My friends, if there is one time of year you would actually want to come visit Louisville, Kentucky, this is it. Tomorrow we kick off the Kentucky Derby Festival with Thunder Over Louisville, the largest annual fireworks show in the country. Never mind that it wreaks havoc on our parking and transportation systems for days—who wouldn’t want to watch 60 tons of fireworks explode from two river barges and a bridge spanning the Ohio River?

For the first time this year, us PC(USA) employees are going to have to pay to watch the fireworks from 100 Witherspoon. Last year was great—I brought David and some friends in, we had a little picnic in my office, and then we watched fireworks from the balcony outside. This year, I’m too cheap to pay, and the powers that be around here are too cheap to let me in without paying.

I suppose it makes sense, too, even if every other employer in town throws giant parties for their employees for Thunder—for those of you who don’t have your RSS feed to the Presbyterian News Service, you may not have heard about the dreaded RIFs about to hit the Presbyterian Center.

A little education, for those of you safely secluded behind the various walls of academia—RIF stands for “Reduction in Force.” The bottom line around here is that the denomination’s budget is short by about $9 million over the next four years. We’ve already cut so many people in the last three RIFs (the last one being in 2004, when Women’s Ministries alone lost ten regional employees), that rumor has it that we’re going to have to cut entire programs this time around.

Apparently, when we cut $7 million back in 1993, 140 staff members lost their jobs.

The announcement for these staff reductions is scheduled to take place on May 1, less than two weeks away. We know that the decisions have already been made and the details are in the mail for the General Assembly Council’s approval. So perhaps it isn’t the time to be spending a lot of money to keep the building open for a fireworks show.

You might be asking, “How are they making these decisions?” or “How does this affect NNPCW?”

The process this time has been much more open and collaborative than the process we experienced in 2004. This year, all programs in the building were asked to submit a description of everything they did, and how it related to the church’s stated mission goals, to evaluation teams. Then 40 mid-level managers (including my boss, Mary Elva, and folks from Presbyterian Women) looked at all our work and decided how well it fit into the church’s mission. They forwarded their work on to a smaller core of managers, who used that information to make budget recommendations that they passed on to the head honchos. I like to think that perhaps the yeast of NNPCW’s collaborative, non-hierarchical models are slowly working their way into the dough—in 2004, decisions were made in a very top-down manner by the executive officers, and this process was much better.

Regarding the RIF’s effect on NNPCW… well, no one can be truly certain of that until May 1, to be honest. While young adults aren’t specifically named in the church’s mission objectives, we are often mentioned “on the street” as a key outreach constituency for the denomination. The fact that NNPCW is one of the few ministries at this level to work directly with young adults would suggest that our work, and sister ministries like Racial Ethnic Young Women Together, Collegiate Ministries, Young Adult Ministries, and the National Volunteers Office, would continue in some form.

I can’t guarantee exactly what those forms will be: whether it means we will continue unabated and unaltered, whether our office will move to a new grouping unrelated to Women’s Ministries, or whether our work could even be absorbed into a new office. But I have faith that our work will continue, and that it will continue with its core identity of justice for women in church and society.

It really is a fearful time to be in PresbyLand, threatened with loss of jobs and anxious about the loss of ministries to which we’ve been called. But God is still at work in the world, no matter what we do. The Good News of Jesus Christ has survived 2000+ years of war, famine, schism, death, and downsizing. And women’s witness to that, as teachers, preachers, organizers, and missionaries, continues unabated since Mary Magdalene proclaimed the resurrection from the empty tomb. That message, and our ability to live into and be transformed by it, transcends any one program of the Presbyterian Church (USA), or the Presbyterian Church (USA) itself.

Keep our national staff and NNPCW itself in your prayers in the coming weeks. We will need it.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” --Luke 9:24

Kelsey

I'm scared. :(

-Maisha