Over the past weeks and months, your vestry, with the close involvement of other parish leadership, lay and ordained, has worked diligently and faithfully to develop a balanced, mission-oriented budget for 2003. This year that process has been particularly difficult, since ours is a thriving parish in a challenging economic climate. While striving to ensure the least possible negative impact on the current work of the parish, the vestry recognizes that the budgetary decisions it must make also have an impact on people and ministries beyond the local parish and the present situation, indeed far into the future.

It may not be apparent to most of us in the lay order of ministry that the cost of seminary education, which principally affects members of the ordained clergy but will place a growing burden on lay people called to receive seminary training for church leadership in the new century, presents a challenge to us all. A recent article in Episcopal Life bearing the title of this submission (subtitled “Debt-ridden seminarians burden church’s future,” www.episcopalchurch.org/episcopal-life/CLsem11í02.html), and reporting a recent study by the Episcopal Church Foundation (“What Our Seminary Graduates Face,” December 2002, www.episcopalfoundation.org/), reveals that 46 percent of M.Div. students at 8 of the 11 accredited Episcopal seminaries who participated in the survey graduated with an average debt of $27,328, for some younger students this is on top of an average undergraduate loan debt of $17,000. For older seminarians (the average age of ordinands is now 45), the cost of their graduate education may mean selling off retirement assets while incurring additional debt, with less time to pay it off. And while average total compensation for clergy within five years of ordination is $44,761, in 2002 for those approaching retirement several years later it was only $55,453.

A 2001 graduate of Seabury-Western Seminary, Melinda Bobo, observes, “As a denomination we probably demand the most educated clergy, but we seem willing to spend the least amount of money.” The Episcopal Church is the only mainline Christian denomination in the United States that provides no national church financial support for theological education, and only 66 percent of our students receive financial aid from the seminaries. Eighty percent receive no aid from their dioceses or home parishes.

While other denominations face a similar challenge and have undertaken efforts to deal with the situation—notably the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterian Church-USA—the Episcopal Church Foundation is exploring the possibility of a major capital campaign to endow financial aid for the theological education of those training for both lay and ordained leadership in the church.

The Episcopal Church has had in place for two decades a program that, if fully realized, would go far toward a solution. The 67th General Convention passed a resolution establishing as policy that every parish and mission give at least 1 percent of its net disposable budgeted income to one or more accredited seminaries, a policy confirmed by the 167th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina in 1983 and reaffirmed by the 184th Convention in 2000. Yet nationally, according to the Office of Ministry Development, only $3 million is produced per annum, one-third of the goal. The Diocese of North Carolina does relatively well: for the year ending December 31, 2001, out of a total assessment of $295,393, our congregations gave $203,287, 69 percent of the goal, or twice the national average.

Responding fully to the Resolution of Support for Theological Education, adopted by both our General and our Diocesan Conventions, is an honored tradition of the Chapel of the Cross, whence so many have pursued the highest excellence of theological education. In 2002, we gave a cumulative total of $11,182, based on the 1 percent formula, to Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, the School of Theology at the University of the South (Sewanee), Virginia Theological Seminary, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, and The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. In preparing the 2003 budget, due to fiscal constraints and for the first time in memory, we were not able to meet our full assessment of $12,000 from the operating budget. We trust that by December, the end of our fiscal year and the time at which we normally forward our contribution, we will be able to fulfill our responsibility to the Church and to those who will carry out its mission and ministry in the future.