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by Herb Gunn
A few weeks before the General Convention, a budget communiqué was leaked from the Episcopal Church Center in New York revealing that the director of communication planned to eliminate Episcopal Life newspaper from her department’s budget for the next triennial. The budget document informed, for the first time, members of both the Episcopal Life Board of Governors and the 31 printing partners of Episcopal Life that the communication strategy for 2010-12 would eliminate the monthly newspaper and its printing partnerships by January, shift to a quarterly magazine, and redirect communication resources to branding, marketing, and public relations.
In defense of dioceses (mostly smaller ones like Northern Michigan, Vermont, Eastern Oregon, and San Joaquin) and their publications, I drafted General Convention Resolution D-034 titled “Continuing Episcopal Life and Printing Partnerships” and shepherded the resolution through the Communication Committee in Anaheim.
By a margin of more than five to one, other supporters of Episcopal Life spoke before the committee in the hope of keeping the publication open, vital, and frequent—at least long enough to consult broadly and discern carefully the place for a newspaper in the panoply of Episcopal Church communication choices.
The Episcopal Life Board of Governors released to the committee a unanimous statement of dismay outlining how the board was not consulted in the decision.
While the legislative hearings in Anaheim gave voice to the earnest support from which helpful resolutions (D-034, D-037)* flowed into the legislative process, the machinations of the General Convention around this issue presented a challenging uphill struggle. Frankly, if one can’t impact the draft budget, no amount of moral support for a different vision will help.
As one of the Episcopal Church communicators who also served as a deputy and believed we were moving too fast in killing off the print publication that is shared by a quarter million Episcopalians, I felt as if we were pouring water into a bucket with holes. No matter what we said—from members of the Episcopal Life Board of Governors, the Standing Commission on Church Communications, at least eight printing partners who were present in Anaheim, and Episcopal Communicators who held a range of opinions on the matter—the budgeting realignment that would end Episcopal Life as a newspaper retained its pre-Convention place in the triennial draft budget and ultimately proved impossible to dislodge from a mammoth budget proposal that deputies were reticent to amend from the floor.
With the bishops’ concurrence without debate on the budget the following day, the Episcopal Life monthly newspaper now ceases to exist, come January. It’s a bitter irony in that the $1.3 million in diocesan printing partnership fees significantly exceeds the annual printing and postage costs, and advertising brings in another $500,000.
But here’s what’s really at stake. This decision is more than the loss of a newspaper. In fact, it never was strictly a debate comparing parchment and pixels, per se. Undergirding the discussion to dramatically shift the communication strategy of the Episcopal Church is the question of editorial integrity—which I quickly grant is neither guaranteed nor necessarily imperiled in any specific vehicle of communication.
But with action taken at General Convention, the Episcopal Church is embracing a clear priority for branding, marketing, messaging, and public relations over news dissemination, and this raises significant questions about the credibility of our story told in a world in which people are letting authenticity guide their religious choices.
How and where do we now tell our stories with revelatory honesty? How and where do we proclaim the Good News even when proclaiming the Good News sometimes involves telling the bad news?
There is much to acclaim in the Good News stories of the Episcopal Church that we must be poised to share. But additionally, from the sad circumstances of ministerial misconduct to the breadth of debate on issues that could sow dissention within and around the Episcopal Church, we need to be in a position to tell our own story with unquestionable credibility. If we are not, others will gladly tell it for us.
Will we, as an institution, have the integrity to tell the unvarnished truth about our Episcopal Church? And can we do so and refrain from telling our communication professionals, “Remember who pays your salary!”
Whether uplifting or controversial, the news of the Episcopal Church cannot be left to others to report and explain, and with deep reductions in secular news agencies’ religious coverage, we are ceding too much ground to people who do not know our story and don’t really care.
A decade ago, Barbara Crafton spoke to the annual conference of Episcopal Communicators, saying, “We must write to those who reserve the right to make a judgment about the Episcopal Church.”
This is a risky enterprise and adds considerable anxiety, especially during anxious times with a lot at stake for our Church. But it is the very ethos of Anglicanism to eschew a dogmatic approach to almost anything, to trust scholarship, and to allow and encourage the freedom to continue asking questions.
As Crafton said in her presentation, sometimes we must risk injury to self and the institution we love, “and write to the important part within each Episcopalian that seeks the truth upon which rests the genuine integrity of the Church.”
* D-034 and D-037 were passed by the House of Deputies and defeated in the House of Bishops.
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Detroit, MI