It’s about 4:30 as I begin to write, and I think I can safely say that not a whole lot has happened today. There was an open hearing on budget priorities which took place before I arrived. Melodie Woerman, my counterpart from the Diocese of Kansas said that many of the speakers spoke on behalf of a proposal to devote 0.7% of the Church’s budget to the Millennium Development Goals. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/. The MDGs have strong backing from Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation http://www.e4gr.org/index.html, which is sponsoring a U2charist tomorrow night that I plan to attend. It seems likely to me that the spending on the MDGs will pass. What remains to be seen is whether there will be much opposition to the request from the Anglican Consultative Council for an additional $550K contribution from the Episcopal Church over the next three years.
As part of the compromising that has kept the Anglican Communion together to date, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada accepted an invitation from the Primates of the Communion not to send voting representatives to the Council’s meeting last summer in Nottingham, England. It strikes at least some deputies as rather nervy to ask us to shoulder more of the expenses of a Communion that seems eager to marginalize us. (No taxation without representation, etc.) But others point out that our voting representatives will once again be seated at the ACC’s next meeting in two years’ time, and that increasing our contribution will be viewed by at least some of the primates as a gesture of good will and good faith.
I think it will be difficult to amend the budget, but I’ll be interested to see whether those who oppose increasing the allotment to the ACC will be able to muster additional support from advocates for Appalachian Ministries and Historically Black Colleges, the group’s widely seen as taking the budgetary hit to find this extra money for the ACC.