Amendment 1 Dies, Then Rises Again
United Methodists Analyzing Amendment's Voting Results
By Cynthia B. Astle
United Methodist Insight Editor
Death, mourning, and resurrection. That’s one way to characterize what has happened across The United Methodist Church in the past week in the wake of a constitutional amendment’s defeat and unexpected return.
The Council of Bishops May 4 announced the defeat of a proposed constitutional change known as Amendment 1, focused on women’s equality and justice, after it canvassed vote totals from United Methodist conferences around the world. Since then there have been questions, assertions of sexism and misogyny, theological counter-claims, mathematics, concerns over voting methods, and finally the discovery of a textual error that may have played a significant role in the amendment’s defeat.
A second amendment on women’s equality also was defeated, but the reaction furor centered on Amendment 1. Three other amendments on church processes were adopted. Here’s a brief chronology of events, followed by reactions:
May 4: The Council of Bishops announces the vote totals. The defeat of Amendments 1 and 2, which supporters say were intended to promote and protect the equality and status of women and girls, shocks the bishops and ultimately much of American United Methodism. “There was pain and there were tears” among the bishops at the voting results, wrote Bishop David Bard of Michigan in a pastoral letter.
May 7: United Methodist women bishops issue a pastoral letter condemning the voting results and urging the church to continue working for women’s equality around the world. The letter states in part:
“The women of the Council of Bishops recognize that we have much work to do as leaders to foster inclusion in The United Methodist Church. At the same time as we lament the devaluation of and discrimination against many groups of people in our world, we renew our commitment as United Methodist women bishops to ensure that all people are treated with respect, compassion, and grace and that all doors of opportunity and leadership are open to them. We pledge to model healthy relationships ourselves and are committed to researching why these amendments failed and what actions we can take to create a world where all people are able to live in safety, justice, and love.”
May 7: Public scrutiny of the voting totals begins. Among the first to question the results, the Rev. H. A. “Bud” Tillinghast posts his analysis on a forum for clergy in the California-Nevada Annual Conference.
May 7-11: Social media explodes with reactions, mostly from American United Methodists, over the amendments’ rejection. The Rev. Dr. Rebekah Miles, professor of ethics and practical theology at UMC-related Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, begins posting percentage calculations of vote totals (see charts below) for what she calls an “ethical analysis” of why the two amendments failed. Seeing rejection of Amendments 1 and 2 as a reflection on their ministry, United Methodist clergywomen start using photo frames reading “Nevertheless She Preached” on their Facebook profiles. In the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference, Bishop Elaine J.W. Stanovsky and other leaders create a video to express their disappointment at the amendments’ defeat.
May 10: On a Facebook group for United Methodist clergy, the Rev. Dr. Robert Hunt of Perkins posts a rationale from the Rev. Dr. Jerry Kulah about why the Liberia Annual Conference rejected Amendment 1. Reading Dr. Kulah’s rationale, the Rev. Taylor Burton-Edwards realizes that the version of Amendment 1 described in the Liberia vote contains a sentence that had been removed from the legislation by the 2016 General Conference. Within hours, the General Commission on the General Conference finds that all ballots contained the same incorrect wording.
In a press release, General Conference Secretary Gary Graves announces that a corrected ballot on Amendment 1 will be distributed to all annual conferences for a new vote. Rev. Graves says the incorrect language was simply an editing error, a fact confirmed by the immediate past General Conference secretary, the Rev. Gere Reist, who supervised records from the 2016 session. The new ballot may be distributed in time for 2018 annual conference sessions in the United States, but many annual conferences in Africa, where the strongest rejections occurred, won’t meet again until 2019.
What follows are some behind-the-scenes vignettes around Amendment 1’s defeat and resurgence.
Questions about voting process
The Rev. John P. Feagins, pastor of historic La Trinidad United Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas, was among those who raised questions to United Methodist Insight about the voting processes used in various annual conferences.
“The appearance of unanimous votes in the ratification returns among several large central conferences suggests that delegates across the global connection may not have been equally free and enfranchised to vote on the amendments, and if not on those amendments, perhaps not on other matters as well,” Rev. Feagins wrote.
“The unity of The United Methodist Church depends entirely on the consent of those governed to abide by the outcome of what they believe to be a free, equitable, deliberative, and democratic legislative process,” he continued. “Any widespread evidence that this process is being unethically manipulated or undermined would deal a far greater insult to church unity than ideological differences arising from controversies being deliberated within that process.
“The integrity of the ratification process, the freedom of the electorate to vote on a secret ballot, is just as important as considering the correct version of the legislation,” Rev. Feagins wrote.
A section of the United Methodist Constitution called Division Five outlines a voting process for enacting amendments. First, General Conference must pass a proposed constitutional amendment by a two-thirds vote. In turn, the annual conferences must approve the amendment by a two-thirds vote. To be ratified into church law, the amendment then must achieve a two-thirds majority of the aggregate total of all annual conferences’ votes.
However, there is no method given for how votes are to be conducted in either the church constitution or the Book of Discipline. There is also no process for recounts or other means of verifying reported voting results.
According to the Rev. Dr. Maidstone Mulenga, director of communications for the Council of Bishops: “The bishops canvassed the votes and announced the results. The bishops don’t certify the votes. They collect the results from the annual conferences and then announce them. Each annual conference reported the votes as they were announced.”
When asked via email whether there was any method for verifying the vote totals, Dr. Mulenga replied: “We have to trust our own annual conferences.”
Doing the math
The Rev. H. A. “Bud” Tillinghast, a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference, has an affinity for numbers and an inquiring mind. Soon after the vote totals were posted, Rev. Tillinghast began “crunching the numbers” on the vote totals. Specifically, Rev. Tillinghast noted what he thought were curious voting totals that showed unanimous votes to reject Amendment 1, especially among conferences in central and western Africa.
Rev. Tillinghast provided his comparisons to United Methodist Insight in the following charts.
In a response to Rev. Tillinghast’s findings on the California-Nevada forum, the Rev. Bob Kuyper of Phoenix, Ariz., wondered how well the amendments, originally written in English, were translated for several conferences located in Africa.
“I have not read the text of the amendment, but I wonder if it was translated into African languages,” said Rev. Kuyper, who has served Hispanic and Japanese congregations in California during his active ministry. “If so, how good was the translation? It might be a cultural misunderstanding. I would not be able to judge a Swahili, French or Portuguese translation. I know from my experience … that Spanish varies from country to country.”
Rev. Tillinghast acknowledged that translation may have played a role in the voting.
“I think that the UMC needs to be cognizant of cultural differences,” Rev. Tillinghast responded. “But there needs to be a common approach to the methodology we use in making common decisions. And I don’t think things are working in using the democratic process. I don’t see any of our U. S. Conferences using our process and ending up with unanimous or almost unanimous votes. Something is wrong here.”
At Insight’s request, Rev. Tillinghast consulted a statistician – his nephew John Tillinghast, a former employee of the U.S. Census Bureau. John Tillinghast replied in an email:
“[From a statistical perspective] Either there's virtually no support at all for Amendment 1 among the relevant population, or someone is making sure that there are no ‘yes’ votes. This could only happen by chance if the percentage of supporters is negligible anyway. I suppose, a lot of people might be boycotting the vote. But as you have noticed, the explanation is not because of probability, but something else about the vote.”
An ‘ethical analysis’
The Rev. Dr. Rebekah Miles has a strong Methodist pedigree. Her parents, the Rev. John Miles and Joann Miles, were active in Methodist/United Methodist politics for decades. Joann helped organize the women’s caucus of the South Central Jurisdiction, while John was a frequent General Conference delegate noted for the colorful metaphors he used to move the legislative assembly off dead center. “We have other fish to fry,” was one of his favorite phrases.
Now professor of ethics and practical theology at UMC-related Perkins School of Theology, Dr. Miles inherited a habit from her parents: compiling statistics from United Methodist votes as a way of discerning the political leanings of church leaders. Over May 9-11, she compiled vote percentages for the U.S. jurisdictions and posted them on Facebook.
“Again, what particularly interests me is what happened with outliers?” Dr. Miles wrote. “What arguments were made or not made, and where did those arguments come from?”
Below are charts that Insight created using Dr. Miles' percentages.
Dr. Miles said she intended to compile percentage totals from conferences outside the United States as well. She is also seeking input from other United Methodists who observed the votes in their respective annual conferences and can speak to the debates around Amendments 1 and 2.
Some global perspectives
Vote totals also gave Dr. David W. Scott, a United Methodist layman, opportunity to look at concentrations of opposition to Amendment 1 across Africa and the Eurasia episcopal area composed of Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. Dr. Scott serves as director of mission theology for the General Board of Global Ministries in Atlanta, and volunteers as blogmaster for UM & Global, a collaborative blog sponsored by United Methodist Professors of Mission.
Along with providing percentage totals in a UM & Global post, Dr. Scott noted that “Cote d'Ivoire, one of the largest episcopal areas in the denomination, did not vote on any of the amendments.”
“Vote totals from Africa and the Philippines evidence a much more consensual approach to voting than in the West, a pattern that holds beyond just this one vote,” Dr. Scott wrote. “There is no clear account of the balance between episcopal pressure and other social factors for producing such consensus. Jerry Kulah expressed a rationale for opposition to the amendments in Liberia, but it is not clear whether the same rationale was influential elsewhere. When African voters did go against the consensus of their annual conferences, they were most likely to do so to affirm the equality of women and men.”
The Rev. Dr. Jerry Kulah serves as dean of United Methodist-related Gbanga School of Theology in Liberia. He is a noted leader among traditionalist United Methodist constituents allied with the Good News movement, the Wesleyan Covenant Association and the Confessing Movement. At the 2016 General Conference, he caused a furor when he preached that American United Methodists were “apostates” for supporting LGBTQ inclusion in the Church, and that it was the calling of African United Methodists to defend the denomination against them.
In a post on "Juicy Ecumenism," the blog of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, Dr. Kulah gave the following rationale for Liberia’s rejection of Amendment 1:
“… the Liberia Area of the UMC is pleased to submit its report. The vote cast by a delegation of 956 comprising of laity and clergy made the following decisions: Proposed Amendments number one and two were given a ‘no’ vote by the Liberia Annual Conference, while Amendments number three, four and five were given a ‘yes’ vote. …
“Proposed Constitutional Amendment #1:
“In the 2012 Book of Discipline, Division One, add a new paragraph between current ¶¶ 5 and 6: As the Holy Scripture reveals, both men and women are made in the image of God and, therefore, men and women are of equal value in the eyes of God. The United Methodist Church recognizes it is contrary to Scripture and to logic to say that God is male or female, as maleness and femaleness are characteristics of human bodies and cultures, not characteristics of the divine. [Editor’s note: The section in italics is the sentence that was removed from the original legislation by General Conference vote.] The United Methodist Church acknowledges the long history of discrimination against women and girls. The United Methodist Church shall confront and seek to eliminate discrimination against women and girls, whether in organizations or in individuals, in every facet of its life and in society at large. The United Methodist Church shall work collaboratively with others to address concerns that threaten the cause of women’s and girl’s equality and well-being.
“… Our Analysis & Position: We are in total agreement, and consistent with Scripture (Genesis. 1:26-27; 9:6; I Corinthians 11:7), that humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore, both male and female are of equal value before God. We also stand strongly opposed to discrimination against women and girls, for we are all God’s children. However, we strongly opposed the reference that ‘it is contrary to Scripture and to logic’ to acknowledge or claim the maleness or fatherhood of God. The Scripture is replete with references to God as Father. When Jesus taught his disciples, (and, by implication, us) how to pray, he taught them to call God “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2); throughout his teaching and preaching ministry, Jesus often referred to God as ‘Father.’ (Matt. 5:16; 6:9,26; 11:27; Luke 2:9; John 2:16; 4:21; 10:17,30; 14:6-11; 15:9). … Furthermore, to accept this inclusion, ‘The United Methodist Church recognizes it is contrary to Scripture and to logic to say that God is male or female, as maleness and femaleness are characteristics of human bodies and cultures, not characteristics of the divine’ would undermine the doctrine of the Trinity, nullify our affirmation of faith (Apostle Creed), and portions of the Bible as non-scripture. Therefore, we voted ‘NO’ to this proposed amendment with a ‘no’ vote of 956; a ‘yes’ vote of 0; and abstention vote of 0.”
In another post on “Juicy Ecumenism,” John Lomperis, director of IRD’s United Methodist section, lauded the vote as “Five Cheers for Conservative Victories on United Methodist Constitutional Amendments.” Linking to the total vote results, Mr. Lomperis wrote: “ The results on all five show how our denomination is moving in an increasingly orthodox, faithful direction overall, whether our bishops like it or not.”
Mr. Lomperis’ celebratory column drew sharp retorts from clergy on Facebook. Among some three dozen comments, the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas, a frequent contributor to Insight, wrote: “Whenever someone cheers for a ‘victory’ in a situation like this, it means they are standing with their feet on the heads of the ‘defeated.’ And this is no way to treat those in the covenant relationship known as The United Methodist Church.”
Analyses, comments and prognostications undoubtedly will continue about what the experience of Amendment 1’s voting means for the denomination's future as the special called General Conference on United Methodist unity looms in 2019.
Email comments on this article to um-insight@as-tex.net. Comments will be compiled and posted separately to allow for more space.
ADDITIONAL REACTIONS
GCSRW Statement Regarding Amendments 1 and 2
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.