What Can We Learn from British Methodists Revising Mission?

July 17, 2013

5:34 PM

British Methodist Logo

The Methodist Church in Britain held its annual conference recently. One important decision to come out of that conference was to fully integrate the Methodist Missionary Society into the rest of the denomination. In its announcement about the move, the church stated, "We have a unique opportunity to assert the understanding that the mission of the Church is one in which work at home and overseas is essentially the same mission." David Friswell, Leader of World Church Relationships, added that "God's mission [is] one mission for all people wherever they call home." This move shows a dramatic move away from a colonial, metropole-missions or center-periphery understanding of the Methodist Church in Britain. In this decision, the Methodist Conference asserts the equality (and similarity) of all areas of mission and ministry for the church.

The United Methodist Church still draws distinctions between its work in the United States and elsewhere around the globe in several ways. Perhaps most obvious are the differences between the Central Conferences and the U.S.-based Jurisdictions. Like the Methodist Church in Britain up until this point, the structure of the denomination's agencies also reflects a colonial privileging of the home body. Most denominational agencies, while not operating entirely in the U.S., are nonetheless heavily U.S.-focused. The UMC maintains a General Board of Global Ministries, tasked with furthering the church's work around the world.

What would it mean for the UMC to affirm along with the Methodist Church in Britain that "God's mission is one mission for all people wherever they call home?" How would such an affirmation not only change our structures but change the ways in which we think about the relationships between the various branches of the UMC? How would it change our understanding of mission and ministry?

These are all questions worth asking, and the Methodist Church in Britain's decision should be taken as an occasion for United Methodists to ask themselves those questions.

David W. Scott coordinates the blog UM & Global, dedicated to fostering conversations about the global nature of The United Methodist Church.

Comments (1)

Comment Feed

Worldwide Nature of the Church

I applaud Mother Methodism, The Methodist Church in Britain, for its understanding of the mission of the Church. I happen to be born in Malaysia which was a British colony but my Methodist roots stem from the United States which was once a British colony too. The Methodist movement from America which sets itself free from Britain did not do the same with the Methodist churches which they helped to establish in Asia, Africa and South America. It fostered the colonial empire mentality in setting up Central Conferences. British Methodism sets its goal to provide the autonomous national churches with national leadership and maintain a fraternal relationship with the British Conference. On the other hand, United Methodist embraced the colonial image and surfaced it again under the rubric of The Global Nature of United Methodist Church.

In the period after World War Two the colonial empires were disintegrating with the emergence of national independence. Methodist Churches of the British connection had already in place the independence of national Methodist Churches. But this was not the case of Methodist churches connected with the Board of Mission then of the present United Methodist Church.

Methodist Churches in Asia with the lonely exception of the Philippines (once an American colony) was on the move towards autonomy and freeing themselves from the global structure of the United Methodist Church. It was in 1968 that I was elected as the first Asian Bishop of The Methodist Church in Malaysia and Singapore without any political pressure from their governments. Other Asian and Latin American churches followed this direction in the following decades until recent years. We have not turned back to the past. I predict that financial considerations of supporting a global structure will force the return to this path towards autonomy of Methodist churches especially in Africa and Europe which are still in connection as Central Conferences.

YAP Kim Hao more than 10 years ago