by David W. Scott
July 17, 2019
Scott is UM & Global blogmaster and Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries.
As a previous post explained, churches, annual conferences, and other groups in the United States provide significant financial, in-kind, technical, and personnel subsidies to churches, annual conferences, and other ministries in the central conferences. However, for a variety of reasons, those subsidies are likely to decrease, perhaps quite significantly, in coming years. The question then arises of what options central conferences have for their ministries in the face of reduced American subsidies.
It is important to state up front that some, perhaps many, of the decisions about subsidized ministries and programs in the central conferences will not be made by people in the central conferences themselves but rather by the Americans who are currently sending the subsidies. For those ministries and programs completely dependent on American or general agency support, it is effectively Americans and/or general agency boards and staff who will make decisions about the fate of ministries in the central conference, not the people from central conferences conducting those ministries.
Despite the ways in which American decision-making will impact those in the central conferences, central conference church leaders also have agency in this process. Thus, there are a variety of decisions they can make or strategies they can adopt in the face of reduced American subsidies. [Read the entire article on UM-Insight.net.]