QUESTION FOUR: Can the Jurisdictional Conference session occur before the General Conference meets?”
SUMMARY: There is no constitutional mandate, nor is there any legislative requirement, that a session of the jurisdictional conference must wait for the General Conference to meet. Nor is there any law or requirement that they must meet within the same calendar year. Therefore, jurisdictional conferences could meet in person as soon as this summer or fall, if such assemblies are feasible in the United States under health regulations, even though the General Conference is not scheduled to gather until late August 2022.
One has to keep in mind, however, the mandate in the Constitution that all five of the jurisdictional conferences must convened on the same day and that the convening day has to be determined by the Council of Bishops.1 South Central Jurisdiction United Methodists might be inclined to agree with the governor of Texas that everything is completely open now. But the global Council of Bishops has to set the convening date. Therefore, Central Conference Bishops (who will not even attend the meetings unless they happen to be invited to be present as guests at one or more jurisdictional conferences) have a vote on the convening date. Whether their votes might contribute to a majority that could possibly block jurisdictional conferences from meeting prior to the General Conference is unknown.
Paragraph 521.1 in the Discipline, to be sure, allows any jurisdictional conference to schedule a special session. However, that jurisdictional conference would have to be in session in order to do so, and right now that cannot happen until the Council of Bishops sets a date for all five of them to convene. In the end, the only practical way for jurisdictional conferences to meet is to have the Council of Bishops set a date for them to convene.
Perhaps one of the considerations that must be taken into account when the Council of Bishops sets a convening date for the jurisdictional conferences is the major item of business that occurs at each jurisdiction conference. The item, of course, is the election of bishops.
If jurisdictional conferences were to meet in the months preceding General Conference, that could create immense complications for the Council of Bishops. A newly elected bishop is a bishop of the church at the moment of election. That person ceases to be a clergy member of the annual conference and becomes a member of the Council of Bishops. Will these newly elected bishops immediately begin voting on matters that the Council of Bishops sends to the General Conference, such as nominations for the Judicial Council?
There might be other reasons. Some candidates for the episcopacy use the platform of a General Conference to advance their candidacies. They seek roles as chairs of the Legislative Committees, for example
The jurisdictional conferences could meet without any relationship to the meeting dates of the General Conference. But the jurisdictional conferences must rely on the Council of Bishops to set a convening date for them to do so. And that group may have their own reasons for wanting the jurisdictional conferences to occur after—not before—the General Conference.
1 The Constitution, Division Two, Section IV, Article IV published as ¶ 26 in The Book of Discipline 2016.
The Rev. Dr. William B. Lawrence is an ordained elder of The United Methodist Church, former dean of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and former president of the Judicial Council. This essay is republished with permission from the website of UMC Conferencing, an unofficial group of concerned United Methodists seeking fresh leadership for the denomination.