United Church of God, an International Association

Council of Elders Quarterly Meeting Report

Milford, Ohio

Monday, August 11, 2014

Chairman Robin Webber called the morning session to order at 9:00 a.m. and welcomed everyone to the meetings. He read through the vision and mission statement and turned and read from Philippians 2:1-5 to set the spiritual tone for this week’s meetings. The meeting then opened with prayer. All 12 Council of Elders (CoE) members were present.

Mario Seiglie was asked to come forward and read the CoE code of ethics.

The last CoE meeting minutes were approved as well as the agenda for the week’s meetings.

President’s Report—Victor Kubik

President Victor Kubik greeted everyone and commented on the peace he enjoys at the home office and at these meetings. It is especially appreciated as we see the troubles in this world. We are grateful that Christ will return and bring ultimate peace. Until that time we have the work of God that must be done. We must fulfill the mission of the Church, which is to preach the gospel and prepare a people. The income has been good, but all our efforts must be prioritized in how we spend and how to spend, so we can be good stewards.

Mr. Kubik went through describing various activities:

• Public Appearance Campaign: We are trying something new and hope that it will be successful. We want to engage the public in a new way. This public appearance campaign will be held Sept. 10, 2014, at the Holiday Inn Eastgate on the historically popular topic of “Why Were You Born?” This was the number-one requested booklet in times past and it is a gateway to other topics about our future, prophecy and Christian living. A number of advertisements will promote this activity: billboards in the Cincinnati area, ads on television and Internet radio, e-mail campaigns, as well as a website for tickets (whywereyouborn.com). Mr. Kubik is asking for all to dedicate a day of fasting and prayer before the event to ask for God’s blessing.
• Direct Mail: We have over 7,000 coworkers and donors, and these quarterly letters let them know more about the work of God and gives them an opportunity to support it. There will also be a letter sent soon to the entire U.S. Good News subscriber list, which is around 180,000 in number. We want to engage them on what we are doing and solicit them for their help as well. 20 percent of our revenue comes from non-members. We want to engage people in our core message and come to repentance.
• Content Committee: Darris McNeely is the chairman of the content committee. Three areas were discussed: 1) The way we speak: How we come across to others in our speech. 2) Working with Ambassador Bible Center (ABC) and seeing what ABC can do for the work. ABC is about making disciples. The ABC students know they will be studying God’s Word for one full year, so we want to help train leaders and encourage them to be greater servants. 3) Music in the Church: It has been six to seven years since printing the last hymnal. We want to review our current hymns and see if there needs to be any additions or revisions.
• Ambassador Bible Center: We want ABC to be more relevant for God’s work. This coming year there will be 32 students (16 men and 16 women). There have been four continuing ABC seminars this summer in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Portland.
• Pastoral Online Training: This is the third year of online training. Don Ward was very instrumental in developing the syllabus. The pastoral class is very popular! We need to expand this online training.
• New Leadership: We are in a transition time with many of the field ministry approaching retirement. At the last two regional meetings in Atlanta and Los Angeles we held meetings about leadership development with 80 people in each location.
• United Youth Camp: The Victor and Bev Kubik went to the Northwest camp as workers this summer. Mrs. Kubik worked in the kitchen, and Mr. Kubik did videography. The United Youth Camps are a tremendous program.
• Home Office: Aaron Dean is working in the international areas, which has been a big help. The home office will be hosting the annual Leadership Workshop over the Labor Day weekend with almost 50 in attendance.

Mr. Kubik concluded his remarks with the encouragement that God is with us and that we are to look at ways to always improve.

Operation Manager Reports:

Media and Communications Services—Peter Eddington

Peter Eddington emphasized that without God’s strength and power, all our work will come to nothing. With it we hope to do great things. He then went through some statistics:

• United News circulation is the highest it’s been in 3 ½ years.
• Coworker count is now the highest it’s ever been.
• The total on our U.S. database listed as “members, youth or associated with UCG” is the highest it’s been in two years.
• 2013 was a five-year record for the number of personal correspondence (PC) answers sent, and 2014 is on track to surpass that.
• Magazine insert cards and literature response cards processed for 2013 were the highest in five years, and 2014 is on track to surpass that.
• Response to our subscriber development letter offering Tools for Spiritual Growth last December is more than 21 percent. With a few more responses it will be the highest percentage ever of any subscriber offer.
• The French Bonnes Nouvelles magazine print run now equals the highest on record.
• Income from non-members is up 2 percent over last year, running at about 20 percent of total donations. This is up from approximately 15 percent three years ago.
• Beyond Today responses are 24 percent higher for January through July compared to last year. One reason is because of the ION Network test that ran for several weeks earlier this year. For January through July of 2014, five out of the seven calendar months saw an increase in 2014 over 2013—including May and June—after WGN America was discontinued.

The dedicated media staff is doing as much as possible with the limited financial resources. At some point, and as God wishes, we hope to see even more increased income and member growth from these ongoing proclamation efforts.

Good News Print Run

The Good News print run was 248,145 for the July-August issue. The decline in subscribers over the past six years because of lower budget and aggressive subscriber-renewal campaigns appears now to have leveled off. We expect the figures to stabilize around about 250,000 with the current fiscal-year’s GN budget.

U.S. subscribers have been declining over the past six years too, for the same reasons. We now see a slight turnaround in the decline, with the past four issues stabilizing right at around 177,000.

Coworker/Donor Letters

Response to the March 2014 coworker/donor letter, mailed to 8,071 contributors offering Tools for Spiritual Growth and Transforming Your Life, has garnered an 8.5 percent response asking for the booklets offered. The cost to print and mail this offer cost about $8,000.

Similarly, the June 2014 coworker/donor letter offering How to Understand the Bible, mailed to 7,670 contributors, has brought in a 7.6 percent booklet request response so far. The printing and mailing cost is around $1 per offer.

Job Openings Coming

Later this year, we will have two job positions open in our International Mail Processing department. Two of our current employees are going to retire.

These will be challenging positions to fill. Job candidates will need to have a very, very good understanding of Church teachings, plus be very adept in English, Spanish and French. In addition, this department reads mail in Portuguese and other languages. We will be looking for candidates quite soon.

Personal Appearance Campaign

Plans for the Sept. 10 personal appearance campaign at the Holiday Inn Eastgate featuring Gary Petty are well underway. Signups for tickets at our www.whywereyouborn.com website are happening every day.

Billboards around the Cincinnati area are now in place, Google advertising is underway, and a letter will be mailed to almost 5,500 Cincinnati-area subscribers next week.

In addition, two weeks before the event, 700 15-second ads will run on Time Warner Cable on Fox News, National Geographic, USA Network, and others; 15-second ads will run on Pandora, and an e-mail invitation will be sent to 22,000 Cincinnati residents twice. We will also e-mail an invitation to those Good News subscribers we have e-mail addresses for here in Cincinnati. And we are distributing “window cling” banners to our local brethren to place on their car windows.

Ministerial and Member Services—Roy Holladay

Roy Holladay mentioned the delight to have peace on the Council of Elders. We are all pulling together for what we are to be doing. God has called us to fulfill a mission, and God is the one who does the calling (John:6:44). What we try to do is to engage them. We don’t want to disengage them. It is important we do our part. We want to be sure we are engaging.

Our updated statistics in the Church includes 197 churches and Bible study groups in the U.S. We are discussing what size a group needs to be to be a church.

Average U.S. Sabbath attendance now includes hookups for faithful members not able to make it to Sabbath services. In 2014, from January to June the average was 7,634 in the U.S.

The United Youth Camps include five teen summer camps with a total of 482 campers and 305 staff.

This year at the Feast of Tabernacles all sermonettes and sermons will be evaluated by the elders to see where we can improve. The Feast speaking schedules are finalized and sent out.

Education Areas:

• Leadership Labor Day Workshops: This will be the 13th year for this program with 47 individuals and maybe a handful more that will attend. There will be a variety of leadership topics covered.
• Pastoral Class: Ken Graham helps as the registrar for the program. Dr. Ward’s Epistles of Paul class is already full for the coming session. In the pastoral training classes we hope all ministers should be upgrading themselves. It may have been 30 to 50 years since some have gone to Ambassador College, so we are encouraging all to take the classes. We are looking to record classes on topics that can help the ministry.
• Regional Conferences: These regional conferences have been successful. The last two have also been used to help in training and developing new leaders.

Mr. Holladay concluded with the reminder that we are an aging ministry. We must be developing the next generation of leaders! We don’t know when Christ will return, so we have to plan that it is one to two generations down the road, but hoping it will be much sooner.

Financial Services—Rick Shabi

Rick Shabi went through the financial statements for the months of June and July, 2014, noting that the fiscal year ended June 30. He mentioned that we had a very good fiscal year, with income exceeding budget by $1 million. He also pointed out year-end adjustments that were made to “close out” the fiscal year and that our total assets at the end of this year were $900,000 more than the prior year, most of it in cash. We are thankful to God for the blessings He has provided.

The July financial statements were briefly discussed, noting that the new fiscal year has gotten off to a good start, with income being above budget, and expenses below budget.

The annual audit, performed by external auditors, will take place the week of Aug. 18. After the audit is presented to the Council of Elders, the audited financial statements will be published in the United News.

Committee Chairman Reports:

Ethics Committee—Mario Seiglie

The Ethics Committee currently has five members. One action item is to replace one of the Elder’s Form monitors, Darris McNeely, who has asked to step down. Under discussion is whether to keep this designation under the purview of the Ethics Committee, or as suggested by some elders, to place it under a GCE committee to be created for this function. This will be discussed by the Council before a designation is made.

Media and Communications Committee—Scott Ashley

The Media and Communications Committee had a teleconference meeting on Friday to preview material from the president’s report and media operation report. Since those were covered earlier in today’s meeting, we won’t cover the same material again.

Strategic Planning and Finance Committee—Bill Bradford

The Strategic Planning and Finance Committee has come to a critical period in their planning. They are analysing where we have been and what we can expect for the next three years. They are focusing on the next three years in planning and formulating the Strategic Plan. They have to make the best forecast, try to understand the external conditions and pay close attention to the internal conditions that will affect our forward progress.

Bill Bradford commented: “We have an opportunity to move from where we are now. We have come out of a period where we had to restructure in some areas. We have to be resourceful to be able to pastor our churches. Our growth has been on a slightly upward trend, but we have to face the realistic picture that things aren’t getting any easier. We all had an expectation of where the Church was going to be at this juncture, but we can’t go forward unless we understand the true situation. So we want to have an accurate assessment of where we are now in MMS and media, and the Church as a whole, and develop a comprehensive plan to best proceed on all fronts.”

Mr. Bradford concluded his presentation thanking everyone for their support as well as their honesty and candid suggestions in the surveys earlier in July.

Roles and Rules Committee—Roc Corbett

Over the past year the Council has worked on updating the Constitution. There was a very good overwhelming majority of the General Conference of Elders (GCE) that approved it in May 2014. This coming year the Roles and Rules Committee is looking to update the Bylaws before the May 2015 GCE. The committee will go through the Bylaws and review and update them. This is not to change doctrines or teachings, but looking for better wording and to make it easier to read and more useable.

The Roles and Rules Committee is also updating two other documents that pertain to the Expelled Elder Appeal Committee and its processes and procedures.

Education Committee—Rex Sexton

The Education Committee is working on two projects:

• The Youth Education Program based on Deuteronomy 6 is going well. They are receiving suggestions and writing the lessons, and have received some input from the summer camp discussions.
• The ABC Review Task Force held their second online meeting in August. It has 14 members. They are updating the ABC mission statement and will be getting input from the ABC instructors before submitting it to the Council for adoption. They are also preparing two surveys to get input on improving ABC: one survey for the alumni and one for the UCG pastors. These will be sent out in the next four to six weeks.

Doctrine Committee—John Elliott

The Doctrine Committee has been entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring that all fundamental beliefs, established doctrines and teachings, and material produced by the Church for internal and external purposes are doctrinally sound.

Some questions have been asked regarding the work being done by the Doctrine Committee:

• What does the Doctrine Committee review?
  • It reviews papers submitted to it through an approved process. The process begins with a preliminary review by the author’s pastor, which is an important responsibility.
• Why does a paper’s review seem to take so long?
  • Once a paper reaches the committee, it is generally reviewed in the order it was received, unless the matter is considered urgent. Many papers it receives propose ideas that are oftentimes difficult to prove using the scriptures provided. Each paper received a thorough review utilizing prayer, careful focus, study and discussion. Oftentimes a subcommittee also performs a separate review. Even so, the committee has processed around 17 projects in the last 18 months.
• Why not announce the topics of the papers you are reviewing?
  • Since the papers are not generated by the Doctrine Committee, announcing their topics might give a false impression that some change is being considered. Also, since the papers are submitted confidentially, privacy is maintained throughout the process, after which the author is notified of the findings along with the Council.

Currently the committee is continuing its review and retitling of the study paper “The Last Great Day.” It has also concluded its review of a statement that was called into question in time past. Another project concerns the development of more comprehensive material to help address various calendar issues that have arisen. Several other papers submitted by various elders are under review as part of its ongoing work. The committee is assisted by elders of the GCE who serve on two subcommittees, the Doctrinal Advisory Committee chaired by Larry Walker, and the Prophecy Advisory Committee chaired by Ken Martin. The Doctrine Committee has no authority to establish or change doctrine. Rather, it is a standing committee subordinate to the Council of Elders. Any proposed doctrinal change would need to seek approval by the General Conference of Elders as outlined in Article 4.1.1 of the Constitution.

Anyone wishing to submit a paper to the Church for review needs to follow the approved “Process for Submitting Doctrine and Prophecy Papers,” which is posted for all elders on the MMS website. Papers need to be written with a singular theme and maintain a primary focus. Submissions containing multiple theses in a single document cannot be readily processed.

Remainder of the Day:

Following the Committee Chairman reports the Council went into the planned executive sessions for the rest of the day. The Council adjourned at 6:00 p.m.

-end-

Interim Council Reporter

Shawn Cortelyou

© 2014 United Church of God, an International Association