February 2, 2010: Costs and DCE's
Just a quick note: if you have been elected by your presbytery to serve as a commissioner or advisory delegate, please let me know: presbybob@me.com . I want to keep these notes more general but would be glad to communicate with you more specifically.
Costs
Over the last several weeks I have covered things like ACSWP and the nFoG. Did you ever wonder how much one of their reports costs? Who pays?
This is not a "gotcha" kind of post; rather, it is a question of stewardship. I have in the back of my head the figure of $45,000 per study; but that is my foggy recollection of an overheard conversation or something I imagined.
But where would you go to find out what a Special Commission or an ACSWP report costs?The point of this post is more about the exercise in finding information than what that information turns out to be.
I don't know where to find out the answer; so I did a little research. I served on the Mission Coordination and Budgets committee at the 218th General Assembly, so I started with the spreadsheets we saw. I could not find it in there (not to say it is not there, I just did not see it). I went back and and looked through some old GAMC and GAC meeting minutes to find it and could not. I searched for about an hour and could not find it. So, I wrote to Joey Bailey (who I think is CFO, but is listed on the GAMC page as Deputy Executive Director for Shared Services) asking where I could find out this information. Within hours I received a note back saying he was looking into it.
Two quick digression points:
1. My experience is staff is extremely helpful to commissioners and advisory delegates who have questions. It is worth pointing out their stress level goes up as it gets closer to the Assembly week -- just like everyone else's -- and even higher during the Assembly week, so the earlier you can figure out what kinds of things you are going to want to know, the more likely you are to get a prompt, helpful response.
2. Additionally, I suspect he could tell me a whole lot faster than describing how I can go find it. Whether the material is readily available on-line is a different question than "what is the amount?" However, for me, the value is in knowing how to find out so that when a similar question comes up I (and several hundred other commissioners and advisory delegates) don't start spamming him for the same information.
In the meantime, I decided to continue my search. I went back to pc-biz and clicked on Explorer. Under the scroll part of the Explorer is a category "Taskforce, Standing/Ad-hoc Committees." I went down to 38-04, "Resolution to Study the Belhar Confession for Inclusion in the Confessional Documents of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)." In the box on the right (gray box under the orange-ish section divider), there is a link for "Financial Implication." It reads:
Financial Implication
(2008)=$0; (2009): $28,050; (2010): $3,050 [Per Capita-OGA].
OK. So, the "Special Committee to Consider Amending the Confessional Documents of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to Include the Belhar Confession" was projected to cost about $31,100. Funding would come from the Office of General Assembly (OGA) budget, meaning per capita. (Thus, the reason why I could not find those numbers in the "mission" budget is because they were, instead, located in the OGA/per capita budget.) How much of that has been spent to-date and is that budget projection accurate? I am still looking. The closest I could find was on the denomination's site, under "financials." This may not even be the right place; but that's where I went.
What about the ACSWP reports? I went back to pc-biz and clicked on Explorer. Under the scroll part of the Explorer tab, I clicked on the 218th General Assembly. It seems to me that ACSWP was likely to come under "Social Justice Issues"; thus, I clicked on Committee 9, Social Justice Issues. One of the ACSWP reports is "On Addressing the Tragedy of America's Gun Violence" which was Item 09-05 from the 218th GA. Again, in the box on the right (gray box under the orange-ish section divider) there is a link for Financial Implication. Click the link and it reads:
Financial Implication
(2008): $5,660; (2009): $24,560; (2010): $5,240 [Per Capita- GAC]
Thus, the budget for one of the reports making recommendation to the 219th General Assembly was $35,460. I could not trace to find the actual cost -- but that is more an issue of my time than the lack of transparency.
Of the two studies I tracked, the budget was between $30,000 and $35,500. Perhaps the $45,000 included publication and distribution costs after the Assembly acted on the recommendations (or, perhaps I imagined it). I will keep on this to see if I can find actual expenses posted anywhere.
Acronym of the Day: DCE (for a full list of acronyms, go here)
Today's acronym of the day is: Director of Christian Education (DCE). In most places this is the person responsible for Sunday School and perhaps Family programming. It is a non-ordained position that may (or may not) be filled by someone who has been ordained as an elder. It is a less costly way to fill some of the responsibilities that an associate pastor ordinarily would cover.
As simple as that is, it gets much more complicated quickly. The reason is that the "christian educator" label is getting more and more nuanced. In recent years changes to the Book of Order have added the categories of Certified Christian Educators and Certified Associate Christian Educators. Ovt-026 (not its final reference number) proposes amendments to the Book of Order regarding the status and voting rights of Certified Christian Educators in a presbytery.
If you would like more information about the movement towards recognition of specific vocations under the Christian Educator umbrella, you can check out the site for the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators (APCE).
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