‘Rooted & Rising’ to Take Reconciling Ministries Network into the Future

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Whatever happens to the institutional United Methodist Church when General Conference finally meets in 2021, Reconciling Ministries Network already has embarked on a path that will take it into a future committed to intersectional justice and grassroots education and organizing.

RMN, as it’s known, isn’t abandoning its longtime advocacy for changing the anti-LGBTQ policies of The United Methodist Church, stressed Jan Lawrence, RMN’s executive director who works remotely from Georgia. Instead, the 36-year-old advocacy group has used the General Conference delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic to refine and enact ideas about its ministry that have been percolating inside the organization’s leadership for several years, Ms. Lawrence told United Methodist Insight in a telephone interview.

Reconciling Ministries gained a significant boost in membership immediately after the special called General Conference in 2019, when United Methodist bans on same-sex marriage and LGBTQIA clergy were strengthened with what many American United Methodists saw as punitive measures. As of Sept. 21, RMN included 1,339 Reconciling Congregations and communities and 43,136 individual Reconciling United Methodists.

Postponing General Conference 2020 interrupted RMN’s historic role as a GC advocate, but it also gave the organization time and energy to fashion itself for a different future.

“We decided we didn’t need General Conference to tell us who we are and what we need to do,” Ms. Lawrence said. “[The new national campaign] really came out of a great desire to want to do something to speak to the church in this moment that is useful and beneficial and move us in the direction of being the church we all want it to be.”

The process, which was led by RMN’s staff, has resulted in a campaign called Rooted & Rising. The crises of 2020 helped shape Rooted & Rising, said Ms. Lawrence and Helen Ryde, RMN’s Southeastern Jurisdiction coordinator who is based in North Carolina.

'Pandemic changed everything'

“It’s a little hard to pinpoint the genesis [of the plan],” Ms. Lawrence said. “The coronavirus pandemic has changed everything. Our staff stopped traveling to meet with conferences and churches. We tried to figure out how to be there for our constituents amid the pandemic.”

On top of the pandemic came the high-profile deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, setting off widespread demonstrations from the realization of ongoing police brutality against Black people, said Ms. Ryde in a separate telephone interview.

“Intersectionality is written into our values but we’re still a white movement in a white church,” said Ms. Ryde, a United Methodist home missioner who uses they/their pronouns. “We had to think about our appropriate response as a social justice organization to what’s happening. We needed to get serious and honest about what we haven’t done and put things into place so we can authentically claim ourselves as a justice organization on all fronts.”

“Rooted & Rising” stands on two pillars: intersectional justice and grassroots education and organizing.

While the term “intersectional justice” – the idea that injustices such as racism, sexism, poverty and so on interweave with one another – may seem to be a new vogue in Christian circles, the idea that oppression spreads across all races, classes, and genders has been inherent in RMN’s work for many years, said Joseph Hurt, RMN’s board chair.

“I’ve been on the board six years now, and intersectionality has always been part of our ministry,” said Mr. Hurt, a retired law professor in Winter Park, Fla., in a telephone interview. “What has helped to galvanize this change has been the pandemic and the obvious fact that the pandemic has affected communities of color much more than any group. Then continued police violence toward people of color became front and center with George Floyd’s murder.”

Three strategies

Three strategies build on Rooted & Rising’s two pillars:

  1. Requiring, instead of merely “encouraging,” intersectional commitment by all new Reconciling Churches in their founding statements;
  2. Inviting current Reconciling Congregations to revisit their statements to add endorsement of intersectional justice;
  3. Increasing grassroots organizing and education, creating annual conference teams “to set specific goals for increasing the number of RCs in their annual conference, focusing especially on areas with low Reconciling presence,” says RMN’s website.

Regarding the third strategy, the RMN website states: “While we need General Conference to do its part in changing official polity, and while we continue our work to influence denominational change, we know that neither a change in the Book of Discipline nor an option for traditional churches to leave will instantly produce a denomination that affirms LGBTQ people and practices intersectional justice. … Policy doesn’t change hearts and minds. Relationships do that. Study and storytelling do that. Individual RUMs, alongside our family of RCs, are needed to influence this important shift.”

“Our ministry is really with centrist and conservative churches,” said Ms. Lawrence. “We walk with them on their journey to become Reconciling. We provide resources and collaborative tools freely available on our website.”

Ms. Ryde said that expanding engagement with more congregations spurred the staff’s thinking on the third strategy.

“At this moment in time in United Methodist life, in this delay, there’s so much that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Ms. Ryde said. “We asked ourselves, what’s the most good that RMN can do?

“It seemed to us that by doubling down, by increasing the numbers of Reconciling Churches and individuals that welcome and affirm LGBTQ people, we would move toward creating the church that we want to be, not necessarily as an institution. We’ll be working with teams in each annual conference not just to increase the numbers of churches, but also looking at where those churches are. Outside urban areas it’s a whole different situation for churches. Even in the Pacific Northwest conference, they don’t have a whole lot of Reconciling Congregations in the more rural areas.

“We want to do all we can to help United Methodists grow churches that welcome LGBTQIA people of all races and cultures, to think strategically about their areas,” Ms. Ryde said.

Regional communities growing

Ms. Ryde added that RMN now will be tracking the growth of Regional Reconciling Communities, groups of LGBTQIA-supportive individuals that are not directly attached to a specific congregation. Ms. Ryde said that there are such groups in several annual conferences including both the Alabama-West Florida and South Georgia annual conferences.

Ms. Lawrence also said that she foresees RMN working with independent churches and in pan-Methodist settings. Currently RMN has Reconciling Congregations in Africa and the Philippines. "We have Reconciling churches in Brazil and are expanding into parts of Central America," she said.

“We’re making progress in Africa in particular,” said Mr. Hurt, the RMN board chair. “It’s small steps; we have one congregation in Kenya and others across the continent that are supportive.”

In addition to Rooted & Rising, Reconciling Ministries Network has introduced a funding program called The Wellspring. It’s meant to enhance the traditional funding given by Reconciling congregations with an intentional mechanism for supporters to contribute on a regular basis. Unlike some other United Methodist advocacy groups, RMN doesn’t require membership fees.

Ms. Lawrence, Ms. Ryde and Mr. Hurt all said Reconciling Ministries’ staff and directors are united in their support for Rooted & Rising.

“We’re very excited,” said Mr. Hurt. “There has never been a more challenging time for us as a small religious nonprofit.”

Ms. Lawrence said, “[The campaign] tells you what you can do when you focus on your mission and not where you’re being driven because of the politics of the church. We’ll evolve to be as effective as we can be no matter what the church’s political environment might be.”

Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.