I was thinking about the penny pinching, miserly nature of our connectional hierarchy as I learned today that the General Board of Discipleship (which, now that it's been renamed GBOD, must now be automatically relevant) has taken their weekly hymn resource off its website. This planner provided suggested music across all UMC music resources based on theme and scripture for each week. Apparently, (my fiancee had used it) it was quite well done and extremely useful when constructing a service every week.
When, in preparation for leading Sunday worship, she visited the site, she found that they had been taken down, and that instead of getting these resources for free, they were now only available in a $16 book.
Our blessed worship people made a passing effort to explain their decision, saying that they're responding to "customers requests" to have all the planner in one book, (what customer requests that you remove a free product and charge for it instead?) "flexibility of use" since the resources are now in one place, (why not add cross-searching abilities into the web site or simply publish it as a free .pdf for download?) , and, believe it or not, due to "price concerns", after all, since it's only thirty one cents a week, anyone can afford it. (How generous of them! Especially considering that churches were paying nothing for it before!)
I do give them credit for listing customer complaints at the bottom of the page. However, they never respond to those complaints specifically, instead simply assuring us that they thought seriously about it.
Quite frankly, if they're going to take away a free resource and make us pay money for it (and yes, for a poor seminary student like me, $16 is a lot of money for a resource!), then be honest with us and admit you're doing it to make a profit. Pretending that you removed the resources from the website to help out "customers" (by the way, customers? since when are the constituents of the churches who pay for your budget via apportionments mere customers?) is dishonest and condescending.
Rather than giving us the resources to equip us for our ministries, they're going for a cheap buck and hoping we don't notice. Unfortunately, this seems to happen across the board in United Methodism. It's the reason why "our United Methodist Publishing House" doesn't give away ANY resources,and charges prices that are significantly higher than places like Christan Book Distributors and Amazon.com. It's the reason why there are Wesleyan Foundations (UM college fellowships) that can't use the Methodist order of worship because they don't own a book of Worship and aren't an official United Methodist Church (Contrast this with the Episcopalians, whose entire Book of Common Prayer (which is far more central to their worshipping life than the Book of Worship is to the UMC) is open source, free to anyone to use).
When a denomination overcharges its members for the resources you need to do ministry effectively, then you know it's in serious trouble.
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