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HOW TO SPEND $30 MILLION (EPISCOPAL) DOLLARS
COMMENTARY
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
January 21, 2014
How to spend $30 million dollars:
1. Educate 100 seminary students (average 3-year cost $45,000) for $4,500,000.
2. Plant and build 2,000 churches in Africa for about $6,000 a church. Total cost $12 million.
3. 24,000 children die of hunger each day in the world. An estimated 3.1 million children die every year due to hunger and lack of nutritious food. A single meal costs .22 cents to produce. $2 million would produce 9 million meals and feed more than 3 million children. An estimated 850 million children in the world do not have enough food to eat or do not get a nutritious meal every day.
4. $50 can provide a nutritious meal for a child for a year. $5 million would feed 100,000 children for one year.
5. $200 can provide an education for a child including provision of buildings and teachers' salaries etc. for a year. For $5 million you can equip 25,000 children.
6. WFP, the world's largest humanitarian agency, says that it costs 25 cents (US) to fill a cup with porridge, rice or beans and give girls a monthly ration. $1.50 the price of a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts (but not Starbucks) is enough to feed a child through school for one week. For $1.5 million dollars you could feed 1 million children for one week. One development agency leader told VOL there are still lots of hurting people and the numbers keep growing.
7. In one fell swoop you could rebuild the Episcopal cathedral in Haiti and every Episcopal parish that was destroyed by the earthquake in that country.
TOTAL COST $30 MILLION
OR you could spend $30 million Episcopal dollars on law firms like David Booth Beers to endlessly litigate against orthodox Anglicans who only want to proclaim the gospel and to keep properties they bought and paid for. The Dennis Canon might well be the most expensively litigated church law in the history of the world.
The figure of $30 million is a conservative figure. It does not include ongoing litigation, nor the millions of dollars the other side has spent defending church properties. One canon lawyer estimates that the true figure could be well over $60 million, in which case the figures above could and should be doubled.
A.S. Haley of Curmudgeon blog fame wrote on Sept. 2010, "We thus arrive at an estimated total of some Twenty-Six Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars ($26,650,000) dedicated thus far by the Church of Katharine Jefferts Schori to lawsuits and illegal disciplinary actions. That is quite a negative achievement for someone who has been in office for not even four years yet." He now estimates the figures to be between $30 million and $33 million. "If the spending continues at the same rate, by the time her term is up in November 2015 (and assuming her last budget is like those before it), she will have committed the Church to an impossible-sounding Sixty-Four Million Dollars in legal costs." http://accurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2010/09/just-how-much-has-ecusa-spent-on.html
Think about that the next time you drop a check or cash in the collection plate of your local Episcopal Church. Ask yourself: Where is this money really going?
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