LAKELAND — A proposal up for vote at this year’s Florida Annual Conference event May 27-31 would phase in the need for clergy to purchase their own parsonage furniture and require churches to take stronger efforts to ensure housing quality.

A task force commissioned during last year’s conference event to explore this issue has completed its work and will present four key recommendations May 30, according to chairman Warren Langer, pastor of Sanlando United Methodist Church in Orlando. Part of the task force’s research involved privately surveying clergy on their housing needs and concerns.

The first recommendation involves changes to the 23-year-old conference parsonage/housing guidelines, giving them more clarity and enforceable teeth. The second item is a list of guidelines for churches providing housing allowances instead of parsonages, which Langer said is a rapidly growing minority of churches. The third concerns transferring the responsibility of furniture to clergy families across a four-year period, and the final recommendation is a district process for clergy families or churches to follow when problems arise over housing.

“…These changes are the result of changes in the [United Methodist Book of] “Discipline” and in the communities where we live and do ministry,” Langer said.

The 1980 housing guidelines “never specified which ones were more important than others. We eliminated some and kept others, emphasizing requirements for parsonages. These will now be standing rules rather than guidelines,” Langer said. “There was no way you were going to find one house that fulfilled all the guidelines. Each church picked the guidelines they wanted to followed and ignored all the others.”

The only new requirement to the 1980 guidelines is that churches provide a monitored security system within the next four years. “So many pastors have to leave in the middle of the night on emergencies that spouses have put that as their No. 1 priority. Plus, since everyone in town knows when the pastor is gone on vacation, there’s been a lot of break-ins,” Langer said.

Each district will form a committee that can make an exemption to one of these requirements, Langer added. “We realize we live in a state with some of the most rural and urbanized areas of the country. There’s no way to be able to address everybody’s issues in every situation.”

Churches that provide a housing allowance rather than a parsonage are being asked to survey existing houses or condominiums within a span of 20 miles of the church in order to find housing of equal value to a parsonage. Langer’s task force also emphasizes the need to research how clergy can more consistently become homeowners, since it is challenging for pastors to come up with down payments or mortgages due to relatively low salaries.

Orlando’s Trinity United Methodist Church recently sold its parsonage and now gives its pastor, the Rev. David Juliano, a housing allowance. Juliano’s wife, Allison, said the change helps them feel they have “some control over some part” of their lives, allowing them to locate in a neighborhood and near schools that are best for their children.

“Owning our own home takes the hard edge off the [itinerant] system,” Rev. Juliano said. “It gives freedom, flexibility and options to ministers we’ve never had before. I can’t explain to you the piece of mind.”

The proposal also calls for empowering district trustees or a clergy housing committee to review any plans for new parsonages and approve housing allowances. The trustees or the committee also would consult with superintendents if there are problems with a particular church’s housing situation and act as mediators. A group of laity and clergy would comprise the committee. Either the trustees or the committee would visually inspect every parsonage at least once every four years or when a pastor moves in.

Langer said the task force’s private survey found that pastors had far more negative things to say about housing when compared to the charge conference forms signed off on by key lay leaders. Thirty-eight percent of conference clergy responded to the survey.

In the Florida conference about 20 percent of pastors receive housing allowances. Langer said that number is as high as 50 percent in North Georgia and more than 80 percent in Arizona.

Pastors who currently receive an allowance must provide their own furniture and, when moved to a furnished parsonage, pay for storage of their furniture. Many clergy coming from second careers already have their own furniture or items with special meaning.

Under the proposal clergy will be responsible for all furniture by 2007. Churches will still provide major appliances. This requirement, however, would be phased in. By 2005 clergy would be responsible for bedroom and study furniture, and two years later, for all furnishings.

“What we’re recommending for churches that already have furniture: if the clergy want it, either give it to them or work out a fair purchase process for them to have it; or sell it, and return the money back to the church,” Langer said.

The Rev. Ivan Corbin, pastor of Community United Methodist Church in Fruitland Park, said he thinks requiring pastors to own their own furniture is “ultimately…a good thing,” though it will put some financial stress on his family over the next several years. Corbin has two children who will enter college in the next five years. “Money I might have been setting aside for college might now have to go to furniture,” he said. “For pastors, especially those on lower salaries, this will be a pretty big hit in the pocket book.”

Corbin thinks this change will make things easier on churches and pastors during moves. Community church built and furnished a new parsonage a little more than a year ago. “The house was furnished for the Corbin family,” he said, adding the new pastoral family arriving in June has more children. “The church is having to redo what it did just 18 months ago.”

Langer’s task force asked the Pastor’s Relief Fund to be ready to assist pastors having difficulty with the furniture requirement. The Florida United Methodist Foundation is also being asked to help churches generate interest income by holding proceeds from the sale of parsonages.