General Commission on Archives and History Photo
Central Jurisdiction
Charles Golden (at right) was elected a bishop in the Central Jurisdiction in 1960. The racially segregated Central Jurisdiction was created to facilitate the merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with two other Methodist branches in 1939 and was dismantled in 1968 in the merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to create today's United Methodist Church.
Several different plans, proposals, and processes are wending their way through the UMC aimed at making denominational structures more equitable in how power is distributed between the United States and other countries with a UMC presence. One significant question facing all of these possibilities is what to do with the Jurisdictional Conferences in the United States. Should they be merged into one US Central Conference? Should they become Central Conferences themselves? Should they just be abolished?
These questions become particularly vexing because the current jurisdictional structure easily becomes a proxy for liberal and conservative theological views within the American wing of the denomination. The Western Jurisdiction often represents theological liberals, wherever they are located, while the Southeast Jurisdiction stands in for theological conservatives. Decades of ecclesiastical separation, secular regional cultural differences, and the Big Sort going on in American society have produced jurisdictions who too often see each other as enemies instead of fellow Christians.
Add to this theological separation differences in numbers (the Western Jurisdiction is the smallest; the Southeast is the largest), and you have the makings of some significant fights over money, resources, representation, power, and belonging in the church. These fights are significant enough that they could potentially derail efforts to move to a more internationally equitable arrangement.
It is important to remember, therefore, that the jurisdictions were not originally crafted for theological segregation but for racial segregation. Jurisdictions entered American Methodism in the 1939 merger between the Methodist Episcopal Church (the northern branch), the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Methodist Protestant Church as a way to create a separate structure into which put African-American churches and church leaders. That segregated jurisdiction was removed in the 1968 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, but that doesn't efface the racist roots of the system.
Why are those racist roots important now? (White, American) United Methodists need to be honest and repentant about the ways in which racism has structured our common life in the past. If we are, then we will be less likely to let racism by the predominantly white American UMC against the predominantly non-white non-American UMC continue to perpetuate systematic inequalities between the US and the rest of the connection.
If American United Methodists can confront the racist roots of the jurisdictions, then perhaps we will not elevate our largely USA-centric worries about the future of the jurisdictions over the need to fairly share power with our sisters and brothers in Christ from other countries.
Dr. David W. Scott, a United Methodist layman, serves as assistant professor of religion at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis. On behalf of United Methodist Professors of Mission, he curates the collaborative blog UM & Global, from which this post is reprinted with permission.