After the budget was handed out on Wednesday, I noted that it eliminated entirely the Office of Women's Ministry. During the question period, I then asked what was happening to the things that this office did and was told that the ministries were being "combined." This made no sense since the office coordinated activities between groups as different as National Altar Guild and the Episcopal Women's Caucus, it was an unsatisfactory answer. So I called a quick meeting at the end of the day's session, got contact information from about 20 women and called a meeting for the following morning. Thus we thought we were organized when the budget discussion began on the floor, BUT people were so intent on cutting money from the early sections of the budget (to free up funds for Program areas, that we never really got to the discussion of cuts in programming. We were the last group to get to speak and the question was called before more than one of us had spoken. The message on the floor was pretty clear. People thought that the central staffs for the House of Bishops, the Presiding Bishop and even the Office of General Convention had areas that could work more leanly and that the cuts had focused much too heavily on program. The Executive Council is going to have to make changes in the budget. Areas that bring in revenue exceeding their costs were eliminated or cut. The budget cuts brought some real change and real pain. Thirty positions were eliminated at the church center, including the anti-racism coordinator, a staff person for UTO and the women's ministry person. Our support for provinces and dioceses in Central America was cut. The strategic plan we had just voted for outreach to hispanics got one-fifth of the funds requested. The next General Convention will be two days shorter. There will be an electronic "blue book," (over 800 pages this year) which is the pre-convention material sent to the deputies. Once at convention the resolutions in it were "perfected" in committee and we got new copies in the daily handouts. Of direct interest to the Via Media Groups, there was a specific line item of more than $1,000,000 for legal costs and another for support of dioceses rebuilding. Further good news is that no one suggested cutting these line items from the floor. How The Episcopal Church responds to this budget is the real challenge. It could lead to a creative refashioning of the way we work together as a church, or it could be retrenched business as usual. Let us hope that the Holy Spirit does lead us to creative solutions.
 
JRG
Joan R. Gundersen