Explanation

A stated goal at this General Convention has been to find ways to renew and strengthen our connections with Voorhees College and St. Augustine’s University, the Episcopal HBCUs. We’re also looking for active, anti-racist ways to live into unity and trust with one another. One way to begin accomplishing these things could be entrusting control of some of our budget to students there. Prudence suggests that we should start with a pilot program, and programmatic nimbleness suggests that our triennial General Convention may not be the best funding source long-term, so the budget request is for $500 each for 20 students at each institution, with the working plan that any continuation would be grant-supported from outside sources. Typical stewardship of any endowment seeks first to sustain or grow the principal, but only secondarily tends to the development of those who will be entrusted with the endowment’s mission. This second sort of stewardship—which grows capacity, confidence, and imagination for engaging in God’s work—must also be addressed, or the church will find itself plenty rich in money, but poor and stagnant in its uses. Consider the parable of the talents: The work the master wants accomplished needs both money and entrepreneurial workers. Without those workers, the master’s journeying away to attend to other matters would yield the same results as burying the money. In our church, those workers aren’t a given, and our leadership’s attention is almost constantly being called away to other matters. We need to tend to our body to make sure we are raising new workers up, and to tend to our senses of what “stewardship” is so that we watch our progress in that regard as closely as our balance sheet. While many approaches exist to do that capacity-building, they are most often offered to people who already have a fair amount of social capital and financial/ministerial capacity. We need to work on entrusting a portion of our mission to the judgement of unexpected ministers. A model for thinking this way and beginning this work is offered by the example of LaSalle Street Church in Chicago. About five years ago, LaSalle (a congregation of about 300 people) received a financial windfall of $1.6 million when a community housing building it held a minority stake in was sold. Like most congregations that size, there were plenty of things LaSalle needed or wanted, and deciding how to spend or save the money became a consuming, distracting question. Not least as a spiritual exercise, the board and pastor decided to tithe from the windfall by entrusting every single member of the congregation with a check for $500 and the broad instruction to do some good with it. Some members supported local or international non-profits, some gave to an acquaintance in need, some banded together to try something bigger with 20 or 30 people’s shares, and some took care of their own urgent needs. Each member, though, was empowered in a new and moving way: The church leadership trusted them. Needed their ideas. Needed their perspective. Needed the lessons and insights they would give back to the church at the close of the project. Seen only as a capacity-building exercise, it would have been incredibly expensive. But seen as vital mission work, the cost was just as well-spent as the rest of the budget, with the added outcome of helping congregants see themselves as ministers and learn to take that responsibility seriously.