Moving Ahead in the UMC: A Distributed General Conference
Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
The United Methodist Church lingers in the fallout of a contentious 2019 General Conference called to settle long-standing divisions in the denomination over same-sex marriage and the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals. Although the traditional Christian understanding of marriage and human sexuality was upheld, a firestorm of protest erupted in North America and Western Europe. Many bishops, elders, and annual (regional) conferences have assumed positions of defiance in spite of vows to the contrary. Electoral battles in U.S. conferences were successfully waged to select more progressive delegates to General Conference 2020 in Minneapolis. In the meantime, the denomination continues its vigorous growth in Africa and marked decline in the West. Recent statistical reports indicate that most United Methodists now live outside the U.S. The traditional global trajectory of the General Conference is unable, however, to impact practice meaningfully in the United States where the resources and agencies of United Methodism are centered.
The global United Methodist quagmire prompted one African bishop to gather influential bishops and caucus leaders to a freelance mediation facilitated by famed negotiator Kenneth Feinberg. In the agreed “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation,” U.S. traditionalists agreed to form a new global denomination upon the passage of legislation granting them liberty from the legal trust clause that ties congregational properties to the UMC. The proposal was to have been the highest profile legislation at General Conference 2020. And then a pandemic struck. The global meeting was delayed and eventually rescheduled for August 29 through September 7, 2021.
The lingering threats and disruption of COVID-19 make a standard in-person 2021 General Conference less and less likely. The Biden Administration recently reinstated certain international travel restrictions that will further complicate an already complex process of securing visas for international delegates. United Methodists await key decisions from the Commission on General Conference, the group charged with planning the global legislative assembly.
A Technological Solution?
A Technology Study Team named by the commission is at work to explore ways to enable the 862 delegates to do their overdue work. The team’s final report was expected January 31 and will be acted upon at the next meeting of the commission on February 20. In the meantime, delegations discuss creative solutions for accomplishing the work of the General Conference. Chief among these possibilities is a virtual meeting. After all, many annual conferences have utilized virtual gatherings over the past year. While met with mixed success, these sessions have proved mostly workable. Our sister denomination, The Presbyterian Church (USA), held its most recent General Assembly in a virtual format.
United Methodist General Conference delegates, however, do not all have the same access to technology enjoyed in the United States. A third of delegates are from Africa, where a majority of the population does not have reliable access to the internet. Unlike annual conference sessions, a UM General Conference requires real-time translation into French, German, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and American Sign Language. Dozens of translators assist delegates in their complex work of sorting and perfecting hundreds of pages of proposed legislation in some fourteen legislative committees.
The complexity of General Conference has led some to combine the concept of a virtual gathering with a recommendation for a simplified agenda. Rather than dealing with the hundreds of pages of legislation in committees, all non-essential business would be tabled or otherwise set aside. Essential business might be limited to a denominational budget, certain elections (like Judicial Council, our high court), and consideration of the Separation Protocol. Delegates already have some recent experience with a limited-agenda gathering. During General Conference 2019, delegates convened in one space and perfected proposals as a single legislative committee. Although the delegates were sharply divided on the outcome, most seemed to agree the format was manageable.
Ensuring a Secure Voting Process
There is yet another obstacle to a virtual General Conference. The 2019 special session was marred with accusations of improper voting. Less than a handful of international delegates were found to have voted without proper credentials. With or without these votes, the Traditional Plan upholding current church teaching on human sexuality was approved. But in the investigation that followed, the Commission on General Conference took the unprecedented step of invalidating passage of a disaffiliation provision that was advanced in a procedural vote by only a two-vote margin. The Judicial Council failed to recognize the commission’s authority to take such a step. Regardless, the net result of the scandal was a renewed commitment by the commission to enhanced security measures. This is an additional burden placed upon whatever virtual voting system might be proposed.
It is difficult to see how hundreds of delegates logging individually into General Conference 2021 would be workable. Someone temporarily losing connection might be disenfranchised from participation in a key vote. Lags in communication would make it difficult to understand the intricacies of parliamentary procedures. The autonomy and validity of delegate voting would be impossible to monitor. For all these reasons, a more likely scenario would be a “distributed” General Conference. Delegates would gather regionally to participate in the virtual gathering as groups.
What is a “Distributed General Conference”?
Before General Conference, each annual (regional) conference elects a delegation of laity and clergy in equal numbers, along with a number of alternates. In a distributed conference, these delegates would gather as groups in regional locations where reliable connectivity can be secured. Relevant translation services would be provided at these remote sites. It has been suggested variously that delegates gather by conference, by nation, or by global region.
A distributed General Conference would be chaired from a central location by bishops charged with the task. A system would need to be devised for securely collecting, tabulating, and reporting votes from each site. The rules governing General Conferences do not anticipate the need for virtual forms of gathering. Plans may be subject to review by the Judicial Council. Ultimately, the delegates themselves would need to approve the format in the organizational motions once they gather.
The Trust Deficit
As a denomination on the brink of formal division, our meetings are low on trust and high on suspicion. GC2016 was dominated by debates over “Rule #44” that would have introduced an alternative discernment process for legislation. After long deliberation, the rule failed approval under suspicion that it was an attempt to change the outcome by manipulating the rules. There were intentional efforts on the part of certain progressive delegates in 2019 to deceive international delegates by making conservative-sounding speeches in favor of amendments that would have nullified the Traditional Plan. Emergency text messages went out from the Africa Initiative caucus: “This is a trick. Please vote no.” (The intricacies of parliamentary procedures are difficult even for native Westerners operating in environments of good will in their native language.) There was also real concern in 2019 over bishops privately pressuring their delegations to vote in favor of the liberalizing One Church Plan and against their consciences. Traditionalists will want assurances that voting sites are free from such pressure and manipulation.
Those tasked with championing General Conference legislative outcomes are closely watching proposals for a virtual, distributed conference. Herculean efforts are necessary, for instance, to align the diverse, international traditionalist coalition. United Methodist evangelicals in America are more motivated toward separation than traditionalists in Africa, where divisions over human sexuality and Scripture are not a daily lived experience. Although the organizations within the Renewal and Reform Coalition generally share an interest in promoting Christian theological orthodoxy, they may not align perfectly on whether the time has arrived to abandon the United Methodist institution. The institution is the primary umbilical cord of mission funding that flows from the U.S. to the Global South and elsewhere.
The Protocol for Grace and Reconciliation through Separation is intended to end the poor depiction of Christianity currently exhibited in our divided denomination. We might dare to hope that a limited, distributed General Conference could gather virtually in 2021 to approve a small raft of motions that will allow for peaceful and orderly division and keep the UMC operational until the heirs of the current quagmire can organize themselves into two or more separate general conferences. An international Transitional Leadership Council comprising bishops and other leaders has been working for more than a year to prepare a transitional Book of Discipline to govern those congregations and clergy who will be leaving United Methodism. A convening conference for a new denomination is envisioned for late 2022 or 2023. The delay is to allow time for annual conferences and congregations to hold the votes enabled by the Separation Protocol. Leaders in the post-separation UMC hope to retain much of the global membership in a new institutional wineskin where each region has much more autonomy on theological and moral issues. That legislation, however, requires super-majority support and global ratification in each annual conference. A similar proposal in 2008 was rejected by a wide margin in African conferences.
Uncertainty has become par for the course in United Methodism. Behind these structural battles are deep theological divides that have fueled an institutional identity crisis. COVID-19 has accelerated realities of decline and, I believe, disabused many of the notion that the current institution can survive with only slight modifications. We are in a different place than we were in late 2019 when the last batch of legislation was written. It is now in the hands of the Commission on General Conference to decide whether a virtual, distributed General Conference matches the needs of this moment.
Chris Ritter is a United Methodist elder from Illinois where he serves as the Directing Pastor of Geneseo First Methodist Church. He served as a clergy delegate to the 2016 and 2019 General Conferences and is the author of Seven Things John Wesley Expected Us to Do for Kids (Abingdon Press, 2016). He is currently serving his second term on the Global Council of the Wesleyan Covenant Association and blogs at PeopleNeedJesus.net.