We're Not Designed to Be a 'Worldwide Denomination'

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

Editor's note: This article has been revised from a previously published version at the author's request.

Someone once wrote: “It is bad enough to be conned by a con man. What is worse is to allow ourselves to be conned by ourselves!” I believe The United Methodist Church has done this collectively to all of us as members, and to itself as an organization.

If we are to try to become a functioning church that has room for all people, I think it is worth our taking the time to try to understand how we got to this point, and what can (and cannot) be done to correct this situation. In part, we are here because we’ve been conning ourselves.

The con was: “When The United Methodist Church was created in 1968, it had approximately eleven million members, making it one of the largest Protestant churches in the world. Since then the church has become increasingly aware of itself as a world church with membership and conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States.” (2016 Book of Discipline, “A Brief History of The United Methodist Church,” p. 23).

What immediately follows are words that we don’t say quite so loudly anymore: “While worldwide membership in The United Methodist Church has grown since 1968, membership in Europe and the United States has declined, offset by significant growth in Africa and Asia.”

Four ‘global’ U.S. denominations

There are only four Christian denominations in the United States that proclaim themselves to be “worldwide denominations”: The Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and The United Methodist Church. The first three denominations are distinctive in sharing a similar organizational design: they have centralized authority and a centralized body defining their theology. Those two facts make the act of maintaining a “worldwide denomination” easer in many respects.

In The United Methodist Church, however, we have, by design, a very decentralized authority, with checks and balances therein, that in many ways mimic the United States Constitution. Further, we allow each individual to make the determinations as to what his/her Christian beliefs are, guided only by a selection of historical documents. (2016 Book of Discipline, “Our Doctrinal Standards and Our Theological Task,” ¶105: “Our theological task is both individual and communal. It is a feature in the ministry of individual Christians. It requires the participation of all who are in our Church, lay and ordained, because the mission of the Church is to be carried out by everyone who is called to discipleship. To be persons of faith is to hunger to understand the truth given to us in Jesus Christ.”

Those differences between our polity and that of the other three denominations that claim to be “worldwide denominations” make it impossible, organizationally, for us to be a “worldwide denomination.”

No worldwide organization, be it the Red Cross, the Roman Catholic Church, Hertz Rent-a-Car, or McDonald’s, can function with each operational division of the organization assigned to carry out identical tasks, operating on different protocols. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to maintain order or control of multiple divisions. Yet this is precisely what we do as The United Methodist Church: we allow Central Conferences (the outside-the-United-States analog of Jurisdictional Conferences within the United States) to amend Disciplinary operational rules to fit differing cultural norms in the areas that they serve. No Jurisdiction in the United States is allowed to do that.

In fairness, we began doing this with the best of intentions, in an attempt to move beyond what many in the Central Conferences call the “colonialism” that was part of the way we did business earlier in our history. In the nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, we saw ourselves as “the good Christians,” who sent Missionaries to foreign lands both to help the people there become aware of a the words of Jesus, and to help them become disciples of Christ. However, in those years, we did not see those new Christians we converted to be our equals. We were not welcoming these new Christians into our tent; essentially we still were subjugating them to a lower status. We realized that this had to change if we were to move out of our “colonial” style of doing business as a church.

Two-fold efforts at change

Our way of making that change was two-fold. To the consternation of many Traditionalists, in the 1980s we changed our missionary-sending model. Instead of sending preachers to proclaim Christ and to baptize new converts, we sent “technocrats,” for lack of a better term, as our missionaries. Their task was to help create the physical and intellectual structures necessary to support new Christian communities: schools, churches, clean water systems, etc. We trusted those who previously had been converted to Christianity, people who knew the local languages in both their formal and colloquial modes, to do the preaching and converting. We made mission members full members of The United Methodist Church, and to keep from imposing our cultural version of Christianity on them, we allowed them to change the operational rules of the church in their areas to fit their own cultural norms and styles of living. The result of these changes in style of missionary outreach was spectacularly successful. As the churches overseas grew, we expanded the number of Annual and Central Conferences we used to maintain structure.

We in The United Methodist Church in the United States never imagined that we would become a minority of the membership in the church. There are, by now, more United Methodist “professing members” outside the United States than there are inside the United States. Yet as a self-proclaimed “worldwide denomination,” with one body (the General Conference) that makes and approves our denominational rules, for only some parts of the world, then as the majority changes, so do our priorities as a denomination. This, because of the fact that the “majority” local churches from outside the United States now operate on less restrictive protocols than do the local churches (and members thereof) inside the United States.

Problems arise when this difference in operational structure, however, is overlaid on our belief that every “professing” (i.e., active) member of the church, wherever located, is a brother or sister Christian, and therefore has an equal, individual vote at each level in which his/her membership is held. We find ourselves in the disputations that have developed over the past 50 years. This issue came to a head at the recent special session of our General Conference. We believe the Holy Spirit speaks to the Church through “majority rule” as identified by voting. The side that has the most votes is the side that prevails in determining our church rules.

All of this has happened, without any particular consideration of financial issues involved. That is a subject in itself for another essay. Suffice it to say, however, that there are many in the United States church that resent being a minority in the total membership of the church while being asked to financially underwrite the Church outside the United States.

Managerial factors

Democratically controlled and maintained organizations can only operate fairly and efficiently when each voting member has a vote of equal valence, and when there is centralized authority to make all parts of the organization, on the same level, operate on parity.

Because it made United Methodists inside the United States feel warm and fuzzy inside to believe that we were giving shared power to the churches outside the United States, (under the assumption, of course, that we inside the United States would always be in the majority), we were willing to ignore the managerial factors that allow international organizations to function; factors that any graduate Business School teaches.

Before theological differences or anything else, this disparity needs to be addressed. Further, to stay within our Constitutional structure, this disparity needs to be addressed by the General Conference for the lowest level within our denomination: professing membership in the local Charge or Church.

The first affirmation that needs to be made in ALL parts of the UMC is that we need to have our rules be consistent with our theological beliefs. My understanding of our beliefs in church membership is that, because each new Christian is asked individually to profess his/her faith in Jesus Christ and Lord, church membership is unabashedly individual; neither familial, nor based on clan, nor communal. This apparently is solely a United States understanding of church membership.

In some areas outside the United States, it has been acknowledged that local church professing membership has been reported via acceptance on bases other than an individual profession of one’s faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. In some annual conferences that are parts of a Central Conference, local church membership may be identified on the basis of being a member of a family, of a clan, or of a community. This has led to reports of tremendous growth in the number of professing members in some annual conferences that are part of a Central Conference; a growth which is not matched with concomitant growth in the average attendance at worship, as reported to the Statistical Reporting section of the General Council on Finance and Administration (¶¶807.15 and .16, 2016 The Book of Discipline.)

In the United States, there is a financial incentive to local churches to keep their professing membership lists honest: In most U.S., annual conferences, financial apportionments to local charges is determined at least in part by the number of professing members. The more members, the more a local charge is asked to contribute to “fair share” funds, both in the general church and annual conference. Are there similar requirements, and similar financial incentives, for determining the number of professing members in annual conferences that are part of Central Conferences? Or is there even a form of financial “apportionment” that is given to local churches in an annual conference that is part of a Central Conference?

Membership audit crucial

If we are to remain a body that allows churches outside the United States to operate on less restrictive protocols than those applied to churches inside the United States, at the very least, we must insist that there be an annual audit of professing membership, with financial incentives to keep all local church reported membership reliably honest, as a responsibility of the appointed pastor of each local church that s/he serves (¶231, 2016 The Book of Discipline) following the rubrics detailed at ¶228.2(4), 2016 The Book of Discipline). This would have to be a uniform rule for all parts of the denomination.

Unless and until we insist that the churches in the Central Conferences have the same rules defining local church membership as do the U.S. churches, and to keep their lists of professing membership honest, we will always have a dysfunctional organization.

An alternative would be allow the United States to become the equivalent of a Central Conference. This would give the U.S. church the authority to amend Disciplinary rules to fit their local cultural needs and norms. If the results have been as successful as reported, there is possibility that granting that same right of amendment would create growth in U.S. local churches.

I can attest to that possibility in my own ministry. Prior to retirement, I was appointed, over the years, to serve three different churches whose racial or cultural membership composition were predominantly not my own, nor in the U.S. United Methodist mainstream. In two of those churches, it became obvious that we had to alter the way we organized our local church administrative structure to fit their specific cultural situations.

Fortunately, in both cases, I had District Superintendents who were willing to listen to what I suggested, to trust my judgment, and to give me permission, before the annual Charge Conference, to make those changes. As a result, in both churches, we had fewer arguments and the beginning stages of growth, once those changes were made. It is indeed possible that granting permission to make operational rules changes may well be what is needed for minority populations in the denomination to flourish.

However, making the United States into its own Central Conference won’t address the issue of having a majority control of what happens in the local churches of the minority membership. Instead the former U.S. Jurisdictional and Central Conferences would operate on parity. The result of this would be a denomination that would have several regional operational divisions, each operating under a different set of protocols that would lead to a differing set of theological beliefs. This would be little different than the proposed Connectional Conference Plan that was rejected by the General Conference.

Further, once a freedom has been bestowed on an operational division of any entity, it is difficult to rescind that freedom. Now that the churches in the Central Conferences have been granted the freedom to change their operational rules to fit their cultural situation, there is no practical way we could ensure that their membership audits would be accurate. They could easily say, “We’re doing this following our own cultural traditions.”

I am sad to say that, regardless of the more widely discussed theological differences found in various parts of our denomination, it is difficult for me to see any way we can bring ourselves back to unity given these operational differences. Even if our denomination were to split in two, each side would still be a denomination with more members living outside the United States than inside the United States. Nor would a divided church have the money to continue to subsidize the the Central Conferences at the level to which those local churches have become accustomed.

Therefore, I assert that even if this theological difference over LGBQ acceptance were not a matter of contention, our polity would have led us to the same point in which we find ourselves right now. We conned ourselves into buying the idea that we are a “worldwide denomination” without putting in the operational safeguards that would allow us to maintain ourselves, worldwide.

I hope and pray that between now and the 2020 General Conference, these operational design issues can be discussed and changes in our polity recommended, as a way for our churches to be able to function together. Alas, I fear we have conned ourselves into a place where little can be done to rescue us. A denominational divorce may well be the only way we can continue to exist and be in ministry for Jesus Christ, separately. That saddens me beyond words.

The Rev. Thomas H. Griffith is a retired clergy member of the California-Pacific Annual Conference.