Contact Us Sitemap Disclaimer font-size:    

• Arrival
• Opening Eucharist
• President's Address
• General Secretary’s Report
• Treasurer’s Report
• Keynote Address & Responses
• Mennonite Action
• Youth & Women
• Climate Change | Public Hearing
• Elections
• Illegitimate Debt | Public Hearing
• HIV & AIDS | Public Hearing
• Evening Get-Together
• Message & Resolutions
• Closing Eucharist & Departure
• Ecumenical Greetings
• Exhibition Space
• Questions Worth Pondering
• Voices from the Region
• Communio Garden
• LWI Assembly News
• Videos
• Video Streaming from the Plenary

LWF Treasurer Peter Stoll addresses journalists at a 21 July press conference during the LWF Eleventh Assembly, 20-27 July 2010. © LWF/Erick Coll

21.07.2010

‘It is Time to Restructure’

Good Stewardship Demands Secretariat Changes: LWF Treasurer

STUTTGART, Germany, 21 July 2010 (LWI) – There has been a positive development in the Lutheran World Federation’s (LWF) membership fees, LWF Treasurer Mr Peter Stoll said in his report to the Eleventh Assembly. Since the 2003Assembly in Winnipeg, Canada, fees have increased from USD 2.6 million to USD 3.2 million in 2009.

Nevertheless, there are still churches “in the North as well as in the South” that do not pay their membership fees, Stoll said. Although the financial situation of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) is stable, efforts must be increased in order to secure its future in the longer term. Funds in the Endowment Fund, founded in 1999 with a long-term target of CHF 50 million, amounted to almost CHF 12 million at the end of 2009. The next goal is to reach CHF 20 million by 2017.

Now is the time to financially restructure the LWF headquarters, said Stoll. All departments have faced financial deficits, he said, urging efforts to achieve balanced budgets. The Treasurer asked the Assembly to consider decentralizing the headquarters in order to “create more synergy with the resources of the member churches and regions,” and restructuring the seven LWF regions and all the departments of the LWF offices in Geneva, Switzerland, where the organization has been located since it was founded in 1947.

Stoll stressed that the changes should not driven by financial reasons alone. Restructuring must be linked to a clear, strategic reflection on the LWF’s tasks in the world as well as the resources available.

For example, he noted that the Eleventh Assembly of the LWF would cost about USD 2.3 million and suggested that future assemblies might be coordinated with other ecumenical organizations, not only for financial reasons but also to further inter-church cooperation.

Stoll reported that the LWF secretariat’s annual budget is approximately USD 100 million, not including the budgets of Department of World Service (DWS) associate country programs. “This money has been entrusted to us for the healing of the world,” he said. “We must be good stewards.”

“Today we are witnessing the accelerating pace of globalization,” Stoll said. “We are confronted with increasingly new challenges for our churches. We have to do our work under rapidly changing, if not deteriorating, financial conditions.” Because of this, the LWF and its member churches need to concentrate on “being a communion, holding onto our mission and vision [and] being willing and flexible enough to adapt to the conditions and contexts existing in our world today.”

LWF Investment Policies Reflect its Faith Convictions

The LWF has investments of approximately USD 65 million, all of which are managed according to ethical principles approved by the Council, Stoll told the Assembly. “God creates and sustains all that is, and calls us to seek justice, peace, dignity and sustainable communities for all.”

He said the way the LWF invests its resources and holds companies accountable for their practices should reflect its faith convictions. By investing ethically, the federation is being a responsible steward “of what God has created and entrusted to us.”

Full text of the LWF Treasurer’s report 

• All the news