget-reducers hear and one that has also been used as a critique of the Executive Committee is that we cannot possibly have enough expertise to make micro decisions about so complex and detailed a document.

So I won't.  But here is what we can do at GC.

We can tell them they will have to cut line 381-Total Staff by 25% for the triennium.  Such a cut does not have to be draconian, nor do people have to be fired at General Convention.  The current three year staff total is $52 million or $17.33 million a year.  I propose that we cut that three year budget by 25% to $39 million.  The Executive Council would then have a number of options.  They could begin some cuts immediately that would give people five months to look for new work.  Or they could choose to spend say $15 mil 2012, $13 mil in 2014 and $11 mil in 2015 for a gentle descent from the current level of staffing.  

We have no need to micro manage, we can leave the staff shrinking to them. I would couple this with responsibly funding a Development Office whose goal would be to generate endowment income streams towards programs goals that current staff may well be suited to fill.  In the short term, roles which the EC (which includes the PB and PHoD of course) deems very important could be offered to the broader church through an Episcopal program like Kickstarter.  

All of us who love the advocacy programs, for example, could donate directly to the Fund for Advocacy and Public Policy.  Indeed each of the Five Marks of Mission could have a short term Kickstarter style Fund set up to attract donors who really think those program ideas are sweet with the eventual hope that the Development Office would create the needful endowment income stream.

So if all these folks with great ideas for the Development Office and for these Marks of Mission budgeting really really want them, then they will have to enter the "Nimble and Adaptive Games" in which they rally support for their programs and work or collect unemployment on the basis of their ability to convince donors to donate.

We say we want to be nimble and adaptive; my proposal gives those in charge and those whom they have employed a chance to shine and show off their nimble and adaptive skills.  If they can't, then it is probably a good thing to let the sun set on their empoyment in our Central Office.

Part of the beauty of my proposal is that all of this could be set up at GC and ready to go just afterwards.  And we who are charged with these responsiblities can go to a single place and see how well these programs proposals are resonating among our public within and without the Church family. Consider too that Diocesan Conventions could then allocate portions of their giving to Central to programs that engage their passions.  And by publicizing the varied Kickstarter projects individuals could give.  All these new donors become leads for....  you guessed it ...... The new Devlopement Office.

In addition, not only is there a six to eighteen month cushion before cuts have to happen, when those cuts do happen the resulting savings in various related expenses could permissibly be used to slow the staff reductions a bit.

This is no different than the Vestry and I have to do each year with Stewardship.  We either make our case or not, grow or adapt.  The Central Office has gotten "used" to funding for which they do not have to make a compelling case. As I said at the beginning the only case we have seen at the last two GCs is that we need to fund the budget they hand us, or else.

My Nimble and Adaptive Budget proposal will create a passion driven funding experience in which programs that actually engage the passions of grassroots or Dioceses will have the funding to exist through the Central Office.  It preserves funding (at the same or reduced levels depending on the EC's decision) for the non-passion inspiring Canonical and hopefully reduced Administrative portions of the budget.  

Although I prefer not to see any of the $6 mil Marks of Mission Cash Splash go to Central Office staffing, my N&A Budget proposal does not prohibit that. 

So there you have it, an alternative to simply bellyaching, one that challenges and tests our Central Office and the entire Church to see if we can really be nimble and adpative.  

Post Script

I hear too that the PB&F hearings may include some table discussions.  I would invite PB&F, upon which my bishop sits, to use my earlier passion driven mission proposal I shared with the HoBD list to invite people to sit at tables that represent their passions, much like a caucus does.  That way the PB&F would have a visual display or where the Deputies' and Bishops' passions rest.  I still think we could do such an exercise on the floor of Convention to quickly see how the room splits out on Passion for Mission.

 

Who Knew a Budget Could Be So Easy?!?!

Who knew?  By borrowing a page from the best politician's playbook the Presiding Bishop has produced a budget that has people fawning over it.  What page did she borrow?  The one where you throw money at popular items to curry support.  And while I am a big fan of pork in almost all its cooked incarnations, it remains true however that when you dress up and put lipstick on a pig it is still a pig.  And so it is with this budget.

Now I like the Presiding Bishop and I am glad she put a reasonably competent budget together inthe wake of the disaster of the Executive Committee (EC) budget.  I don't really care whether or not she has the canonical right to do this and I truly pray this is not some part of a deeper political machination to make us a more Bishop driven church (which would simply leave us more purplexed than we are). But apart from some nifty window dressing there is not a dime's worth of difference between this budget and the EC budget.  Both budgets failed to reduce Central staff.

The smoke and mirrors of this budget is in her reframing of it in terms of the very popular Five Marks of Mission.  I like them too.  But what happens next is the problem.  The PB simply throws cash into four of the five pots without any indication of a strategy for implementation other than to trust management. 

Mark One: Proclaim the Good News gets $2 million for Church Planting (line 21).  While church planting is great, actual experienced church planters might well chuckle at how little money $2 million is for a sixteen nation Church.  But beyond that, is church planting the best way to proclaim the Good News?   We might want to ask whether or not having a coherent message would be better, presented in a way that actually seems to attract folks or even gets out to them.  Line 55 budgets $6.7 millions dollars for communications staff and to be honest I have no idea what they are doing to get our message out in any effective way to the wider world.  That may be my fault, but I am a Rector, Deputy, Standing Committee member and Nerd so not to get my attention is pretty hard.  And indeed it is their job to GET my attention because if they cannot get mine how will they get the public's?

Mark Two: Teach Baptize and Nurture New Belivers: Line 61 tosses $1 million into strengthening Province IX towards sustainability; a worthy goal.  And there appears to be a plant to support for this in that region.  In this same area the PB refunds other Christian formation programs that the EC bduget pushed down toawrds localities.  Frankly making them more local was okay by me because there is no history of effective centralized programming in this area.  

Mark Three: Respond to Human needs in loving service.  In Line 79 the budget tosses $1 million towards "Making Missionary service available for all Episcopal Young People."  Good idea, no plan, trust Central, unacceptable.  Why not just put that million into line 81 the Episcopal Service Corps which has been so important that the EC and PB budget only put $200,000 there.  I think this goal is great and I support it, I just think unfocused cash is a sop not a plan.

Mark Four: Seek to change unjust structures.  Line 108 puts a million dollars here and talks about creating a network of responders. We already have a network of responders called parishes.  And while they generally prefer service to advocacy, none the less we have a fine history of advocacy without central direction. Line 108 is not a plan we need.  This section already has staff costs of $2 million dollars and is a popular area among Deputies.  

Mark Five: Strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. Line 122 tosses $1 million to facillitate networks and do more advocacy.  Sounds great in a vague sort of way.  We could spend the million helping every parish we have become more green and have a bigger impact on the environment.  Instead of a network, how about loans to congregations for green improvements.  The repayment of those loans becomes a perpetual income stream to futher the work. (This is a principle of the development plant Bp. Mathes has created for San Diego, recirculating money)

So here is the essence of most of these Marks: more central staff.  Yes, Yes, they tell us they are cutting 13 staff positions, but when you get to line 381 the cost of staff under the PB's budget is $720,000 higher than current actual for 2010-2012 and $566,000 higher than the EC budget!  But wait there's more! With $5 million in unfocused new spending ($6 mil if you could Mark Two which is getting spent in Province IX, but actually has a plan) you can be sure that given the tendency of both these budgets it will translate into more jobs at Central.  

More jobs at Central and more money for staff there is the wrong direction to go.  The increase in staff costs is still AFTER lines 310, 315 and 333 which promise 5% reduction in governance costs amounting to about $1.3 million.  That $1.3 is not coming from cutting more staff since line 381 grows and all current staff are insured a 2% increase each year.  

What we have here is an entrenched institutional staff structure that has not produced results with visible impact in the life of the Church. The standard set was for the Central staff to do things that could not be efficiently done at more local levels and I would submit that it simply doesn't do this.

It has not produced a coherent compelling message about life in Christ along the Episcopal Way and it has not produced a visible presence in the broader public sphere. The Central staff has not produced materials or programs that have the vast bulk of the church standing in line to get at them.  Were it not for the Huffington Post we might have no media exposure at all!

I am not trying to be cruel, but what we have has not been working.  And our structure problem is not how many deputies there are or the length or cost of General Convention.  Our problem is the problem of all bureaucracies whose inherent nature is to increase themselves and protect themselves from meddling by hoi polloi.  We have four times the staff for one half the population served (since 1960).  So the restructuring we need is to do is in the size of the Central Administration.  And as hard as it might be, by cutting lots out there we might well discover that no one misses it.  

So please, lets wake up from the glitter bomb of the Marks of Mission Cash Toss and ask the hard questions about the need for $52 million dollars in Central Staff. 

A Post Script

1) Why in the world is the PC increasing spending on the Anglican Communion?  While cutting money to the secretariat in line 193 by 60% she adds $700,000 to our staff costs in line 196.  What will those staff do?

2)  I also wonder why we are putting all our MDG eggs in one basket in line 81 with $2.4 million just for Haiti.  I appreciate that his could leverage more giving, but there are places in the world and goals of the MDG which have more desparate need.  10 million children die each year from preventable causes.  The single best element for development is related to improving the status of women and world wide women and children are still the principal victims.  I would like us to discuss this some more and not just plop it all in one place.

The long failure of the Barthian/Christian Realist Experiment

Last year the retiring Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright pronounced the failure of the Enlightenment Experiment.  He stands in a line of folks who, since the Enlightenment itself, have formed a Counter-Enlightenment out of the offense they took at Reason's elevation and a heightened appreciation of human capacity to make progress and reduce suffering.

The Enlightenment tooled along its motto was "Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better."  The optimism produced by scientific achievement invigorated the western world until it was interrupted by the first world war. In the midst of its horrendous destruction Karl Barth wrote his magisterial work on Paul's letter to the Romans.  His powerful tome galvanized the Counter Enlightenment into a movement called Neo-Orthodoxy whose reply to the Enlightenment was "Oops, you forgot sin. We can't get better every day in every way because we are too depraved to succeed."  Among those who fell under was Reinhold Niebuhr who moved from Christian Socialism to Christian Realism.  Ethicists like Paul Ramsey fell under this sway as well.

N.T. Wright is but the latest of the intellects to take on the Enlightenment, using his weight to press back against people trusting too much in reason, progress, or the capacity of people to choose the good and reject the bad.

Just as Barth's "Epistle to the Romans" created nearly 100 years of dreary theology that undercut optimism about the human condition a  new book has burst upon the scene that puts fresh light into the Enlightenment optimism. Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature" is a long and detailed look at the progressive and consistent reduction of violence among human beings.

In short, despite the eruption of the "Hemoclysm" of two World Wars, everything HAS gotten better in every way at least within societies that have benefited from the "better angels".  He lists six trends that form our better angels:  a Pacification Process that spanned millennia, The Civilizing Process that spanned centuries, The Humanitarian Revolution, The Long Peace (after WWII), the New Peace of decreasing violence in all arenas since then and finally the "Rights Revolution".  

The Angels that support it are empathy, self control, moral sense and reason.  In combination with historical forces of a centralized state, commerce, feminization, cosmopolitanism and, he writes, "Finally, an intesifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason -- can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won."  (Kindle location 242)

Pinker investigates all of these with a very intense application of knowledge and reason, including the use of very contemporary data mining techniques to produce a readable and exciting exploration of the themes listed above.  While I am only about a third of the way into the book, I am predicting that this work could well transform the conversation N.T. Wright and others are now generating to undercut Enlightenment sensibilities.

Those of us who are tired of the neo-orthodox constant humanity bashing and sin wallowing will find this a heartening work, not because it denies sinfulness and evil, but because it discusses how humanity has used what God planted in us to move from violent anarchy to a world where both Reason and Love can work in concert with Revelation.

Buy the book and read it.