Since I spoke out in the Oct. 15 issue of the Religious Herald expressing my concerns with the proposed 2013 Baptist General Association of Virginia budget, it is only fitting that I express my appreciation for the budget committee’s willingness to take another look at its proposal and return with revisions. Their’s is a thankless task — especially when finances are so tight and the needs are so great.
As reported in the Oct. 29 Herald, the budget committee revised its allocations for some partner agencies to lessen the reductions of the earlier version. In some instances the initial 2013 budget had reduced 2012 BGAV partner allocations catastrophically.
Jim White
|
Their task was made marginally easier when Woman’s Missionary Union of Virginia voluntarily cut its own allocation from $406,000 to $395,000, when Virginia Baptist Mission Board treasurer Eddie Stratton made adjustments in business services and when the Herald chose to decline a budget committee offer to add $12,287 to the proposed $108,000 allocation. The 2012 budget provided $215,675. As I told budget committee chairman David Washburn, “When you’re faced with having to raise $107,000 more than you expected, every $12,000 is very significant.” But I had stated that I did not want my concerns about the proposed budget to be construed as a plea for additional funds for the Herald and therefore I believed we should not accept more. I felt bound by my word.
Perhaps the budget revisions are enough to avoid a challenge from the floor at the coming BGAV meeting in Roanoke, Nov. 13-14. Regardless, I believe Ron Crawford, president of Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, is correct in questioning the budget process.
Before I explain why, some background information is essential. The Baptist General Association of Virginia consists of the churches that voluntarily cooperate in Kingdom advancing ministries. In a technical sense, the BGAV exists only once a year when messengers from these cooperating churches meet in annual session, but in reality the BGAV exists year round in the cooperating churches. Early in its life, the BGAV sent missionaries to spread the gospel throughout the state. To manage the missionaries, the BGAV organized a Mission Board made up of people from BGAV churches. The mission of the BGAV is achieved in some cases by partnering agencies and institutions and in other cases by people employed by this Mission Board. To complicate easy comprehension, the early missionaries have evolved to become the current employees of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. The VBMB is overseen by but different from the Mission Board’s governing body. To distinguish between the two, I’ll refer to the people chosen from the churches to direct the work of the VBMB as the “board of directors.” The employees of the VBMB make up five different teams to accomplish their part of the BGAV mission. The board of directors is divided into five committees, each assigned to work with one of the five teams of the VBMB.
During the budget planning cycle, the partners submit budget requests to one of those five committees assigned to receive their requests. Agency representatives meet for a few minutes with a committee on a day set aside for that purpose and at the end of the day each committee makes budget recommendations for their assigned partners. They do this without knowing what other committees are recommending and, largely, without understanding the inner workings of the agencies for which they submit funding requests.
The BGAV budget committee then takes the committee requests, evaluates them and develops a budget which it then reports to the Mission Board’s board of directors for feedback and then to the BGAV at the annual meeting for adoption. Ideally, since the BGAV executive director and treasurer are also the executive director and treasurer for the VBMB, these individuals consider the needs of all partner entities in formulating the proposed budget.
Why does this process need revision? Let me count the ways.
1. The board of directors’ committees that make recommendations to the budget committee operate blindly. They have no way of knowing what other committees are recommending for other partner agencies. They can see and consider only their small part of the whole. Yet these are the only avenues of input for partner organizations. Since the recommendations are made without any sense of the whole, the committee recommendations are largely pointless and futile. This would be akin to a church property and grounds committee receiving a budget request from the choir and the RAs and GAs, then making budget recommendations to the stewardship committee.
2. The BGAV budget committee (which includes the chairpersons of the five board of directors’ committees) receives the recommendations, deliberates and creates a BGAV budget which it proposes for the coming year. The committee is not bound by budgets adopted by the BGAV in previous years and conceivably could, as was true this year, reduce allocations drastically. The timing of the process could be calamitous because with virtually no warning a partner’s budget may be slashed, leaving it less than two months to revise its own budget for the next fiscal year and try to discover whether alternate sources of funding can be found. For partners that depend heavily on Cooperative Missions support, this could be disastrous.
3. The process requires no communication with partner agencies in developing the budget to discover what impact major allocation cuts will have on their ministries. One could argue that the process assumes this, but lacking specific direction, budget committees have not asked for input or feedback.
4. The process does not allow for any comprehensive multi-year planning in budget allocations, and prevents partners from planning ahead with any certainty. As Crawford pointed out, “Is it asking too much for us to have a respectful conversation and plan together to reach a mutually agreeable timetable …? Or are BTSR and other partners simply at the mercy of whomever is on the budget committee in any particular year? Why can’t partners and BGAV leaders sit together and plan out a mutual future?”
5. Apparently it is easy for the budget committee to forget that the churches are giving through Cooperative Missions to all BGAV entities and not just to the VBMB.
Clearly we have a lot to think about.
Jim White ([email protected]) is executive editor of the Religious Herald.