Could, Woulda, Shoulda

What General Conference Had the Opportunity to Do But Didn't

by

June 5, 2024

In June 2023, just a bit short of a year in advance of the just completed General Conference, I posted on Facebook a commentary as a follow-up to the annual conference of the Alaska Conference in which I presented my version of what The United Methodist Church ought to accomplish at its General Conference of 2020 to be held in Charlotte in 2024. My friend Cynthia Astle picked it up and featured it in her newsletter, UM Insight, which is especially popular among UM Progressives to whom, in truth, it is primarily directed.

You can access my commentary by following this link to where Cynthia has posted it:

https://um-insight.net/.../alaska-conference-says.../

The gist of it is that I reported that Alaska had adopted for forwarding to GC20/24 a petition proposing regionalization of the Church that included abolishing the five jurisdictions in favor of creating three Regional Conferences in North America along with changing the seven Central Conferences to be equivalent Regional Conferences with the exact same powers, duties, and privileges obtaining to those in North America, including electing bishops. The Alaska proposal also included removing from the Constitution the requirement that bishops in the United States be elected for life.

I went on to say that in my opinion GC20/24 had three tasks which were the following:

  • Regionalize the Church
  • Reform the Episcopacy
  • Restructure the General Agencies

I went on to say that if it didn’t do those three things GC20/24 would be a failure, and if it did them, it would be a resounding success.

It’s now time to look back and see how GC20/24 did on these three counts, and while I’m at it, I also want to look at a few other things GC20/24 had an opportunity to do but didn’t get done.

1) GC20/24 did adopt the most discussed proposal for Regionalization, but that wasn’t the proposal from Alaska. It was the Christmas Covenant, and that proposal not only didn’t discontinue the five jurisdictions, it didn’t address episcopal reform in any manner whatsoever. Several of the proponents of the Regionalization plan that was adopted acknowledged that the continued existence of the jurisdictions was a big problem, but argued that this was not the time to attempt to find a solution. Christine Schneider-Oesch speaking for the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters who presented the argument of the SCCCM during the debate said the following:

One brief remark about the jurisdictions. Yes, this is a burning issue. Yes, members of the Standing Committee agree that this structure is problematic, but after long debate and a long consideration, the Standing Committee has come to the conclusion that it is better to solve this in two steps, and that’s why it has not included the question of the jurisdictions in this petition. Many of us in the Standing Committee are convinced it is time this question—to address this question. And we are sorry you still have two—four layers of decision-making in this country even after we pass regionalization but let’s solve that in the next step. We are convinced this is the better way to do it.

Failing to address the problem of the jurisdictions, the adopted plan also failed by commission, as Schneider-Oesch acknowledged in her speech, since it created a whole new layer of Church in North America, a nationwide Regional Conference that has no parallel in the rest of the world on the scale of that one. Forbes Matonga, in his speech on the regionalization package, called it a plan to “divide and rule” Africa. (Proceedings, page 151, lines 33 and 37 found at this site on the Worldwide Web:

https://app.box.com/s/m03ebtkvkw2oo5f3tx6sdhzvozwtx2f9)

2) The sweeping kind of reform of the episcopacy I had in mind in my commentary didn’t even come close to adoption at GC20/24. I envisioned such reform would be to eliminate life tenure of bishops anywhere in the Church, to institute a uniform term of service in all parts of the Church, to provide that Regional Conferences would be responsible to determine how many bishops they need and provide a plan to pay for them, and to provide that bishops would serve in, and only in, the Regional Conference where they were elected. And there were petitions on offer that would have done all that, many of them my own.

What we got instead was a rather insipid version of episcopal reform wherein the Interjurisdictional Committee on Episcopacy was empowered to make recommendations about the number of bishops who would be elected and where they would serve. A petition, not mine, but Petition 20968, given Calendar Item number 457 and found on DCA page 2178, that would have eliminated life tenure was referred to the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. That’s somewhat ironic, since when I was a member of that agency I attempted unsuccessfully to get some attention on this problem. More irony is, of course, that GBHEM has been the sponsoring agency for decades now of the seemingly perpetual Study of Ministry that has, in the past, recommended that life tenure be discontinued.

3) GC20/24 did the least well on Restructure of the General Agencies. In fact, we didn’t even come close to approaching a systematic solution to this problem of duplication of effort in these important connectional ministries of the Church. What reform we’ll get will be through the purse, as the money simply isn’t there to support them. Only one petition in the set of petitions I submitted calling for consolidation among these Church bodies received any attention other than rejection in their assigned legislative committees, and that was my Petition 20674, Calendar Item 440, found on DCA page 2177 on Consent Calendar C04, which was adopted by a vote of 701 to 29. This action referred this proposal for the merging of UMCom and GCFA to those two agencies for study and report to the next General Conference. We will reap the whirlwind on this. The agency structure we have is not sustainable, and consolidation is, by far, the lesser of the bad choices available to us in our attempts to cope with the fact of the shrinking Church.

4) One of the persistent problems in professional ministry in our Church has been how to deal with persons in pastoral ministry who are not ordained. We’ve called them various things through the years, such as local preacher, lay preacher, lay pastor, and today’s combination of those earlier names, Local Pastor. One of the most persistent of these problems has been in the relegation of the people in this category of ministry to second or third class standing in the Church. The voting rights of Local Pastors in the annual conference have historically been severely restricted, though there have been some moves in the recent past to redress this seeming injustice. Local Pastors, though defined to be clergy (¶¶32 and 142), may not serve as delegates to jurisdictional or General Conference, may not vote on amendments to the Constitution (¶¶35 and 316.6), and may not vote on matters of character, conference relations, or ordination of clergy (¶316.6). A retired Local Pastor has voice, but not vote, in the annual conference of which she/he is a member. Fairly recently a provision was added to ¶35 that gives to Local Pastors who have either completed the course of study or received a Master of Divinity Degree and completed two years of consecutive service under appointment the right to vote for those who will serve as delegates to General, jurisdictional, and central conference.

At GC20/24 a multitude of petitions was on offer that would have expanded the rights and privileges of Local Pastors. And passion was high on this. Two of those petitions, 20104 and 20107 aimed at adding additional voting rights to Local Pastors, and though both failed in the legislative committee, each was brought to the floor by delegate request. They received Calendar Item numbers 552 and 558 respectively and thus were slated for debate and decision in plenary. But a bundling motion was adopted that called for rejection of all remaining items that had been rejected in legislative committee, and both petitions failed when that motion was adopted overwhelmingly by GC20/24. So, GC20/24 made no significant change in the Church’s attitude toward Local Pastors.

5) And speaking of the exclusive right given to ordained clergy to determine for themselves how they stand relative to the historically exclusively clergy matters of ordination, character, and conference relations of clergy, it is nothing short of extreme hubris for members of the clergy in essence to assert that either lay people are incompetent and ill-equipped to have a say in those matters, or that lay people have no stake in how such matters are decided. The fact is that none of that is true now, and it probably never was. And this GC20/24 was the perfect opportunity for that to change. I submitted a pair of petitions, one calling for change in the Constitution and another calling for implementation of that change that would have moved decisions about these clergy matters to the whole annual conference, no longer to have them decided in a closed clergy session. They were Petitions 20994 and 20995, and each was rejected in the legislative committee without a single supporting vote. The secular equivalent to this would be for the evaluation of the performance of the members of the board of directors of Exxon to be given to the board of directors of Exxon. At least there that job is given to the share holders at an annual meeting.

6) Long ago widely adopted secular law in the United States made it illegal to discriminate based on a person’s age. (Editor's note: The federal age discrimination prohibition was adopted in 1967). But in many things, this being one of them, churches are exempt from secular law, though just why age discrimination in a church ought to be exempt from secular law is a subtlety that I don’t fully comprehend. And in The United Methodist Church we still doggedly adhere to provisions that require clerics to retire when they reach a certain age, regardless of how otherwise fit they are to continue to serve. I submitted a petition to prohibit the use of age in mandatory retirement, Petition 20673, found on ADCA page 1034. The petition received 10 supporting votes out of 58 in the legislative committee on ordained ministry, so it failed and was not calendared. This was truly a missed opportunity to take a step into the reality of longer, healthier living.

7) The way the UMC funds its ministries beyond the local church is bizarre. It is a top down process. I’ll use the General Conference as my example here, but all levels of the Church beyond the local church use the same procedure. For General Conference the General Council on Finance and Administration, in consultation with the Connectional Table, projects what amount the various ministries need to have through the next four-year period (the quadrennium), that budget is approved by the GC, then each annual conference is told what its share of that budget will be. The annual conference either apportions that budget to the districts of the AC or directly apportions it to the local churches of the AC. And UM law provides that it is the first benevolent obligation of the local church to pay this apportioned amount. Not even the United States Government budgets like this! So, I submitted a petition to GC to reverse the process. My petition, Petition 21053 on ADCA page 1604, would have replaced the current apportionment system with a bottom up tithe wherein local churches would be asked to send 10% of their revenue to the annual conference which would, in turn, be asked to send 10% of their revenue to the general church. Then budgets at the “upper” layers of the Church would budget based on revenue to be expected, rather than, in effect, tax the local churches to meet a needs based budget not rigorously tied to activity in the local churches. This petition failed in the legislative committee on the local church with 1 out of 44 votes in support, meaning the Church continues to focus on the financial needs of the connection, not on the financial capacity of the local churches to support connectional ministry.

8) One of the best ideas anybody in the Church has had for a really long time was the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation. This was a proposal whose foundation was the principle of amicable separation, and it grew out of the aftermath of the contentious GC19. One of the astounding things about it was that it was negotiated by folks like Bishop Tom Bickerton and Rev. Keith Boyette, and Randall Miller and Pat Miller (not related), under the watchful and guiding wisdom of famous mediator and negotiation expert, Kenneth Feinberg who had been urged to take that role by none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. You couldn’t make this stuff up. The repeated delays that led ultimately to a decision by Traditionalists who grew increasingly frustrated by defiance of Church law by inclusionists spelled the death through obsolescence of the Protocol. But there’s nothing that makes obsolete the principle of amicable separation. Yet GC20/24 turned its back on this principle in favor of the principle that what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable. All petitions aimed at continuing or reinstating a provision for amicable separation through disaffiliation of local churches and/or annual conferences, and there were many, including two of my own, were soundly defeated. This was a missed opportunity of major proportions that is likely to result in a resort to lawyers and secular courts, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, that ought to be spent on mission and ministry.

9) The UMC system of deployment of ordained clergy in the elder category is probably terminally sick. It has been made obsolete by several things, some old and some new. First off, our megachurches have never been part of the itinerant system. They’ve always functioned more or less on a call system whereby when a change of pastors is to come, the church sends out a search committee, finds a candidate, then contacts the bishop and negotiates the provisions for getting that pastor appointed to the church. Second, the new reality of working spouses of clerics means that a pastor is NOT available for appointment anywhere that would not accommodate the spouse’s employment opportunity. Third, the UMC now finds itself with an abundance of clergy couples and thus a concomitant need to accommodate both members of the couple in making appointments, including parsonage accommodations. The Alaska Conference submitted Petition 20962 that would have addressed most of these problems of our itinerant system by strengthening the process by which the bishop is required to consult with both the candidates for appointment and the local churches that would be affected by the appointments. The petition got 9 supporting votes out of 50 in the legislative committee on Higher Education and Superintendency. We’re eventually going to have to do this, or we’ll lose a whole lot of talent if we don’t.

10) The last item I’m going to put on this list isn’t last in importance, and it’s far from the last I could put here. But I don’t need to belabor this further. A multi-quadrennium study has been ongoing in the UM standing Committee on Faith and Order aimed at producing a statement of our theology of the Church, our ecclesiology. The statement is projected to be a parallel statement to go with "By Water and the Spirit," our statement on baptism, and "This Holy Mystery," our statement on Holy Communion. The current project is currently called "Sent in Love." It was probably a good idea to do what GC20/24 decided to do with it, since fixing some of the flaws in the document was not work that could be done in a reasoned way by as large a body as the General Conference. But that doesn’t keep me from lamenting the fact that this proposed theological statement was referred back to the CFO for additional work. Hopefully we’ll see it resurface at GC28. The petition proposing the adoption of "Sent in Love" was Petition 20643, and it got all the way to being Calendar Item 453. It was approved by 43 out of 55 votes in its legislative committee, but, as I said above, referred by plenary back to the Committee on Faith and Order.

Longtime United Methodist leader Lonnie D. Brooks lives in Anchorage, Alaska. This post is republished with the author's permission from Facebook. Please contact the author via Facebook for permission to republish this content elsewhere.