What to Expect at the Next General Conference

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May 31, 2023 | FLORENCE, Ky. (UM News)

Key points:

  • The group that plans The United Methodist Church’s big legislative assembly is putting together the final details for holding the long-postponed General Conference next year.
  • That includes ensuring access to visas and arranging for travel, lodging and food for hundreds of delegates and bishops from four continents. 
  • The pandemic and church disaffiliations already are having an impact on the coming General Conference as well as the commission that plans it. 

Planning a big family wedding with dozens of people coming in for a weekend is challenge enough. But imagine trying to bring more than a thousand people together from four continents for a gathering that lasts two weeks. 

They speak 10 languages, have various dietary needs, require multiple hotel rooms and must be able to come together to pray, worship and make decisions that affect millions of United Methodists. Hundreds of these visitors also need visas just to attend.

Making sure United Methodist delegates, bishops and others can come together for the denomination’s top legislative assembly is the responsibility of the Commission on the General Conference.

That international commission gathered May 21-24 for its first in-person meeting since 2019 to determine some of the final details for next year’s General Conference. The theme for the gathering will be  “…and know that I am God” from Psalm 46.

Kim Simpson, the commission’s chair, said that focus on God is critical, especially in this tumultuous time. 

“None of us sitting here can say the last few years have been easy,” she acknowledged at the beginning of the meeting. 

“We are weathering this storm, and hopefully, it’s coming to an end soon,” she added. “But we need to keep carrying the light of Christ into this world that needs it. That is what we are called to do.”

For the past three years, the commission’s planning has been hampered by the COVID pandemic and resulting travel complications — leading the commission to postpone General Conference three times. The assembly, originally planned for 2020 in Minneapolis, is now scheduled for April 23-May 3, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A new location is not the only change resulting from General Conference’s delay. While the coming legislative assembly still faces multiple proposals to split the denomination after decades of debate over LGBTQ inclusion, a separation of sorts is already happening.

Filling vacancies

The Judicial Council, The United Methodist Church’s top court, opened the door for more General Conference delegate elections this year. 

The church court ruled that annual conferences are permitted to hold elections to fill vacancies in their allotted General Conference delegations “provided vacancies cannot be filled with reserve delegates.”

The Rev. Gary Graves, the secretary of General Conference, is still receiving information about how many such vacancies currently exist worldwide. At this point, he told UM News he is aware of seven General Conference delegation vacancies in the U.S.

But because the Judicial Council was not asked, the church court did not address how annual conferences should handle any vacancies left on their jurisdictional or central conference delegations after the depletion of their reserve pools.  

Jurisdictional conferences in the U.S. and central conferences in Africa, Europe and the Philippines are the bodies that elect bishops. General Conference delegates as well as an additional number of elected delegates serve these bodies. Delegates elected solely to their jurisdictional or central conference also serve as General Conference reserves. 

The Commission on the General Conference plans to ask the Judicial Council for clarification on how to handle these jurisdictional and central conference vacancies. 

"It is imperative that there be a consistent understanding of the process across all the annual conferences as these steps are taken," Graves said. 

General Conference delegates also can expect stricter requirements for their credentials after an investigation in 2019 found four ineligible people cast votes during that year’s special General Conference using credentials of absent delegates. 

At its previous in-person meeting in August 2019, the commission added new procedures with the goal of ensuring only duly elected primary and reserve delegates are allowed to vote. 

Read General Conference commission press release

Organizers of a conservative breakaway denomination opted to no longer wait for General Conference to act and launched the Global Methodist Church last year.

Since then, a growing number of congregations have disaffiliated under a church law passed by the 2019 special General Conference that allows U.S. churches to leave with property if they meet certain conditions. Not all disaffiliating congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, and the church law expires at the end of the year. But the departures are already having an impact. 

Because of disaffiliations, deaths, resignations and other changes within delegations, a number of annual conferences — the denomination’s regional bodies — are holding elections this year to fill vacancies in their General Conference delegations. 

The coming General Conference is to have 862 voting delegates — 55.9% from the U.S., 32% from Africa, 6% from the Philippines, 4.6% from Europe and the remainder from concordat churches that have close ties to The United Methodist Church. Half are to be clergy and half lay. Bishops preside at General Conference sessions but do not have a vote. 

Like the delegations it serves, the 25-member General Conference commission itself has undergone changes. 

Two commission members — Betty Katiyo and Ellen Natt — have died. The Rev. Joe DiPaolo resigned after last year’s postponement. The Rev. Laura Merrill was elected bishop and now leads the Arkansas Conference. The Revs. Beth Ann Cook and Gary George stepped aside amid church disaffiliations. 

As a result, the commission that met this month has six new members — two lay members, Dr. Pacis-Alarine Irambona and Muriel Nelson, and five clergy, the Revs. Dawn Taylor-Storm, R. DeAndre Johnson, Andy Call and Aleze M. Fulbright. 

At the beginning of the meeting, the commission learned that another member, Dr. Steve Furr, was stepping down because his new work schedule prevents his continued service. 

Amid all these shifts, the commission still has planning to do. To that end, the group addressed logistical details for delegates elected to General Conference. 

Visas

Every General Conference has seen at least some delegates unable to attend because they could not obtain visas, but the onset of the pandemic has made the situation worse. 

The commission postponed General Conference last year because of prohibitively long wait times for visa interviews after the pandemic scrambled world travel. 

Sara Hotchkiss, the General Conference business manager, noted that in some countries, those wait times have vastly improved, but challenges remain. 

General Conference has delegates from Russia, where no U.S. embassy is open. That means the delegates from the four annual conferences in Russia and its Eurasian neighbors will need to go to Kyrgyzstan to obtain visas. 

Eurasian United Methodist churches are in the process of leaving the denomination en masse, but their departure requires General Conference approval. 

Hotchkiss said her office also is working to begin the visa application process as quickly as possible for delegates in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, where visa wait times have been wildly fluctuating between 30 days to nearly 200 days. The Democratic Republic of Congo sends the most delegates to General Conference outside the United States.

The first step to obtain a visa is for a delegate to receive a formal invitation letter to General Conference. 

The Rev. Gary Graves, the General Conference secretary, said he is in the process of verifying delegation changes with annual conference secretaries.

“As soon as delegations are cleared, those invitation letters are going out,” he said.

Irambona, a new commission member from the Burundi Conference, emphasized the urgency of getting invitation letters to delegates who are already credentialed. 

The commission supported her motion that invitation letters start going out immediately after the meeting and that the commission receive weekly updates on how many letters have been sent. Hotchkiss added that the updates would also include the progress of visa interviews.

Irambona told UM News that getting visas is one of the top priorities for her and other delegates from African countries. “We keep having so many questions, and all of the answers are: ‘Wait for General Conference to happen,’” she said. 

 Tackling a petitions conundrum

The General Conference commission spent time grappling with what to do about petitions submitted by people who, for whatever reason, are no longer part of The United Methodist Church. 

The Book of Discipline, the denomination’s law book, states that any United Methodist organization, clergy member or lay member may submit a petition to General Conference. The key phrase in that provision, the Discipline’s Paragraph 507, is “United Methodist.”

With each postponement, the window has opened again for United Methodists to submit additional petitions proposing changes to the Discipline or requesting General Conference take a certain action. The deadline for petitions to the coming General Conference is now Sept. 6. Instructions for preparing petitions can be found online. 

Read more

Food

At their last in-person meeting in 2019, commission members approved that delegates would receive a $29 per diem for food.

With the rise of inflation in the ensuing years, Hotchkiss said that was no longer realistic. 

Instead, she recommended, and the commission approved, having the Charlotte Convention Center cater breakfast, lunch and dinner each day for all delegates. Hotchkiss said she is working with the convention center to ensure people’s cultural and dietary needs are met with the variety of meals offered. She also said the convention center would have rooms where annual conference delegations could have a dinner together. 

The one day the convention will not provide meals will be April 28, a Sunday when no General Conference business will take place. For that day, the delegates will receive a $50 per diem. 

“We know that if you eat foods you’re not used to, you don’t feel well and you cannot function as a delegate,” Hotchkiss said. “Part of our goal is to make sure we are providing for that — making sure you are getting your nutritional needs and eating the things you are used to.”

Improving General Conference

Even under normal circumstances, General Conference often can be a grueling experience where people spend weeks far from home, relying on interpreters for communication and debating issues of faith that they hold dear.

But commission members, throughout their May meeting, remarked that they expected the coming General Conference — with a denominational separation already happening — not to be business as usual. 

With that in mind, the commission approved a motion by member Marie Kuch-Stanovsky to have Simpson, its chair, form a “think tank” with other denominational leaders on ideas for conducting General Conference.  

Specifically, those other leaders are to be from the Council of Bishops; the Connectional Table, which coordinates denominational resources and ministries; and the General Council on Finance and Administration, the denomination’s finance agency.

Johnson, a new commission member from the Texas Conference, said he hopes such a “high-level” think tank might make recommendations for helping the General Conference delegates do their best work. 

“We are in a different season altogether,” he said. “It may be …  that the way we have done it has brought us to this place. And if we just keep doing the same thing, we’ll find ourselves running ourselves into the ground.”

Heather Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. This content may be reproduced elsewhere with credit to Hahn and UM News.