Speaking to the World with (Closer to) One Voice

Analysis

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Ask the UMC | Aug. 1, 2024

The Social Principles of The United Methodist Church have always been intended to reflect the whole church speaking to the whole world about how United Methodists understand the implications of the kingdom of God Jesus proclaimed for every part of our lives as human beings on Earth.

These Social Principles were first adopted in 1972. At that time, they were the primary vehicle for the four-year-old denomination forged by the uniting of the Evangelical United Brethren and The Methodist Church to offer public witness with (close to) one voice. 

Much has changed since 1972, including the rise of “culture wars” in the United States and the overall composition of The United Methodist Church.

As the cultures wars in the United States increasingly focused on abortion and human sexuality., and both of these were addressed in the Social Principles, succeeding General Conferences also faced ongoing sharp debates and often fairly close votes on these two topics, signaling that the divisions in the wider culture were divisions in the church as well. The Social Principles were becoming less a unifying voice and more a battle line within the denomination.

Meanwhile, the composition of the denomination has changed dramatically, as well. In 1972, the vast majority of delegates were from the United States (nearly 91%). With the exception of the four conferences in East and West Germany, no annual conference outside the U.S. had more than two delegates. The central conference whose delegations added up to the highest representation was India, with 24 across 12 annual conferences. In the U.S., the largest delegation came from West Ohio, with 36 delegates.

Forty years later, in 2012, nearly 38% of General Conference delegates were from outside the U.S.  The two largest central conference delegations came from Côte d’Ivoire (40) and North Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo (26). The annual conferences in India had become an autonomous Methodist denomination in 1981. And in the U.S., the largest two delegations were from North Georgia and Virginia, each with 26 delegates.

So, by 2012, a very different and substantially less American United Methodist Church was still debating and tweaking a Social Principles document whose core concerns did not reflect those of over one-third of its members and had never fully included their voices.

This is why the 2012 General Conference commissioned a thorough revision of the Social Principles. This project was envisioned to take at least two full quadrennia (eight years) to ensure ample time to hear from voices of United Methodists worldwide, so that the revised Social Principles could once again help the church speak to the world with closer to one voice — a voice that would reflect the church as it now was and was increasingly becoming.

Revising the Social Principles

The revision project set up opportunities for United Methodists across the world, including a majority of annual conferences outside the United States, to share the core concerns they wanted the whole church to address with them.

Over 4,000 United Methodists worldwide participated in these gatherings during the first four years of the project. Thousands more participated by offering feedback as the writing and editorial teams distilled what they had heard into a new draft document, made available for online review two years prior to the originally scheduled 2020 General Conference. That feedback led to further edits embodied in the version of the Revised Social Principles presented to the General Conference meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2024.

The Scope of the Revision

The term “revised” may be an understatement. The listening projects revealed the degree to which the current version of the Social Principles had relied almost exclusively on the individualist worldview and ways of life in the United States, all the way down to the very structure of the document itself. As The United Methodist Church had become increasingly centered in Africa and the Philippines after 1972, the perspectives and concerns of those churches now needed to shape the structure and the topics to be covered in the Social Principles.

A few cases in point are illustrative. The current Social Principles begin with the natural world, then proceed immediately to the nurturing community, with a focus on the nuclear family, and then to a separate section on the social community, followed by the economic community. Speaking of the world as “natural” and thinking about the nuclear family before addressing the social community are thoroughly Western, Enlightenment ways of thinking. So is the tendency to consider economics as a result of social arrangements, rather than an underlying driver of what social communities can be and do.

The Revised Social Principles instead begin with the community of all creation (adopting a more biblical and African approach), move immediately to the economic community, and then to the social community, of which the nurturing community is now listed as a part. This ordering better reflects how United Methodists, wherever they are, actually experience the world and the relationships of their communities within it.

The revision of the section on the economic community underscores the shift these Social Principles have made. Consistent with Western individualism, the section on the economic community currently begins with consideration of private property, collective bargaining (which exists only in limited ways across Africa), work and leisure and consumption. This is followed by poverty, then foreign workers, gambling and family farms. This listing in this order is grounded almost entirely in the concerns of the United States.

In the Revised Social Principles, by contrast, the opening section addresses macro-economic challenges, including globalization, poverty and income inequality, human trafficking and slavery, and graft, bribery and corruption, followed by a section on economic justice that calls for responsible consumerism and speaks of farming generally (not family farms), the dignity of work, sabbath and renewal time and corporate responsibility. Many of these are matters that United Methodists from Africa and the Philippines, in particular, as well as marginalized persons in the United States, have been raising as priority matters for decades, but whose voices and concerns were unheard in the Social Principles until now.

Similarly, there are now several topics within the section on marriage that had never been addressed specifically and separately before. While the current Social Principles had called for marriage being between one man and one woman, it had never explicitly addressed the practice of polygamy, which remains in many parts of the world, though it is outlawed in the West.

Now, polygamy, along with another practice found almost exclusively outside of the modern West, child marriage, has its own section dedicated to rejecting each and explaining why. The addition to the section on marriage by Zimbabwe East Conference delegate the Honorable Molly Hlekani Mwayera addresses both of these concerns as well.

On abortion, while the underlying life-centered ethics —  which reject abortion except for life-versus-life situations — remain unchanged, the whole of the paragraph is reframed in the light of access to reproductive care for women. And on human sexuality, the frequently stated point of many of the denomination’s African delegates that homosexuality is not even named in their contexts is honored, because it is not named here, either.

The Revised Social Principles was a project of deep listening, again and again, to ensure that all voices were heard and that the structure of the document and the topics it addressed were no longer circumscribed by the concerns of the United States and the West.

The Rev. Taylor W. Burton Edwards is director of Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.