RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Baptists will be asked next month to adopt a budget for 2011 that is $650,000 lower than current budget allocations, bringing the spending plan closer to anticipated receipts next year.
The proposed 2011 budget of $13,350,000, unveiled by the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s budget committee Oct. 12, is 4.6 percent less than this year’s $14 million budget. Because of the way the budget is divided among state, national and international causes, allocations for most Virginia ministries actually will be reduced by about 10.8 percent. (To see the complete proposed budget, click here.)
Budget committee chair Jim Slatton
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But BGAV treasurer Eddie Stratton anticipates contributions from affiliated churches this year to fall far short of the $14 million goal. Total contributions likely will be anywhere from $12.8 million to $13 million, he said, and receipts in 2011 will be about the same.
“For several years the strategy has been to aim more toward a challenge budget, and the committee was of a mind that we not do that this year,” said Jim Slatton, chair of the BGAV budget committee. “We wanted to be as realistic as possible and bring the budget more in line with receipts. The proposed budget is still beyond what we may receive in 2011.”
Messengers will vote on the budget during the BGAV’s annual meeting in Hampton, Nov. 9-10.
Slatton, retired pastor of River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond, said the budget committee regretted proposing a reduced budget, but said in the face of a deep recession and slow recovery, church contributions had dropped.
“All this is done in an attempt to get us closer to actual receipts,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me that challenge budgets have been particularly effective in raising revenue. And that being so, and realizing churches are making the same kinds of decisions, it was felt we should budget more realistically.
“We didn’t take all the challenge out of it. We would be thrilled if next year’s revenues came in above expenditures.”
Mission Board request
Slatton presented the proposal to the Virginia Baptist Mission Board during its Oct. 12-13 meeting at Eagle Eyrie Baptist Conference Center near Lynchburg, Va. The Mission Board is not authorized to approve BGAV budgets, but budget committees are required to present their proposals to the board for “information and counsel.”
This year the Mission Board took the unusual step of requesting the budget committee to increase the allocation for Woman’s Missionary Union of Virginia to the 2010 level — a request the budget committee honored a few days later by adding $50,000 to its overall budget proposal.
In the original proposal presented to the Mission Board, WMUV’s allocation was reduced by the same 10.8 percent applied to most Virginia ministries, dropping WMUV’s allocation from $510,000 to $454,485.
WMUV president Ann Brown, who serves as a member of the Mission Board and saw the proposed allocation for the first time during the Oct. 12 budget presentation, told board members she and other WMUV leaders were “shocked to discover we had been cut by $55,000.”
That was at odds with “covenants and verbal agreements” which commit the BGAV to providing 100 percent of WMUV’s operating expenses, she said.
Brown was referring to decades-old agreements which transferred the Alma Hunt Offering for State Missions — created and initially administered by WMUV — to shared administration with the BGAV. In return for WMUV’s reduced role in determining offering allocations — which had included funding for WMUV’s operational expenses as well as its projects and ministries — the BGAV agreed to provide funding for operations.
“I am thankful the BGAV and WMUV are partners …,” said Brown. “The BGAV funds our operational expenses at 100 percent, the WMU shares our offering with the BGAV. WMU has agreed not to go to churches to ask for direct funds. Instead we go to churches and actively encourage them to give to Virginia missions. This is detailed in our covenant and in verbal agreements. … We have honored this covenant.”
David Turbyfill, a Danville, Va., pastor who chairs the Mission Board’s glocal missions and evangelism committee, stressed the importance of those agreements and moved that the board request the budget committee to restore WMUV’s $55,515. The motion was adopted.
Budget committee members said they affirmed all BGAV-WMUV agreements, but maintained the documents did not guarantee WMUV would always receive 100 percent of its budget request, citing a BGAV constitutional provision that “allocations in any year’s budget are contingent upon availability of funds through gifts from the churches.”
“The WMU is a highly-prized part of the BGAV family,” said Slatton in an interview. “But the ability of the General Association to maintain a given level of support depends on the receipts of the churches.”
He noted that while most Virginia ministries had been reduced equally by 10.8 percent, a few ministries had received deeper cuts — though not WMUV.
“Generally speaking, we tried to do across the board percentage reductions to get to the lower budget figure,” he said. “But we also made some hard choices about the degree of support for some specific partners. … In point of fact, four of our partners took reductions in excess of the proportional rollback. The WMU was not included in this. Their rollback was simply proportional.”
Nevertheless, said Slatton, the budget committee wanted be “sensitive to the intentions and wishes of the General Association and consider the Mission Board’s request.”
“The vote to reconsider [the WMUV allocation] was a strong majority and we took that as an indication that it might be the same [at the BGAV annual meeting].”
The budget committee met after the Mission Board adjourned, polled its members and agreed to increase the overall budget proposal by $50,000. Based on the formula that distributes funds among state, national and international ministries, that provided an additional $34,000 to WMUV’s allocation.
World mission percentages
The proposed 2011 budget allocates $9,612,000 to Virginia missions and ministries and $3,738,000 to world mission causes. It continues to offer churches three pre-set giving tracks and a fourth customized option, all of which divide funds between Virginia ministries and national and international causes.
The percentage divisions in the pre-set giving tracks remain unchanged:
• The World Missions 1 track provides 66 percent for Virginia ministries and 34 percent for Southern Baptist Convention ministries.
• The World Missions 2 track provides 72 percent for Virginia ministries and 28 percent for a combination of Virginia, SBC and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship ministries.
• The World Missions 3 track provides 72 percent for Virginia ministries and 28 percent for CBF ministries.
The customized plan allows churches to select or delete any item in WM1, WM2 or WM3 and adjust percentages to reflect their own priorities.
While most Virginia allocations in the proposed budget were reduced proportionately, there were exceptions:
• The Virginia Baptist Foundation is reduced by 49 percent above its 10.8 percent reduction, from $91,000 to $41,094. “That cut reflects the budget committee’s confidence in the Foundation’s ability to find other revenue streams,” said Slatton. In addition, he noted, last spring the Mission Board transferred about $6 million in funds that had been managed by a financial institution to the Foundation. The Foundation’s standard fees for managing $6 million total about $33,000 — in part making up for the funding lost in the reduced budget, Slatton said.
• The Virginia Baptist Mission Board is reduced by 2.4 percent, from $6,698,508 to $6,538,074. The Mission Board has taken many of the heaviest budget cuts in recent years, Slatton said, and is currently receiving about $500,000 less than it was in 2003. “We wanted to protect it from even heavier reductions,” he said.
• Funds for subscriptions to the Religious Herald for pastors and other key church leaders were reduced from $40,000 to $15,000 and limited to pastors. Slatton said that, while it was important for all church leaders to receive the Baptist paper, the committee felt those leaders should bear that cost.
• Two line items — the executive director’s office and the treasurer’s office — were slightly increased. Slatton said that reflected salary adjustments mandated by the Mission Board’s executive committee at the end of 2009, after the 2010 budget had been completed. The Mission Board funded those adjustments for a year through its other revenue streams, but Slatton said they needed to be reflected in the 2011 budget.
• The allocation for stewardship education was kept at $93,134, but moved from a separate line item under BGAV support ministries to the empowering leaders team of the Mission Board, which already was administering those funds.
Percentage allocations in the world mission giving tracks remained the same, with two exceptions, both in World Mission 2 — the percentage for Ministering to Ministers, an agency which works closely with ministers who have been fired by churches, was increased from 2 to 3; and the Baptist Center for Ethics, a Nashville-based advocacy group, was reduced from 3 to 2.
If the budget is fully funded, that represents an increase for Ministering to Ministers of about $14,250, for a total of about $42,750; and a decrease for the Baptist Center for Ethics by $14,250, to a total of about $28,500.
Robert Dilday is managing editor of the Religious Herald.