More Employee Layoffs at PPH

[Silent Service]

My mentor/senior pastor and I were discussing this subject the other day in a way.

He has been licensed UPC for 40 years now and he was saying how the UPC was feeling the financial effects of many established churches either leaving or "checking out" and doing their own events with or without the districts and national. they have pushed out alot of up and coming churches into the independent ranks over the years due to the pastors getting sick of the infighting and politics.

even many of the churches that are "in" the UPC do their own thing once they pass 200-300 and start to hold events independent of the section or state apparatus.

Honestly they should hold GC every 2 years and allow for online & secure voting with a pre-recorded for and against vote on various resolutions and then allow for amendments to be made virtually via a teleconference either yearly or every 6 months on a Saturday afternoon. Why do ministers need to travel and be physically there when they can simply verify a vote yes or no via a secure website and some minimal levels of security like SSN or a ID #? I would assume that considering its minsiters voting the level of vote fraud would be very very low.

The needs for a publishing house in the days of Amazon.com are kinda silly. They can go 100% web-based and put UPC books into .pdf files with no need for inventory and near pure profit.

But that would be like cutting the foreign missions board members travel money to visit nice places around the world and tie up missionaries from their actual duties or getting rid of a Sunday School Departments who's black and white, hand drawn literature has been a punchline since the 80's (which is a whole different line of discussion)

The fact is that there is alot of fat to trim from WEC and alot of positions that could be chopped. The only departments that are really necessary from my point of view are church planting/foreign missions/publishing distribution channel (which may or not be PPH)/Outreach Training for Churches(which Matt Maddox and his bootcamp team have been pushing for in vain)/and the bible colleges.

pretty much everything else should be done on a volunteer basis or virtually online via web/teleconferences.

really what the UPC needs more than anything is to provide actual value to their churches in the form of training clinics with top notch experts on church growth, retention, discipleship, etc from within or without the UPC for districts and via webinar for their ministers. Heck.. even the board of realtors has ongoing training for members who pay their dues (which are alot less than what the UPC rakes in from a typical church)

the thing they should be scared of is the demographic gap thats forming among the ministers. they have a graying of the ministerial ranks and alot of younger men are going independent or will join the UPC later if ever. look at most of the officals of the UPC currently (from the top down) and you will only see a few "first generation" ministers that have any position of importance.. Paul Mooney and a few others are the exception. It has become a extended family enterprise with (as a earlier poster said) a real "caste" system connected by marriage, blood ties, and relationships.