Speaking on the exhibition hall floor, Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire reports that the House of Bishops is stripping nearly every resolution directing the budget committee (PB&F is the jargon if you're following this on Twitter) to fund something of that language requiring the the committee allocate funding. The effect of this action is to strip any resolution expressing the will of the church of teeth when it comes to actually providing resources.
To be fair, there is a legitimate tension here. The bishops see themselves as the adults in the room when it comes to budgeting. After all, the people proposing these resolutions aren't summing them all up to see if they're reasonable taken as a whole, given the resources available to the church. I don't necessarily see anything nefarious in the bishops' actions.
At the same time, this defangs the House of Deputies when it comes to exerting influence over the budget process, creating disproportionate power for both the budget committee and the bishops.
In my more volatile moods, I wonder if the HoD should just vote down any budget that fails to make a reasonable attempt to address the mission priorities it has expressed. The Act 8 Moment frankly acknowledges that nobody in the wider culture would notice if the Church Center were to shut down due to lack of a budget. For that matter, with the exception of very worthy ministries like Episcopal Relief and Development and the Navajoland Mission, probably nobody else in the church would notice much either.
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