One of the charts presented during GCFA’s 2021 fall board meeting shows how the base percentage used in calculating apportionments — requested shares of church giving — has gone down since the 1990s. The GCFA board agreed with the Budget Advisory Team recommendation that the coming four-year budget use a 2.7% base percentage. Graphic courtesy of GCFA.
The survey results do not mean that conferences expect more than a quarter of U.S. United Methodist churches to depart or close during the next four years. Net expenditures can vary widely by congregation and by circumstance.
What the results do mean is that conference leaders forecast that church departures and closures will result in a substantial decline in one of the key factors used in determining the denomination’s budget.
As it stands, some churches already are leaving without waiting for General Conference to act.
GCFA reports that in 2020, 32 U.S. congregations disaffiliated from The United Methodist Church. But that represents only a tiny fraction of the denomination’s more than 31,000 United Methodist churches nationwide.
The Rev. Steve Court, GCFA board member and former director of connectional ministries for the East Ohio Conference, told the board that he thought the net-expenditure estimates might be overly negative about what the future holds.
“I just want to keep highlighting that because it has real ministry impacts about the level of cutting that we do at this point,” he said.
North Texas Conference Bishop Mike McKee, GCFA board president, agreed with Court that the estimates were far from definitive. McKee said conference leaders tend to answer the disaffiliation question very differently depending on their role.
“This is going to be very difficult to forecast,” McKee said. “I’m of the opinion that people will walk more than churches will.”
However, he added, that he does not know of any better way to make budget projections.
The board’s meeting on Nov. 30-Dec. 1 was itself emblematic of the uncertainty the group faces. Up until the day before the meeting, most members planned to be in Nashville, Tennessee, for the group’s first in-person gathering since COVID-19 shut down travel in mid-March 2020. However, rising COVID-19 cases in Nashville led the board to cancel the hybrid format and meet solely online.
The pandemic also has played havoc with General Conference, which typically takes up legislation — including the denomination’s budget — every four years. The coronavirus has twice forced the postponement of the international assembly from its original 2020 dates and has placed in doubt whether the big meeting can go forward as now planned Aug. 29-Sept. 6 in Minneapolis.
In the meantime, the Judicial Council — the denomination’s equivalent of the Supreme Court — has ruled that the budget allocations approved by the 2016 General Conference still stand until the legislative assembly approves a new apportionment formula.
With so much up in the air, the Commission on the General Conference has asked the GCFA board to give delegates the option of voting on a budget that could take the denomination through 2026.
The budget General Conference approves is apportioned to conferences, which in turn ask for apportionments — shares of giving — from their local churches.
