At the instigation of the Council of Bishops with little or no input from the Boards and Agencies of the denomination, a wide-ranging plan named “A Call to Action” was developed over the past quadrennium. It had many features and many critics. By the time it reached General Conference, it had been broken up into various parts, as discussed in my posting on this blog of “April 25 – Dr. Chomingwen Pond,” under which I included a section called “A Call to Action.”
Right after lunch on the day it was passed (May 2, two days before adjournment), the plenary voted with no discussion to refer this variation on reorganization called “Plan UMC” to the Judicial Council. This was such a high-profile set of legislation, having taken up all the oxygen in the room at General Conference that the Judicial Council took it up immediately.
As they have done with so many reorganization plans submitted from annual conferences, they discerned the primary flaw of this one, an attempt to move decision-making from the bodies granted it by the Book of Discipline, and placing it in other bodies.
Here again, as I’ve written before, the Council of Bishops was seeking to gain control over more and more of the organizations of the denomination. Nowhere in any version of the segments of “A Call to Action” was there an effort to look at where the bishops in their duties may have contributed to whatever malaise they were trying to resolve with their plan. The problems of the denomination were with everyone else, as the plan clearly pointed out.
But the Judicial Council stuck with examining the plan for constitutionality, not for its inherent weakness. With care, they laid out the constitutional flaws of this reorganization attempt, the same ones they have explained over and over in previous rulings dating back to JCD 364, a decision given in 1972. See also decision JCD 1198, from 2011.
One special feature of this decision is that it did not restrict itself to the possible constitutional issues identified by the one making the request. Under the general rubric of determining constitutionality, the Judicial Council found its own grounds for determining that the legislation lacked constitutionality. Again with careful argument, the Council was clear about what it found. Future efforts to reorganize the Church better take these into account.
I do not expect those who cobbled together “Plan UMC” will do any better when they try to revive this kind of thing for 2016.
The immediate effect of this decision had a serious impact, though, in three ways.
First, the years spent over the past Quadrennium working on “A Call to Action” suddenly were seen by many observers to be the waste they were. And the hours spent trying to keep it alive at General Conference despite its questionable objectives were not lost on the majority of the delegates in Tampa.
Second, the impact of this effort led by the Council of Bishops further eroded the respect with which they had been held by the rest of the Church. Many episcopal leaders expressed dismay at the lack of trust they were being shown by the actions of the General Conference. See my posting of May 29, 2012 on “Trust of Bishops.”
Third, two agencies, the General Commission on Religion and Race and the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, were preserved. Again under the revised Plan UMC, they would be merged and would have next to no resources to continue in any serious way, if at all.
In conversations I had among bishops during the 2012 General Conference, I found every one of the bishops with whom I talked to be stunned at what had happened to their “wonderful” ideas meant to “enliven” the denomination. We can look forward to similar efforts for 2016, though this General Conference did not fund a new study. I do not see that stopping those energetic leaders from bringing many petitions professionally packaged to sell in the next conference’s prime time. The Judicial Council better be ready for more work in Portland, Ore., in 2016.
The Rev. Jerry Eckert of Port Charlotte, Fla., a retired clergy member of the Wisconsin Annual Conference, originally posted this response to Plan UMC regarding Judicial Council Decision 1210 which found Plan UMC unconstitutional on the Associates in Advocacy blog. Associates in Advocacy is a volunteer organization of clergy who serve as advocates for clergy during "fair process" personnel procedures and monitor judicial proceedings of The United Methodist Church.