Putting Its House in Order

Ecumenical coalition seeks to broaden support, restore faith

A half century after its formation and decades removed from its heyday as

a leading voice of the civil-rights era, one of the United States’ largest religious alliances is trying to regain its former stature as a force of Christian unity and social change.

The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., which represents about 50 million congregants in 36 mainline Protestant, historically black Protestant, and Orthodox denominations, is mounting a multimillion-dollar fund-raising effort as it seeks to stake out a new future.

The organization has adopted a dual agenda that its leaders hope will revive the council’s influence and put it once again on the front lines of social change. It is seeking to broaden its constituency beyond its core base of Protestants to include Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and conservative evangelicals. And it is inviting Christian churches of all theological and ideological persuasions to work together to fight domestic poverty.

The Rev. Robert W. Edgar, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who became the council’s general secretary last year, says one of the organization’s biggest challenges is to restore its reputation as a key advocate of equality and social justice. In recent decades the council’s influence has faded as its mission and message became less sharp.

“My critique of the national council in its last five years is that it has been all over the map,” he says. “People could not say what its identity is.”

So far, Mr. Edgar and other council officials have provided few details of the group’s ecumenism and anti-poverty efforts, though they say they are seeking the views of a wide range of Christian groups, including ones that don’t belong to the council.

Whether the efforts will succeed depends in part on the ability of the traditionally left-leaning council to foster better relations between liberal and conservative Christians who disagree on issues like female ordination and the union of gay couples.

Indeed, the council’s most vocal critics contend that its expanded ecumenical efforts are motivated not by a zeal for inclusiveness, but by a desire to secure the organization’s future.

“When we hear of the national council wanting to reach out, we ask: Do they really want to listen to the groups that they have chilled out in the past?” says the Rev. James V. Heidinger II, president of Good News, a theologically conservative movement within the United Methodist Church. “Or are they really looking for some new means of survival and funding?”

Mr. Edgar, whose previous job was as president of Claremont School of Theology, in California, which he helped to rehabilitate after a pair of financial scandals, rejects such comments as cynical and unfair. He says that the council’s ecumenism goals are much broader, and much loftier, than the well-being of the group. “Our vocational call is not to fix the national council, but to do what is right in restarting and re-energizing the ecumenical commitment,” he says.

New Identity

Clearly, though, the council’s ability to jump-start the ecumenical movement hinges largely on reviving its own fortunes.

Among the challenges the council faces is figuring out how to carve out a new identity in the wake of a split last year from Church World Service, a 55-year-old international relief organization that accounted for up to 85 percent of the national council’s revenue and expenses.

For decades, Church World Service had helped to give the council name recognition in local churches and other venues. But the relationship between the two groups was often dogged by rancor and mistrust.

Church World Service had long argued that it was paying the national council too much in management fees. The national council, on the other hand, argued that it didn’t charge Church World Service enough to cover the cost of overseeing its far-flung relief operation.

Besides learning to live without the name recognition that it gained from its prior relationship with Church World Service, the national council also must restore faith in its management methods, which some people in its member denominations have criticized as disorganized and wasteful.

Still fresh in some members’ minds is an episode from the mid-1990’s, when the council lost $3-million of an $8-million investment with the Bank of Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, and spent several million more on a consultant who was brought in partly to figure out ways to prevent another such episode.

Facing a budget shortfall of at least $4-million at the end of 1999, the council — under both Mr. Edgar and his predecessor, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell — cut 40 of its 90 staff members, imposed a special fee of $1.45-million on Church World Service, and asked its member denominations, which contribute about $1.6-million to the council each year for overhead, for $2-million more in debt relief.

The denominations came through, but not without a fight. The United Methodist Church, for example, gave $700,000 to the council, but required it to repay $400,000 of the sum plus 7 percent interest.

Seeking Donations

To reduce its dependency on dues from member denominations and management fees from its divisions, the council now is putting its faith in fund raising.

Council officials say that five years from now, they want the organization to be receiving $2-million annually from individual contributors and $10-million a year from a combination of foundation and corporate gifts, plus government grants for social-service programs. The council now receives less than $1-million from foundations and nothing from companies or the government.

Mr. Edgar also wants to build a $25-million endowment in the next decade. Currently, the group has a $4-million non-endowment reserve fund, which, Mr. Edgar says, has shrunk in value from $24-million since 1994.

The council thus far has received $100,000 in donations from two direct-mail appeals it sent out last fall to individual donors, and officials expect $2.5-million in foundation grants this year.

Among those the group is contacting for donations are Mr. Edgar’s former political supporters. It also is working with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Foundation to establish a planned-giving program to encourage bequests and other planned gifts.

Key to the council’s fund-raising success, says John A. Briscoe, who joined the council as development director last summer, will be its ability to become a clearinghouse of information and resources to help churches and other nonprofit groups carry out social programs.

“We are a national network of 140,000 churches,” he says. “What we need to do is get the word out that we are an organization with 140,000 local affiliates, and that’s 140,000 reasons to support us.”

Mr. Briscoe envisions the council helping to promote programs sponsored not only by churches, but by nonprofit groups such as the Children’s Defense Fund and Habitat for Humanity International.

While mounting an aggressive fund-raising effort could help put the council on a stronger financial foundation, the move also could backfire, some observers say. The council, they point out, could wind up vying with its member denominations and their local congregations for donations. Denomination officials are circumspect in discussing that issue, but they concede privately that concerns do exist.

Mr. Edgar says that such worries are unfounded. The pool of charitable dollars is not finite, and the council’s appeals to potential contributors will not threaten other religious giving, he says.

“We’re not attempting to invade any of the churches’ opportunities,” Mr. Edgar says.

Helping the Poor

Still, whether the council can reach its fund-raising goals depends in large part on its ability to generate broad support for its dual agenda of fighting poverty and promoting ecumenism. And, as Mr. Edgar points out, the two parts of the agenda are linked.

While Christians may disagree on matters like homosexuality, he says, people of all faiths can find common ground on the need to reduce poverty. It is the mutual understanding that “Christ cared for the poor,” Mr. Edgar says, that will promote cooperation.

“Christians have discovered that they may only agree on one sentence in the New Testament,” he says. “I’m not sure which sentence it is, but I’m sure that one sentence has in it the word poor.”

There again, however, the council must tread carefully, many observers say, lest poverty become a divisive issue that drives the council’s constituency apart rather than brings it together.

Since the Bush administration announced its plan to enlist faith-based groups to provide social services, debates have intensified between conservative and liberal religious leaders over how best to help the poor, observers point out. The issue, they say, has the potential to create conflict not only on political grounds, but on theological ones too. While some believe that church-sponsored programs for the poor do not have to include a spiritual component, many conservative groups believe that Bible study, prayer, and other religious activities should be included in church-sponsored relief efforts.

“There are some churches that have lost their way on this,” says A. William Merrell, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination that remains outside the national council. “They want to just feed the body. We believe that you not only need to relieve suffering, but that you need to feed the spirit, too, and be evangelists of the good news.”

‘Ecumenical Table’

Mr. Merrell’s comment points to the difficulty that the national council faces in seeking to bring together a broad range of Christians. Despite the council’s historic commitment to ecumenism, most Christians in the United States are members of churches that don’t belong to the council: not just the 16-millionmember Southern Baptist Convention, but also the 62-millionmember Roman Catholic Church, plus a variety of fast-growing evangelical and Pentecostal groups.

Mr. Edgar says he wants to build “a new ecumenical table” for people of all Christian faiths — people who have a wide range of theological, political, and ideological views. What sets apart the council’s latest unity efforts from those of the past, he says, is that the organization is making it clear that it does not need to be at the head of that table.

In fact, Mr. Edgar says the group is prepared to reorganize — and even dissolve — if that would help to foster a new spirit of ecumenism.

For now, though, Mr. Edgar is counting on building an ecumenical table on the foundations of the National Council.

A fund-raising letter to potential donors, signed by Mr. Edgar, compared the council to the Old Testament army of Gideon, a hero who saved his beleaguered people from defeat.

The council, the letter declared, is “smaller, tougher, tempered by the fires of crisis, and ready for new challenges.”

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE CHURCHES OF CHRIST IN THE USA

Purpose: The council, composed of 36 mainline Protestant, historically black Protestant, and Orthodox denominations, is the nation’s largest ecumenical organization. Through its lobbying, education, justice, and ecumenical divisions, the council works on such issues as Christian unity, poverty, racism, and the environment. It translates and publishes the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Finances: The council’s budget this year is $7-million. In 1999, the last full year before the council split from its biggest unit, Church World Service and Witness, an international-relief group, its budget was $74.4-million.

Sources of funds: Nearly half of the council’s income comes from member denominations, which pay a total of $1.6-million in dues and another $1.6-million in program-specific contributions. This year the organization expects to earn about $1.3-million from its publications, mostly from Bible royalties, and another $600,000 for services it provides to Church World Service. The rest of the council’s income is expected to come from interest earned on long-term investments and money raised from individuals and foundations.

Key officials: Robert W. Edgar, general secretary; Andrew Young, president

Address: 475 Riverside Drive, 8th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10115; (212) 870-2227

World Wide Web site: http://www.ncccusa.org