A “budget is a moral document,” right?

The Institute on Religion & Democracy reports that following the loss of a major donor, the National Council of Churches (NCC) finds itself “closer than ever before to the precipice” of financial collapse. The progressive/liberal church prised largely of mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches, is running out of dough. IRD’s Barton Gingerich:

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Presiding Bishop told the NCC’s September board meeting: “We have 18 months sustainability.” All voting NCC board members were scrambling for “immediate sustainability,” mostly behind closed doors as they discussed the NCC’s audit and budget. Further highlighting the crisis was an interruption of the meeting by placard waving union employees distressed over benefit cuts to NCC staffers.

Meeting in secrecy? Workers protesting draconian budget cuts? In response, some NCC leaders suggested that the organization do nothing for a year but seek out prospective donors. Of course, they used the appropriate biblical vocabulary for “shutting this place down”:

At one point, the board broke up into small table groups to propose solutions to these besetting toils. One table, headed up by Bishop Mark Hanson and United Methodism’s Betty Gamble, even mended the NCC take a “jubilee.” Under this plan, the NCC would withdraw from public activities and focus on fundraising. Many delegates pointed out that such a recess would negate any reasons for donors to contribute.

But how strange that the same NCC leaders who signed onto the Circle of Protection’s faux-prophetic admonition to “resist budget cuts that undermine the lives, dignity, and rights of poor and vulnerable people” are now looking at slashing pension and health care benefits for their own employees. Didn’t the NCC hear that our nation is facing a health care crisis? Wasn’t it General Secretary Dr. Michael Kinnamon who not so long ago reminded us all that with the troubled economic times, “millions more are finding increases in medical co-payments and participation requirements unmanageable or are losing health benefits with the loss of employment”?

Didn’t NCC’s president, the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, point out when she endorsed the Circle of Protection that Christians have sometimes failed to heed “the call to economic justice in our national life. Sometimes we have gotten so concerned about our personal lives we have neglected this very point”?

The employees of the NCC, and presumably their union steward, don’t care for the budget cutting idea at all:

Accentuating the tension was an interruption by the NCC staffers’ union, the Association of Ecumenical Employees, which marched into the board meeting waving placards. Ironically, the pro-union NCC has been trying to reduce retirement and health benefits with its own union. It seems that contract negotiations have lasted nearly eight months, prompting distressed unionists to conduct their silent interruption, after which they quietly marched out.

Maybe the memory is too fresh in their minds of NCC executives getting themselves arrested in the U.S Capitol Building last summer while they were offering “public prayers asking the Administration and Congress not to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.”

Is it finally sinking in among some on the religious left that you can’t just wish away a looming budget meltdown? Perhaps the NCC leadership would profit from a review of the Acton Institute’s Principles for Budget Reform or the website of Christians for a Sustainable Economy. They won’t find any fundraising tips on these pages but they might just start to better appreciate the virtue of fiscal prudence.