Alaska Conference Says: Regionalize, Reform, Restructure

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The Alaska United Methodist Conference had its annual conference in Fairbanks June 4-6. We did all the things a United Methodist annual conference normally does, most of which is routine, such as establishing the minimum that our ordained clergy must be paid, what benefit programs will be available to them, hearing reports from various conference and connectional Church agencies, setting budgets for next year, and hearing the list of ministry stations to which the bishop will appoint our clergy.

But we also took a couple of actions of which you ought to be aware if you're interested in the upcoming 2024 United Methodist General Conference.

1) We adopted a resolution calling on the UM General Council on Finance and Administration not to allow funds contributed by United Methodists of Alaska to be spent in support of the additional regular session of the General Conference demanded by the Judicial Council and encouraged by the Council of Bishops.

2) We supported a petition to General Conference that calls for the regionalization of the Church. The petition proposes to combine the petitions to do that which have already been submitted by the Connectional Table, the program coordinating body of the UMC, and by an ad hoc group of United Methodists from outside the United States. But it additionally proposes to discontinue the 5 jurisdictional conferences in the United States in favor of creating 3 regional conferences in North America. It also includes a provision to remove from the UM Constitution the provision requiring that bishops in the United States be elected for life.

In providing some context for the regionalization petition I said that the 2020/24 General Conference, scheduled to convene in Charlotte NC next May, has three important things before it as it attempts to live into its new reality of being a post-separation United Methodist Church. They are the following:

1) Regionalize the Church.

2) Reform the episcopacy by authorizing fewer bishops who are elected for terms, not for life, across the whole Church.

3) Restructure the general agencies by downsizing the entire connectional ministry of the Church commensurate with a smaller Church that is more focused on its mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, which mission is primarily accomplished in local ministry settings, like worshiping congregations.

The bad news is that next year if the General Conference does not do these three things, it will be seen in history as being a total failure.

The good news is that if General Conference does all three of these things, then regardless of whether or not it does anything else, it will be considered a success of monumental proportions.

It's easy to remember: Regionalize, Reform, and Restructure. That's the task of General Conference 2020/24. Everything else is peripheral.

Lonnie D. Brooks of Anchorage, Alaska, is a longtime United Methodist leader and former delegate to General Conference. This post is republished with the author's permission from his Facebook page. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via Facebook.