Attendance at PRS Drops After Recent Funding Changes

Photo Courtesy of The King’s College

Attendance for The King’s College’s Public Reading of Scripture (PRS) has significantly dropped in the first two weeks of the Spring 2023 semester after the formal announcement of no more free Chick-fil-A from the college’s Grace and Mercy Foundation (G&M) grant during their Welcome Back Gathering.

“Specifically [with] attendance numbers, they have been lower,” said Moses Kazanjian, a senior and the Christian Formation intern for King’s. “I will say we've only had two PRS’ since we've gotten back. If you look at the data, the first week was less than half of what we usually get. Usually, we expect a spike on the first day of PRS, so that was kind of discouraging. We only had 25 people show up to the first PRS, and then it evened out to a normal 40-45 the second week. It's hard to tell what's going on with numbers if you know that it has only been two weeks.”

This number went up the following Monday, with around 46 people attending PRS according to Colby McCaskill and Avian Hall, both freshmen in the House of Dietrich Bonhoeffer – “about double the people that were here last week,” said Hall.

“I went to PRS this past Monday [Jan. 30] and attendance was definitely lower than last semester,” said Rachel Wells, the Chamberlain and Spiritual Life Associate (SLA) for the House of Queen Elizabeth I. “But I think it was a good turnout, especially considering the lack of Chick-fil-A as an incentive for students to attend.”

Prior to this week’s PRS, King’s advertised in-person community updates held during PRS meetings. “Beginning this Monday,” the announcement in the King’s Weekly email on Jan. 29 read, “we are initiating a bimonthly Community Update immediately following PRS in order to keep our community informed and updated about campus happenings.” (Editor’s note: A full story regarding the community update will be published Monday 2/6.)

“From what I saw, the community update brought a lot more traffic to PRS than normal,” McCaskill said. “Though I hope the attendance numbers stay high as I see PRS as integral to The King’s College.”

This is the second major change to come to PRS this school year. At the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester, the school transitioned from a communal reading of selected Scriptures by volunteers to pre-recorded readings from the G&M Foundation’s new app Audio Bible.

The Grace and Mercy Foundation is a New York-based private grant-making foundation for religious nonprofits. The foundation gives an annual grant to King’s to support its various spiritual life programs.

“The Grace and Mercy Foundation provided the funding for the Chick-fil-A lunches at PRS each week, which was why we switched to the prerecorded audio version of Bible readings,” Wells said. “The Grace and Mercy Foundation values getting through large passages of Scripture. To respect the organization providing the funding, we moved to the new PRS format… SLAs were informed of this change during our training session before new students moved in.”

“The decision to use the pre-recorded readings was something TKC and G&M mutually agreed to pilot,” said Director of Christian Formation Rafael (Ralph) Castillo. “After this year, we agreed to regroup and discuss the impact/outcomes.”

“There are pros and cons for both,” Kazanjian said, referencing the format change for PRS. “The whole idea with having readers out there is we wanted to engage our community and see members of our community go up and represent and just read, and it's nice to have that. But there are a lot of added pros to using the Audio Bible. For example, we get through more significantly more Scripture. In fact, we can track how much Scripture we've gone through and compare that to previous years… We're not sacrificing quality and we're increasing quantity.”

“The other spiritual life program[s] that G&M helps to fund are the House PRS and Just Show Up groups,” Leedy said. “Most houses refer to them as House Bible Studies. Those continue to be supported via the G&M grant.”

It remains unclear as to how the funds that were paying for lunch at PRS are being reallocated. For the initial announcement, Leedy told the Empire State Tribune that “the foundation gives the College a large gift to help fund multiple programs but leaves it up to the College to determine how much is allocated to those respective programs.”

“As an intern, I have not been told where the money has been going,” Kazanjian said. “I'm not saying that nobody's being transparent or they're being secretive about it. It's just not something that's come up… The funds that were given to houses did not change. We made sure that that didn't change because people had already secured some of those.”

The future of the G&M Foundation is uncertain. As of July 2022, the G&M Foundation is currently facing a lawsuit from a former employee of Archegos Capital Management after the arrest of billionaire Bill Hwang and the subsequent collapse of Archegos in Spring 2021. Hwang is the founder and CEO of both Archegos and the G&M Foundation. The lawsuit against G&M has not yet been settled.

“I don’t know much about the lawsuit and to my knowledge, it has no bearing on the G&M grant that King’s receives,” Leedy said. Castillo declined to comment on the subject.

On G&M’s most recent tax form released by the IRS, the foundation gave a total of $475,000 to King’s in 2019. According to Kazanjian, the budget for Christian formation programs in the 2021-2022 school year while he was Director of Spiritual Life was $38,000.

The Empire State Tribune was unable to verify the size of G&M’s grant to King’s for the 2022-2023 school year.

Melinda Huspen is the Managing Editor of the Empire State Tribune. She is a junior at The King’s College studying Journalism, Culture and Society.