March 20, 2008
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

Missionaries who work outside of the United States under the auspices of the Episcopal Church will soon see major changes to their compensation.

According to a letter from the Rev. David Copley, Anglican and Global Relations mission personnel officer, sent to all overseas missionaries, the church will no longer pay them a monthly stipend (about $500, in most cases) or cover their airfare, relocation expenses, language study, vaccinations, and any health expenses not covered by insurance.

According to Copley's letter, the new compensation package will include:

• health/dental/life insurance;

• pension premiums;

• eligibility for educational scholarships for children of missionaries;

• logistical and pastoral support; and

• all expenses paid for a missionary retreat (to a regional retreat once every three years)

Copley, who works in the church's Office of Anglican and Global Relations, said in the letter and a subsequent interview with ENS that the decision was made in the face of what he called "the realities" of a $50,000 increase in health-insurance premiums for this year, a five percent cut in the current Episcopal Church budget and the $130,000 cost to provide increased pensions contributions for lay missionaries in 2008.

The pension provision was a major factor in the decision, Copley told ENS. Not all appointed lay missionaries have been included in the pension program. "It was a little spotty as to what we promised them" in the past, Copley said.

Now all lay missionaries are offered pension contributions and new lay missionaries will be eligible to participate in the pension plan after one year of service.

Copley said his office believed that pension contributions for lay missionaries should be made on a more equal basis with clergy missionaries. The formula for calculating payments for lay missionaries will be based on the average clergy salary across the Episcopal Church of $62,000, rather than the average lay employee salary of $35,000, according to Copley.

"We wanted to have some equity between lay and clergy," he told ENS.

In addition, the Episcopal Church's Executive Council, during its recent meeting in Quito, Ecuador, accepted a plan to pay $450,644.59 from its pension reserve to make one-time contributions to tax-deferred retirement savings accounts for the past service of 22 lay missionaries. Those missionaries were promised payments which were then not made on their behalf between 2000 and the end of 2007.

"Contributions for lay missionaries were administered on an ad hoc and inconsistent basis," according to the explanation attached to Resolution AF060 said.

In a related move, there will no longer be a distinction between "appointed" and "volunteer" missionaries, in part because "the original distinctions between the two has become blurred," Copley wrote in his letter. One way the lines were blurred, he wrote, was the fact that a number of volunteers have served for more years than some appointees.

"In some sense all missionaries are volunteers in their willingness to serve sacrificially far from home," he wrote.

Copley said the alternative to the compensation changes was to cut the number of missionaries in order to balance the budget.

"For some of you, this will mean an increase in benefits with the addition of a lay pension component, but for others this will mean that there will be a reduction in support," Copley acknowledged in his letter. The decision affects about 70 missionaries, for whom the new package will go into effect at the next renewal of their Letter of Understanding with his office, Copley said.

"Missionaries will be asked to raise funds to cover other costs," according to the letter.

Copley, who spent seven years as a missionary in Liberia and Bolivia, acknowledged "it is a lot of money" to have to raise, in addition to what most missionaries routinely gather for their work. He added that he hopes the missionaries' sending congregations and dioceses will look seriously at their financial commitment to the people they send out to minister in the name of the church.

"The hope is that people will get even more involved in the lives of the people they're sending out," he told ENS.

The General Convention budget is "finite," Copley told ENS. "We're hoping that parishes and dioceses will step up to fill the gap," he added.

As part of that effort, information about the changes is being sent to "all bishops, diocesan leaders, and other of mission networks to highlight the need for their increased support for the mission program and for individual missionaries," Copley said in his letter.

"We will also continue to petition for the increased support of missionaries as we begin to prepare the budget for the next triennium to be voted on at the General Convention in 2009," he wrote. "There continues to be a growing interest in mission service and in the significant ministry being undertaken by Episcopal missionaries throughout the world. Our hope is that this ministry will continue to grow and flourish in the coming years."

Randall Giles, who has been a lay missionary in India for nearly eight years, told ENS that, while most Episcopal Church missionaries do have some support outside of the compensation Copley's office, he does not. He did not have a well-established network before he was sent by the Diocese of Western Massachusetts to the Diocese of Madras, he said.

His stipend is about $730 per month. The Madras diocese gives him a house to live in and some financial help with living expenses and car insurance, he said.

Giles, who was the choir director at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, for about two years before going to India, travels throughout the diocese and the rest of south Asia helping congregations and dioceses improve their choirs, their church music, and their liturgy. He has also been able to record the local use of Anglican music "from parts of the world you are not likely to visit," he said.

"Up until now 815 footed the bill for my getting there," Giles added, referring to the Episcopal Church Center in New York. The places he visited normally covered his "in-country" expenses.

His trips back to the United States to raise funds have not been very successful due to his limited support network, he said. Thus, the cuts in his compensation "will basically change what I am doing," he said, adding "I just won't be able to do this anymore."

Giles also said he worries that the changes in compensation will result in a change in the Episcopal Church's missionary efforts. He doubts that there will be many people who can commit to being "long-term presences" overseas "unless they are of absolutely independent means." As a result, Giles said, there may be more people who can only work as missionaries for a few years and may not have the same commitment to the work.

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as news of the dioceses of Province II. She is based in Neptune, New Jersey, and New York City.