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Friends United Meeting |
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March 1998
A Hard Look at Gifts
By Earl L. Conn
"If I were analyzing the Priscilla Deters' Productions Plus story it would be that we all are susceptible to greed, not excluding myself. Anytime anyone says 'I want to give you this wonderful gift,' we should step back and take a long hard look at what's proposed," said David Brock
David Brock, Indiana Yearly Meeting superintendent and treasurer of the Fifth Friends Ministers Conference held in October 1994 in Orlando, was reflecting on the experience when Deters' Productions Plus agency in Kansas promised the sponsors of the conference that she would double their money to help train pastors "because she really wanted to help."
Sponsors of the conference, Friends United Meeting and Evangelical Friends International-North American Region, had invested with Productions Plus for the 1989 conference and received back more than $50,000. A 1989 surplus of $22,000 was reinvested toward an anticipated gift of $150,000 for the 1994 conference.
"Our sponsors already had used the 1994 registration money to pay the air tickets for participants. We had a $140,000 hotel bill and, when she came to the conference, she gave us a check for $80,000 toward that bill. But the next day, she stopped payment on the check," Brock recalled.
Productions Plus supplied no further funds. Ultimately, contributions and loans from participating yearly meetings paid off the debt.
By 1996, Deters was under federal indictment on 11 counts of mail fraud and three counts of wire fraud in Kansas for defrauding churches and religious organizations in 21 states out of an estimated $6 million.
One aftermath of the affair was that Maurice Roberts, superintendent of Mid-America Yearly Meeting (MAYM), resigned his position Oct. 22, 1994, on the basis of exceeding his authority and failure to give full disclosure about yearly meeting investments with Productions Plus. At the time, Duane Hansen, clerk of the yearly meeting noted, "In spite of this error in judgment, Maurice has served us in an exemplary manner."
Jim Perkins later resigned his position on the yearly meeting finance committee when he felt a three-person study committee's report about Productions Plus was being ignored. "I am convinced the church is losing lots of fine, astute businessmen when we refuse to deal with these situations. It's a matter of integrity," he says.
Leatha Hein, a MAYM trustee until 1995 and acting treasurer, carried out her own investigation of the yearly meeting's involvement with Productions Plus and National Friends Trust. Eventually, she turned her records over to federal authorities when it was determined that federal court was the best way to stop Deters because of her use of the mails and wires.
"My fellow trustees were very supportive and gave no resistance at all to finding the facts and laying them out. Our resistance came from the executive committee, the superintendent and from the floor of the yearly meeting," she recalls.
In planning for the 1994 pastors' conference, Brock recalls that several Friends "really put on the pressure" to accept Deters' money-making offer:
"We all should have been more suspicious when we were told that she would only deal with one individual and that she was a private person who wanted no publicity but only wanted to help.
"In retrospect, I'm convinced we should all re-read John Woolman. We need to trim our expectations to what we can handle. We need to pay attention to our core programs and not get caught up in all the other stuff. Our sights shouldn't be set so high and we certainly shouldn't depend on some high-flying financier."
Federal prosecutors have charged Deters with operating a matching-gift
fund program with her victims including, among others, Friends, the Nazarenes,
and Barclay College in Haviland, Kansas. Her trial, originally scheduled
in late 1997, was postponed when she was sent to a federal facility for
mental evaluation. Her trial now is scheduled for late February 1998.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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