Tuesday 16 June 2009

Mc DONALDS HEIR'S PLAN FOR DOZEN'S OF SALVATION ARMY CENTRES FALTERS

At her death in 2003, Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of the McDonald’s Corporation, left a grand idea and $1.8 billion to make it happen. She wanted the Salvation Army to build some 30 lavish community centers around the nation, like the $87 million complex she paid for in San Diego, with three swimming pools, an indoor ice skating arena and a 600-seat theater.
But more than five years later, her plan is sputtering
The gift has always rested uncomfortably with some Salvation Army officials, who have a hard time reconciling the elaborate centers with the Army’s image as a frugal church that serves the needy.
Now, the plan is also proving difficult to finance. The Kroc fortune has been battered by the economic downturn, and raising additional money to make sure the centers can sustain themselves in the future has been challenging.
So far, just four centers have been completed. Two are scheduled to open this year, and at least five more next year. Plans for two complexes, in Detroit and Massena, N.Y., have recently been scuttled.
“The Salvation Army is not immune to the economic climate in which we find ourselves,” said Lt. Col. Ken Johnson, the Salvation Army’s secretary for business administration in the southern territory, one of four regional units. “When Mrs. Kroc gave her gift, it was a different economic world.”

Mrs. Kroc left enough money for each center to have an endowment equal to the cost of construction. It was a formula set by her financial advisers and was intended to cover any shortfall between a center’s operating revenues and its overall budget.
The Army, though, believed that was not enough, so it required each community to raise additional money — a total of $628 million nationally.
To date, the Army has received pledges and commitments of 34 percent of that amount, or $214 million, a spokesman said.
At the same time, Mrs. Kroc’s gift has shrunk. The half reserved for endowments has declined by 14 percent, or about $126 million, to $774 million, according to the Army.
“It’s one thing to build,” said Col. Steve Hedgren, chief secretary in the eastern territory, “but we’ve got to have the assurance that everyone understands the importance of these endowments and partnerships in the communities to sustain these centers.”
In some locales, deep-pocketed donors have stepped in to help. In Omaha, for example, a nonprofit fund-raising organization led by the community’s most prominent business leaders pledged to raise the necessary $15 million, while in Grand Rapids, Mich., Amway and the two families who own it have been major contributors.
But in other regions fund-raising has stalled. Long Beach, Calif., is struggling to raise $25 million. Chicago must raise $50 million.
New York City will have to raise $200 million for the Kroc Center scheduled for Staten Island, in part because the community has expanded the project.
In Massena, the cancellation of the Kroc Center was prompted by the closure of a General Motor plant, as well as other signs of economic deterioration.
“We’ll be going back to communicate with donors that have given for Kroc to let them know that we’re backing away from a Kroc center but will put up something else instead,” Colonel Hedgren said.
In Detroit, Salvation Army officials decided to cancel plans for a $40 million Kroc Center, a move that has incited outrage there and raised questions about how they have handled Mrs. Kroc’s gift. Army officials said they were simply unable to raise the needed money.
Supporters of the center disagree. Lt. Col. Clarence Harvey, a retired Salvation Army fund-raiser who was hired part-time to help raise money for the Detroit Kroc Center, said there was a financing plan in place in 2007 that local Army officials sidelined.
“There wasn’t any part of any program or future plan for Kroc that was not an example of the Salvation Army’s mission, but it made some people uncomfortable,” Colonel Harvey said. “There was fear that the Army is incapable of running such a plant, fear that the aquatics programs would be problematic — many concerns.”
The plan proposed by Colonel Harvey and a fund-raiser who was not a Salvation Army member, Russ Russell, included using a loan to give the community more time to raise the $48 million the Army was requiring.
Additionally, a major donor had pledged to line up 18 other large donors to pay down most of the loan, with the remainder coming from a grass-roots fund-raising effort.


But the plan was rejected by the leadership of the central territory. “There was never any offer on the table and never any viable deal to pursue,” said Col. Carol Seiler, the territory’s coordinator for strategic mission planning.


She said the “legal and practical” obstacles were too high.
In the end, she said, only $2 million was raised for the Detroit center, and donors in Detroit were telling Army officials there that they preferred to support the Army’s more traditional mission of serving basic needs.
Wayne Doran, a retired Ford Motor Company executive who led the Kroc fund-raising committee in Detroit, said he was confident the fund-raising goals could have been met and blamed internal Army squabbling for the cancellation of the center.
“I have great respect for the Salvation Army, but this couldn’t survive the political bickering that was going on among Army members,” Mr. Doran said. “People who give a lot of money do not want to give into a situation that is fraught with those kinds of problems.”
The Army recently turned down an offer of $250,000 from the Detroit Black McDonald’s Owners to support fund-raising and now plans to put a much smaller non-Kroc facility on the site. Community groups and others involved in the project have signed up more than 150 people to protest at the Salvation Army’s central territory headquarters in Chicago this month.
Meanwhile, other Kroc Centers are progressing. The Salem, Ore., center is scheduled to open in September, and the Omaha center in November; and at least five others are expected to open next year.
In some places, the Salvation Army has shown greater flexibility toward fund-raising goals. The central territory, for example, has allowed fund-raisers in Chicago to split their campaign into three phases.
Similarly, fund-raisers for the Kroc Center in Philadelphia say they believe that starting construction will help spur donations, so a 12-acre site there has been cleared and the holes have been dug for the pools.
“Some folks are less capable of giving because of investment returns and asset values being less, but they still want to hear from us,” said Raymond Welsh, a senior vice president at UBS Financial Services and chairman of the Philadelphia fund-raising committee. “Some are saying not now, but that’s not no forever.”

COLEMAN MURDER CASE BRINGS UP QUESTION OF EVANGELICAL DIVORCE




That question, of course, leads to others: When, and why, do religious organizations forbid their employees to divorce?Police have charged Christopher Coleman, a former employee of Joyce Meyer Ministries, with killing his wife and two children last month in their Columbia, Ill., home. A week after the murders, the Post-Dispatch disclosed that Coleman was having an affair. Soon after that, he resigned from his position working security with Joyce Meyer Ministries, a nonprofit evangelical organization based in Jefferson County. Coleman, 32, has pleaded not guilty.
Parents disclosed Wednesday that on the day of the murders, Coleman told his girlfriend that his wife, Sheri Coleman, would be served with divorce papers. In sworn testimony Wednesday, Columbia Police Chief Joe Edwards said: "Joyce Meyer Ministry does not employ people who get divorced." He said if the Colemans had divorced, Christopher Coleman "would end up losing his job." Calls to the ministry's headquarters were not returned, and an attorney for the ministry refused to speak on the record about the ministry's policy about divorce. Last month, however, a ministry spokesman said "a violation of moral conduct" led to Coleman's resignation.

Three former employees of the ministry described the no-divorce policy for the Post-Dispatch, though they couldn't say whether it was a written rule, or just an ingrained part of the Joyce Meyer Ministries culture. They said that people who have already gone through a divorce can be hired to work at the ministry, but that anyone divorced while working at the ministry is let go.

The ministry "hires people who have broken lives, who are divorced, who've been drug addicts," said George Wise, who said he worked for Joyce Meyer Ministries from 2001 to 2003 as a video specialist. The ministry uses testimonials from believers to attract others to the organization, including one from a woman whose relationship "ended in a painful divorce."

"I started to watch Joyce Meyer every chance I got," she writes. "God started to transform me and heal my broken heart."Wise said he'd been divorced twice by the time he was hired by Meyer and then married a colleague at the ministry. When that marriage didn't work out, he said, he was fired three days after his divorce was finalized."Everyone I ever knew that worked there and got divorced ... was fired," Wise said.

Professor Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who has written about religion and marriage, said a no-divorce policy is not unusual in Christian organizations whose employment guidelines are structured according to their faith."Some more traditional, typically evangelical Protestant or fundamentalist Protestant institutions ... have a policy relating to an employee's personal conduct," Wilcox said.

"For some of those institutions that conduct can encompass marital infidelity or divorce, and you could be sanctioned as a consequence."All of which is completely legal. "There is no law in Missouri that forbids discrimination on the basis of marital status," said Mary Anne Sedey, an employment attorney at Sedey Harper.

Eric Sowers, an employment attorney at Sowers & Wolf, said he'd never heard of anyone at a secular organization fired over marital status. He said religious organizations are exempt from the Missouri Human Rights Act. Wilcox said the First Amendment gives religious institutions wide latitude "to shape their employment policies so they're consistent with their religious teachings.

"Church leaders use a handful of passages from the Old and New Testaments as the Scriptural basis for such policies, including verses from the Gospels in which Jesus, referencing Genesis, said married people "are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."Most Christian scholars believe that after taking into account all the relevant biblical passages, Jesus said divorce was acceptable only in cases of adultery.

Christian leaders have struggled ever since with putting that message into practice, especially in clear cases of marital abuse.

"The big issues are the permitted grounds for divorce and whether or not one can remarry while the former spouse is alive," David Instone-Brewer, author of "Divorce And Remarriage in the Church," said in an e-mail message. "There are a few Christian teachers who would say that no believer may ever divorce, even if their spouse was committing constant adultery."Edwards, the Columbia police chief, testified Wednesday that Christopher Coleman has told authorities he had a good marriage, with a difficult period a year ago that was resolved with marriage counseling.

Despite the concentrated effort to keep Christian marriages together, a 2008 study from the Barna Research Group shows evangelical, or "born again" Christians divorce at the same rate as the rest of the American population — about 33 percent of all marriages.

Joyce Meyer said in her book she divorced her first husband, a part-time car salesman who cheated on her, in 1966 when she was 23. She calls it an "emotionally abusive first marriage" on her website. In an article on her ministry's website, Meyer wonders, "How many marriages could have been saved from divorce if husbands and wives had been willing to show love by serving one another."