Epic Fail: The Case of Ginny Mikita and UMC Polity

How—and why—a bishop and district superintendent erred in the way they dealt with a layperson who performed a wedding ceremony—and how we can get out of this mess.

A United Methodist Insight Editorial Analysis

By Thomas H. Griffith[1]

(c) 2015 Thomas H. Griffith & United Methodist Insight

Ginny Mikita is no longer a member of The United Methodist Church – or so says Bishop Deborah L. Kiesey, resident bishop of the denomination's Michigan Area.

Removing Ms. Mikita from membership was Bishop Kiesey’s response to a letter alleging misconduct filed against Ms. Mikita by three United Methodist clergy members – the Rev. Drew McIntyre of the North Carolina Annual Conference, the Rev. Evan Rohrs-Dodge of the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, and the Rev. Stephen W. Rankin of the North Texas Annual Conference. This analysis contends that by acting upon the clergymen's letter in the manner she did, Bishop Kiesey operated outside of United Methodist law.

The bishop's decision, implemented by district superintendent the Rev. William Haggard, has enraged one part of the church and cheered another. As a result of her actions, we United Methodists find ourselves in a church legal and administrative mess. The task now before us is to find a way to get out of this mess gracefully.

The episode started in July when a pastor serving in the West Michigan Annual Conference, the Rev. Benjamin Hutchison, admitted that he was in a committed relationship with another man. Rev. Hutchison is ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and so was treated as a United Methodist minister only as long as he was under appointment. Upon his self-avowal of homosexual practice, which is forbidden for United Methodist clergy, Bishop Kiesey terminated his appointment in accordance with church rule. A few days later, Rev. Hutchison and his partner Monty Hutchison were married.

Many of his former clergy colleagues wanted to stand with Rev. Hutchison in support of his marriage, which is now legal throughout the United States following a June U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming same-gender marriage as a constitutional right. However, within United Methodist Church law no clergy perform the marriage ceremony without putting their own orders at risk.

Attorney Ginny Mikita, a professing United Methodist and a candidate for the ordained ministry in the West Michigan Annual Conference, wanted to protect Rev. Hutchison's clergy friends from risking their own careers. So, in order to perform a wedding under Michigan state law, she signed up for an online “ordination” with Universal Life Church Ministries. Being thus “ordained,” Ms. Mikita performed the Hutchisons' legal ceremony.

At this point, the story divides into two versions. This writer is not certain which version is correct. However, either justification of Bishop Kiesey's action remains erroneous and contrary to United Methodist polity.

The first version, reported orally but not in writing, to Ms. Mikita, says that Bishop Kiesey invoked a 2012 Book of Discipline paragraph by which a pastor may classify a member as "withdrawn" if he or she finds that the member has joined another denomination.[2] In this version, Bishop Kiesey determined that Ms. Mikita had withdrawn her United Methodist membership. By terminating Ms. Mikita’s lay membership, the bishop also terminated Ms. Mikita’s ministerial candidacy status. Here the bishop's error comes in assuming responsibility for determining membership lies, which rightfully rests with a congregation's appointed pastor, not with the bishop or district superintendent. For the bishop to invoke the authority she took, she would have had first to remove the pastor of Ms. Mikita's church, and left that appointment vacant while the bishop expelled Ms. Mikita. This did not occur.

According to the second version, Bishop Kiesey took her authority from a 1993 ruling of the United Methodist Judicial Council, the denomination's "supreme court." Under the authority of Judicial Council Decision 696[3], Bishop Kiesey declared that because Ms. Mikita had joined another denomination, her candidacy and her membership were both terminated. Once again the bishop usurped another body's authority, as only a District Committee on Ordained Ministry may terminate a candidate’s status.[4]

This version relies on a particularly spurious argument. In context, Judicial Council Decision 696 related to a United Methodist clergy member, the Rev. William Farmer, then a professor at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. An ardent proponent of Christian unity, Dr. Farmer believed that the only way he could be ecumenical and affirmative of church history was to be an ordained United Methodist minister and simultaneously a lay member of a Roman Catholic religious order. The Judicial Council ruled that clergy in The United Methodist Church have an obligation to maintain exclusive membership in the denomination, and Dr. Farmer's status as United Methodist clergy was terminated. 

The Farmer ruling is at least understandable. We ask all lay members to “be loyal to The United Methodist Church and to support it with your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service, and your witness,”[5]  but we can't compel them to do so. However, we also believe that (ordained) elders are “set apart (from the lay membership) for a ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Order.”[6] Further, we guarantee each elder a full-time job, and guarantee that elder at least a minimum compensation for doing that job.[7]  If a clergy accepts that promise and that pay, the Church has a legitimate right to demand exclusive loyalty. Thus, Judicial Council Decision 696 never was intended to apply to lay members.

By either version, however, Ms. Mikita was not “ex-communicated” by Bishop Kiesey, as has been trumpeted by pro-LGBT forces. She remains a baptized member of the universal Christian Church.[8] Rather, the appropriate term for Ms. Mikita's removal is “disfellowshiped.”

Even in its correct understanding, Bishop Kiesey's action disturbs those of us who closely monitor the administration of United Methodist polity. Our understanding of church law is that there are only three ways a United Methodist may be removed from membership:

  1. He or she may withdraw.
  2. He or she may cease to participate in worship and other church activities, and be removed from membership after two years' inactivity by vote of the local charge conference.
  3. He or she may be brought up on charges and removed from membership in an ecclesiastical trial.[9] For laity, this process is a relic from late 18th century church history. It has only been used, to my knowledge, less than half a dozen times since the turn of the 20th century. (For clergy, trials are the ultimate way we discern and deal with alleged clergy misconduct, but there are many supervisory stages available prior to trials.)

In this case, the letter filed by Messrs. McIntyre, Rankin and Rohrs-Dodge against Ms. Mikita could only be deemed to be judicial complaints,[10] that is, formal complaints of misconduct under United Methodist law that could only be resolved by church legal means. These means are two: a just resolution involving supervisory review and pastoral consultation,  or a full-blown church trial.[11]

Either way, Bishop Kiesey's decision abrogated Ms. Mikita’s right under church law either to just resolution or to a trial.[12]

Further, Bishop Kiesey justified her action with the idea that an “ordination” from Universal Life Church Ministries was tantamount to membership in another “church.” Interestingly enough, we United Methodists have no definition within our church law of exactly what constitutes a “church.” By the many rules codified in the Book of Discipline, we presume that we are a “church,” but we make no attempt to define others, not even those denominations with which we are in "full communion."

Even the U. S. Constitution offers no help, for it specifically prohibits the government from coming up with a legal definition of a “church.” The closest thing we have to any legal definition of a “church” comes from a Federal Tax Court opinion, now used by Internal Revenue Service auditors when such questions come up: De La Salle Institute v. United States, 195 F. Supp. 891 (N.D. Cal. 1961).[13] This Court decision listed fourteen activities common to worshipping churches of all denominations. While not setting a numerical requirement for the number of such activities a religious organization must undertake to be considered a “church,” it suggested that a “church” is a religious organization that engages in a preponderance of such activities, the most important being that it has a worshipping congregation. The United Methodist Church engages in all fourteen such activities. Based on statements in its website, Universal Life Church Ministries at best engages in only four of the cited activities. It maintains a list of its “ordained ministers,” offers ordinations for free upon request, and sells “ordination certificates” and “ordination kits.” Universal Life Church Ministries has no membership, and no worshipping congregations. It is no more a church than would be your local grocery store! To say that Ms. Mikita joined the “membership of another denomination” is a joke without foundation.

What really happened, on both Ms. Mikita’s part and Bishop Kiesey’s part, is that they played with what can only be called a “legal fiction,” something that has no factual basis but for legal purposes we pretend it to be true nonetheless. This legal fiction is the statement in our Social Principles that “(the practice of) homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching….”[14] and the derivative paragraphs used throughout 2012 The Book of Discipline used to implement that fiction within our denomination.

Ms. Mikita undertook the effort to get an online “ordination” so she could perform the legal wedding of a former clergy and his partner, thus protecting the couple's clergy friends from being charged with “disobedience to the order and Discipline of The United Methodist Church.”[15] Ms. Mikita is no more a member of this non-church ordination mill than any of us reading this article.

In accordance with the job description we have for bishops,[16] Bishop Kiesey responded to protect our church law by trying to find a way to “punish” Ms. Mikita for violating this legal fiction in an expeditious manner – even when it meant violating the very polity from which the bishop receives her authority to administer.

Thus, both erred; Ms. Mikita by taking a generous but ill-advised action of her heart, and Bishop Kiesey by taking an extralegal action outside the Book of Discipline process. The real villain in this event is General Conference’s insistence that we maintain the legal fiction of official opposition to marriage equality that is now legal in the United States.

Compounding the episode, the United Methodist Church is not solely a U.S. denomination; it is an international denomination with churches in Europe, Africa, and the Philippines. It also is an organization that operates under a form of political philosophy which political scientists and historians have called “Jacksonian Democracy.” We operate by majority vote, under Robert's Rules of Order, with votes on everything at every level in the denomination. Therein lies the rub.

If the vote were taken solely among the United States clergy and laity of the denomination elected as delegates to the General Conference, the statement that “(the practice of) homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and its derivative implementations would not exist. However, outside the United States, and particularly in Africa, the church is fighting cultural acceptance of profligate sexual activities outside of monogamous relationships that has led to Africa suffering 90 percent of the world's HIV/AIDS cases. Especially for the church in Africa, an official United Methodist statement that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching is a contextual, theological and ethical necessity. However, according to the latest information from the World Health Organization, HIV/AIDS is transmitted by unprotected anal or vaginal sex. WHO states: "Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, with 25.8 [24.0–28.7] million people living with HIV in 2014. Also sub-Saharan Africa accounts for almost 70 percent of the global total of new HIV infections." The votes of conservative U.S. delegates and the majority of delegates from outside the United States keep the denomination's anti-homosexuality stances in place are a tool to cope with this health crisis.

Nonetheless, because of the present U.S.-centric nature of United Methodist governance, we can't eliminate anti-homosexuality stances within the United States where same-gender marriage is now legal, but leave them in place for countries with different cultural contexts. Thus United Methodist bishops are under tremendous pressure to enforce this legal fiction worldwide.

So, how do we get out of this mess? I suggest that the best and easiest thing that could occur would be for the president of the North Central Jurisdiction College of Bishops to invite one or more mediators to work with the three official complainants, Ms. Mikita, the district superintendent, and Bishop Kiesey, in an effort to develop what we call a “just resolution.”[17] Such a resolution could begin by rescinding the decision to disfellowship Ms. Mikita and to terminate her candidacy for the ordained ministry. Then much prayer and discussion among the six participants would be needed to come up with an appropriate resolution that all could accept. We must remember that the biblical norm for “justice” is “restoration of the community.” Forced separation contradicts Christian teaching regardless of anyone's theological perspective, according to Jesus' instructions in Matthew 18. The Book of Discipline specifies "just resolution" as the first step in dealing with alleged misconduct.

Apart from the "just resolution" process, nothing can be gained by forcing the church trial of a lay member. By the time the trial process was over, the cost would be into six figures; the enmity among United Methodist factions would be inflamed; and the denomination's reputation would be even more besmirched than it all ready is by this episode. There are far better things upon which we could spend money, time, and emotional energy. No one wins in a church trial: the moment it is convened, everyone has lost, for that action proves that we have failed to find a way to be the body of Christ.

What the Ginny Mikita episode really tells us is that our “legal fiction” is getting in the way of us being the body of Christ to bring about healing, wholeness, and Christ-likeness among our lay and clergy members. I believe our General Conference has to come up with a better way to deal with the reality of homosexuality as part of God’s creation, and how appropriately to deal with this issue holistically, in our church.

[1] Thomas H. Griffith is a retired ordained Elder in the California-Pacific Annual Conference, now residing in Chandler, Arizona. He has been involved in church judicial issues both as Counsel for the Church, Defense Counsel, and Defense Advocate in judicial and administrative complaint processes for the past 30 years.

[2] See ¶241, 2012 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church.

[3] See http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263 at decision 696.

[4] ¶314.1, 2012 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church

[5] Op. Cit., ¶217.6

6 Op. Cit., ¶332

[7] Op. Cit., ¶¶337, 342

[8] See ¶215.1, .2, 2012 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church.

[9] Op. Cit., ¶¶221, 2703.3, 2714

[10] Op. Cit., ¶2702.1

[11] Op. Cit., ¶221

[12] Op. Cit., ¶20

[13] Cited at length at “http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopica94.pdf”

[14] Op. Cit., ¶161(F)

[15] ¶2701.1(d)

[16] ¶¶414-416

[17] Op. Cit., ¶¶221, 2704.4