Break Up Text
13 November 2017
The United Methodist Council of Bishops gave us yet a third option for a way forward to resolve our impasse on human sexuality, and that one is COB Option 3, Separation.
Here’s what the COB says about this choice:
3) A third sketch of a model is grounded in a unified core that includes shared doctrine and services and one COB, while also creating different branches that have clearly defined values such as accountability, contextualization and justice.
There seems to me to be some intentional obfuscation in this description, but whatever the intent, it is easily uncovered to reveal itself to be a proposal for amicable separation. “Different branches” must be understood to mean organically separate churches, while “unified core” means some umbrella organization, similar, perhaps, to the existing World Methodist Council, but likely with more significant common ministries than obtain in that body.
This option is simultaneously simpler and much more complex than the other two. In COB Option 1, it is likely that the Progressive Incompatiblists will depart. In COB Option 2, we would be at high risk to lose the Traditional Incompatiblists. In COB Option 3, Separation, the concept of loss would be entirely different, because the most persuasive way to look at it is that the current structure would cease to exist. The simplicity is that the only work that General Conference would need to do at the special session of 2019 would be to delete the trust provisions of the Book of Discipline to enable the withdrawal of local churches from The United Methodist Church with their real property and other assets intact, and approve the concept in general terms. There isn’t time in the three days allotted to the special session for business purposes to do any more than that. Moreover, an expiring organism has no control over what will replace it other than to pass on its DNA, history, and traditions. Thus it was, for example, with Hitler’s Third Reich. It had no influence over the creation of the modern German nation.
The complexity is that the various entities who arise from the rubble of The UMC, if COB Option 3 is selected, will create themselves, and that work will begin at the General Conference of 2020 when dissolution is formally structured, including, most importantly, an agreement among the new churches about what sort of Wesleyan Alliance they can create as the expression of connection.
The highest jeopardy for catastrophic damage in implementing COB Option 3 is our general agency structure that most embodies our connectional polity. If we go down this path, it seems to me that we can find a way to cooperate through the Wesleyan Alliance to support our General Board of Pension and Health Benefits (now Wespath) and our General Council on Finance and Administration. Agreement on those should be relatively easy. Somewhat more difficult, but doable, would be agreement to share some programmatic services, as represented in the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, the General Board of Global Ministries, and the General Board of Discipleship (also called Discipleship Ministries). Somewhat more problematic would be what to do with the General Board of Church and Society, which has been a bit of a lightning rod for conflict between the left and the right in Church politics. But, if we don’t share that ministry, each of the churches will have to create the same sort of structure, or cease to be Wesleyan, so we might as well share it.
The work of the current commissions will devolve to the program boards, to the degree that work can be shared, with the most problematic one being the General Commission on Communication. That is a large agency with a big budget. What strikes me as the most viable way forward under COB Option 3 for that agency would be for it to be spun off as an independent corporate entity that functions on a fee for service basis.
The United Methodist Publishing House, our oldest connectional agency, also would have to be spun off as an independent corporate entity, working on a fee for service basis. It already does not receive apportioned support. It would either make it as an independent body, or it would die.
Under COB Option 3 there would also need to be a lot of work done to plan for how our UM related institutions, meaning hospitals, schools, colleges, universities, seminaries, and mission stations, will relate to the churches created out of the dissolution of The UMC. This is not a trivial concern, because some of those institutions, like Southern Methodist University and Emory University, are owned by UM entities.
Perhaps most problematic of all in what the COB said in COB Option 3 is “and one COB.” That is unrealistic, unless that body is understood to be completely powerless in the new Wesleyan Alliance, in the same way, for example, as obtains for the current Consultation of Methodist Bishops convened under the auspices of the Pan-Methodist Commission (¶433.2). This is a collegial body that has no supervisory or oversight authority in any of the member churches. That would work, but an empowered COB that serves all the churches created from the ashes of The UMC would not.
The possibility that GC19 might choose this COB Option 3 is my nightmare. Unfortunately, this is a bad dream that might become reality.
Lonnie D. Brooks is a longtime United Methodist layman and leader in the Alaska Missionary Conference. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.