A more just structure
The structure of the global United Methodist Church was set over 40 years ago. The 1960s-70s were not exactly known for Americans being equitable to foreign countries, and our UMC reflects that in many ways. Two examples off the top of my head:
- For decades, the Ivory Coast was denied full representation in the global church, and it took a Judicial Council ruling to give them full representation at General Conference.
- The Central Conferences can edit the Book of Discipline for their context, but the United States cannot.
In 2008, the General Conference attempted to change the structure of the church to make it more equitable. Those amendments failed thanks to the conservative caucus groups defeating them out of fears of advancement of homosexuality.
We’ve been waiting for the global church (General Conference and the General Boards) to give us some plans for years. They deferred making recommendations at the last two General Conferences. Rather than wait for another deferred study, the NEJ decided to study it themselves, alongside Central Conference voices, and make a proposal.
Proposal and Webinar
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT), the Northeastern Jurisdiction is holding a Webinar to outline their proposal for the 2016 General Conference to consider.
Welcome! We are excited to be able to share information about the Global Connection Plan for the United Methodist Church! Our two-year process with a diverse group of United Methodists has lead us to an exciting proposal that we believe can be a source of wholeness and healing for the church.
Our desire is to share our plan and respond to your questions about it. In this 60-minute webinar we will present the problems we are seeking to fix, the solution we’ve developed, and the answers to the most frequently asked questions. View the Global Connection Plan: http://www.nejumc.org/global-structure-task-force.html. We’ll also have time for your responses and questions.
I hope you are able to make it and get your questions answered as well as hear more about what the proposal entails.
See you then!
I am looking forward to the conversation. I haven’t written yet about the NEJ proposal, so it should provide a lot of clarity for me to understand the benefits (long-term and short-term).
Thoughts?
I read the judiciary restructure and find it interesting. The judiciary as we know it now will be no more. There will be a global judiciary council that only looks at global issues and their reviews will be constrained. The regional judiciaries will rule on matters within their geographical areas but only after a minimum number at conference request a review. The end result of this will be to rip apart our constitution and replace it with regional mob rule. This looks like a big step toward congregationalism.
So who and how would what is regional v. global be decided? For instance, marriage? Would it be defined globally, or regionally? That will be a big matter. And also, can a congregation choose to affiliate with a different region? For instance, I can foresee many more conservative US congregations desiring to be a part of the African region or connection. Why would the connections be regional?
Ryan
I will bet you lunch that the authors of this proposal believe marriage should be a regional issue not a global one. I will even double down and say that same sex marriage is the driving issue behind this.
I am not going to bet lunch, because I have a sinking suspicion that you are absolutely correct. I wonder what rationale there would even be to have marriage, which is defined by the Bible, to be regionally? I don’t think African churches should be able to amend the definition to include polygamy although at least some African nations still practice polygamy either legally or illegally. And I don’t think that Europe or the US should be enabled to include so called same gender marriage either.
I still have questions about these regions. I wouldn’t be surprised if my current congregation would want to be considered an African church, or under the authourity of African Bishops rather than American ones.
Jeremy:
There is both a misleading factual inaccuracy and a misleading claim in what you’ve written in this post. The factual inaccuracy is this: It is not the case that the 2008 Worldwide Church amendments “failed thanks to the conservative caucus groups defeating them out of fears of advancement of homosexuality.” The amendments failed because they did not garner the supermajorities needed at the annual conference level to ratify them once they had been passed by the General Conference the previous year. Indeed, in most cases they didn’t even get close to bare majorities. A quick scan of the voting results shows that these ill-considered amendments were defeated by landslide level ‘nay’ votes:
http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/council-of-bishops-announces-constitutional-amendments-voting-results
On the second point: The misleading claim occurs where you cite the ability of central conferences to alter portions of the Book of Discipline as evidence of “Americans [not] being equitable to foreign countries.” The reality is just the opposite. Since the UMC (and its predecessor bodies) were so heavily tilted towards a U.S. membership in previous decades, there was the assumption that the Discipline would be slanted towards American concerns. Thus, the willingness of the General Conference to allow central conferences to tailor certain portions of the Discipline toward their own contexts is very much a sign of the desire on the part of the American church to be equitable in its treatment of overseas branches of the UMC. That you would claim the opposite to be the case is odd indeed.
Andrew,
that is a profoundly insightful read that I didn’t catch at first blush. The BOD has been Amero-centric or nearly wholly defined by Americans. Therefore, why would we need to ‘edit’ a BOD we wrote. It was written specifically for our context, and here not just from 1968 onward, but really from the beginning of the Methodist movement in the US. There are parts that are simply impossible to apply in other countries.