A View From Inside the UMC: Reflections on Bishop Bickerton’s Presidential Address

Photo by Alp Ar Tunga Jabbarli

Finally…. The Council of Bishops (COB) of The United Methodist Church met in-person during the week of April 31-May 5 in Chicago, IL. It was the council’s first in-person gathering since the advent of COVID. On Monday (May 1) of that week, Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton, COB president, delivered the President’s Address. Bishop Bickerton is to be commended for giving careful attention to his speech, thoughtfully crafted and passionately delivered. The video replay of the address demonstrates the bishop’s deep love for his episcopal and general-agency colleagues and The United Methodist Church.

During his address, Bishop Bickerton spoke in a heartfelt way about the recent death of his father (and the much earlier death of his grandfather). What a tremendous loss for the bishop to endure, and then in short order turn around and write and deliver a speech to the Council of Bishops. Bishop Bickerton’s commitment to Christ and His Church, even during a time of heart-breaking personal loss, is to be admired. We pray for the Holy Spirit’s comforting and strengthening stay with the bishop and his larger family.

In speeches and sermons, United Methodist clergy usually try to be as positive and upbeat, non-controversial and non-offensive, as possible. Bishop Bickerton’s most recent President’s Address does not play that game. In his address, the bishop is candid--perhaps painfully so--about denial, worry, and weariness. 

Denial 

Bishop Bickerton joins many others in denying that the bishops are responsible for the schism now occurring in The United Methodist Church. His clearest statement of denial goes like this: “We want to move forward, and some of us want to do it right now. But there is a need to grieve. We [bishops] didn’t do this but it did happen under our watch. We didn’t want this but we are dealing with the reality that we are less than we were the last time we were together.” To be sure, the bishops are not the only ones responsible for the schism, but they certainly took the lead. Years ago they allowed a few of their number to ignore and break church doctrine and discipline; then, the guilty ones were not disciplined, formally or informally, in any way. Those are simply facts of the matter.

Were the bishops to be done with their denial and confess their complicity in the schism, healing and reconciliation would come to the church. Were the bishops to repent and depend upon God’s grace for forgiveness, there is no telling how much good among Methodists, including United Methodists and Global Methodists, would be divinely given. But first the bishops must overcome their denial. 

Worry 

Most clergy try not to use the word “worry” in pastoral conversation, in Bible study, in committee meetings, or in public worship. Nevertheless, Bishop Bickerton uses this often forbidden word in his President’s Address. Notice how he admits worry into United Methodist life.  

First he spoke about how chaos in the church is harmful to the leaders of the church:

“This second wave of disaffiliations has taken a toll. In conversations with many of you [bishops and agency executives], it’s not hard to sense the fatigue, the disappointment, the anger, the sadness, the confusion within you. Some of us can’t help but look back and long for a day that once was. Some of us can’t see straight because where we are is so complex and confusing. And some of us just want to move ahead. It’s time to find our stride, our joy, our sense of purpose again. We just want to find a way through. I’ve worried about you. Worried about us....December 31, 2023? It can’t come soon enough.” 

The bishop also noted: 

I admit that I’m eager to get past this. I want us to stop talking about disaffiliations. I worry that we have spent more time on those who are leaving than focusing our energy on those who are staying. There isn’t a day, it seems, when nothing new comes our way--another Judicial Council decision, another unexpected departure, another surprise we hadn’t anticipated. An ordinand that we believed in who tells us they are leaving, a home church where we were baptized and raised in the Christian faith that had voted to disaffiliate, a community that has in the blink of an eye suddenly lost their United Methodist footprint.
I worry about that. I worry about you. I worry about us….

The bishop is quite wise to name this problem of and temptation to worry. When named and acknowledged and resisted, worry cannot capture and bind its victims to the point that they cannot live in faith and obedience to God.

Wearniness 

In his President’s Address, at least three times Bishop Bickerton admitted to being tired. First he said: “Like you, I am tired, and on other days, I’m just dizzy over the magnitude of work before us. But this is our time. It is our wakeup call. We’ve been asleep far too long, snoozing with the help of the melatonin of somehow this will all work out if we’re patient enough to see it happen.”

Then he stated: “We are tired, worn and vulnerable. It is not time for us [bishops and executives] to be ‘at’ one another as much as it is a time for us to be ‘with’ one another. Let us choose our words carefully, love one another deeply, listen to one another intently, and lean on one another deliberately lest we further damage an already pierced institution.”

Finally, the bishop noted: “Frankly I’m tired of waiters and flight attendants saying, ‘thank you for being so kind to me’ and creating the thought that a simple act of kindness was an extraordinary act, rather than a simple expected behavior from everyone.”

Here the bishop seems to be at his most tired, though he does not use that word: 

“As it relates to disaffiliations, I just have to be honest. I’ve had enough of being told that we [bishops] are the problem. I’ve had enough of sitting idly by listening to someone else’s narrative, someone else’s condemnation, someone else’s Friday morning armchair quarterbacking from a group that says they are all about good news, when all they can write about is what is wrong and who is to blame. It is time to make the pivot.” 

This comment seemed to draw the most vigorous response of the entire speech from other bishops and agency leaders–clapping, cheering, laughing, and pounding on tables. The bishop seems more willing to take on the critics and their criticisms.

Pivots

The President’s Address was not all about lament. Bishop Bickerton also listed “pivots,” or new beginnings, he hopes to see in The United Methodist Church. For example, he wants January 1, 2024--the first day following the disaffiliation season–to be “the beginning of a period of jubilee, a time of refocusing, a time to look at those that are a part of this United Methodist Church and say, it is time to rebuild the temple and get on with what God has called us to do from the very beginning.”

In addition, he hopes the General Conference between 2024 and 2028 that the Judicial Council has mandated will “reset this denomination organizationally and functionally.”

Bishop Bickerton ’s vision of The United Methodist Church is honest and yet hopeful: “We should anticipate less bishops, reconfigured boundaries, reformed agencies, and a revised work plan to achieve our mission. We cannot work with what is not there. But we can see it as a long overdue opportunity to reposition this denomination for its next expression.”

According to the bishop, all of his hopeful pivots depend upon God: “The future of the UMC hinges on our ability to deeply pray that God will give us the strength and the courage to do what we must, what we have been called to do all along. It hinges on the faith that Paul talked about in Ephesians when he proclaimed that God at work in us–not us, but God at work in us–is able to achieve abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”

So only God can “re-claim” (church identity, practices, and disciplines); “re-new” (Wesleyan theology, “scriptural holiness across the land,” and “the historic purpose of a pastor who is to [do] nothing but save souls”); and “re-vive” (centering on the work of God, excellent preaching and teaching, the church to become a beacon of God’s grace and love to the world) The United Methodist Church. Only God can return to The United Methodist Church “the heart of our theology, the heart of who we are–to offer a theology of grace, hope, peace, love and justice to a broken world.

According to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, such change is indeed possible. But such change often begins with repentance. If the bishops demonstrate repentance–and show the larger church how to repent–the pivots that Bishop Bickerton hopes for just might, with God’s help, reform The United Methodist Church. 

The Rev. Paul Stallsworth is an elder in the North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church. Living in Wilson, NC, he is the editor and president of Lifewatch, a witness for the Gospel of Life within United Methodism.