Intense and interesting debate last night at Synod, primarily around the issue of funding. Briefly, there is a draft report before the Synod which proposes to fund much more of the "head office" activities from "parish taxes" (to use some loose, but understandable, terms). This proposal would effectively raise parish tax rates by about 50%, although from an admittedly low base. My back of the envelope calculation suggests the proposal would cost my church about $7k a year.
Synod passed a motion to send the report to Standing Committee - basically to do some more work on the drat and bring it back next year for approval. I was surprised that this motion passed without dissent, as I knew some people strongly opposed much of the report. As the night wore on, I understood what was happening. Derailing a bill like this is very difficult, so no-one tried. Instead, they attempted to "de-fang" it in various ways via ammendments. All of the ammendments went down, but some had considerable support in the house. A number of other people rose to, in theory, give speeches in support of the bill, but in reality to tell the house what was wrong with the bill. Standing Committee is "on notice" that the report needs some serious attention, or it will face some opposition next year.
My thoughts? Still quite undecided. I know that we need to restructure our finances, no question, but something about this proposal niggled at me. Sandy Grant may have nailed it when he pointed out that the bill put all of the "non-negotiable" head office costs on the parishes, effectively reserving all of the discretionary spending for the distributions from the endowments. This effectively means there is "no room to move" when it comes to parish taxes, as there has been in the past when various "taxes" have been raised for specific purposes, and voted for by the house.
Another thing bothers me a bit. A couple of people made the point that the endowment is "inheritence" money, and you shouldn't spend your inheritence on the groceries (ie. recurrent expediture). However - in the past, significant amounts of endowment money has been poured into recurrent expenditure in various parishes, mostly to subsidise "strategic" staff costs. My own parish has benefited from this. At least one ministry with an income of over half a million has had it's staffing costs subsidised for years, to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm sure this situation will continue once the endowment distributions are freed up again. So the truth is that everyone is proposing the inheritence money be spent on the "groceries"! And one could argue that the net effect is that all parishes are being taxed a bit extra, for the purposes of subsidising the favoured few.