Whether you are a newcomer to United Methodism, a longtime member, or a passerby looking askance, these days it is obvious there is a lot of controversy going on in The United Methodist Church.
The following are ~1000 word attempts to describe the current state of The UMC in a succinct manner that admittedly over-simplifies things with broad brush strokes. Nonetheless, it will be a useful set of primers for people to enter the conversation.
- The Past: Power & Polity versus People & Places (LINK)
- The Present: In the Meantime and the Mean Time (LINK)
- The Future: Avoiding the Fundamentalist Future Set Before Both Sides (LINK)
Part I: Power & Polity
versus People & Places
United Methodism At A Glance
The United Methodist Church occupies a unique place in America and on the world stage.
The UMC is a global, mainline, evangelical Church. It sits at the intersection between evangelical (baptists, etc.) and mainline (the Seven Sisters of Protestantism ) movements, drawing the best elements from them both. On the global stage, it has a unique composition: progressive and traditionalist people together under a global democratic representative polity with episcopal governance.
At one time it was the largest denomination in America—now it is third behind the Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists, with the LDS (Mormon) church not far behind.
The Methodist tradition, which began in the 18th century, had gone through many schisms, reunions, branches, and offshoots before its largest entity finally settled on its current form of The United Methodist Church in 1968. It’s right about then that we need to look back at two movements within the church that led to our situation in the UMC today.
An open table…eventually
A diverse church with many different traditions and shifting power dynamics has had to deal with minority groups seeking equality within the church. The UMC has previously come to terms with including minority groups into the Church and emerged better for it with both mainline and evangelical qualities.
Progressive, Moderate, and Conservative people worked together to advance the rights of women to become clergy (1956) and to fully include African American pastors (1968). Make no mistake, these were far too late and hard-fought to achieve, denying ministry to people groups for decades, and even then, implemented incrementally. Against both votes, there were Traditionalist groups who had opposed the inclusion of women and black pastors, but by the dates of these votes, their influence had waned because women’s suffrage and black civil rights movements in civil society predated these votes on in church society.
These two acts of inclusion made United Methodism, at the time, one of the largest and most inclusive denominations in America—it still is the largest denomination affirming women’s ordination. And all of Methodism, especially Methodism globally, has benefitted from these two acts of inclusion.
Traditionalist Reaction to “Minority Mania”
But those two acts of inclusion of women and African Americans were too much to bear for the Traditionalist element in United Methodism, which began to organize to stop the alleged “minority mania” of an ever-expanding table of grace. Rather than leave the denomination like Alabama Methodists who created the Southern Methodist Church, they created their own shadow denomination within The United Methodist Church in order to weaponize fears of progressives and inclusion, particularly of the LGBTQ+ community.
With the messaging foundation laid by the Good News Magazine (1966), The IRD (1981), and others, Traditionalists began creating a parallel reality within the UMC but outside of United Methodist oversight, accountability, or connectional leadership. Through the Mission Society ( 1984 parallel to the General Board of Global Missions), Bristol House Books ( 1987 parallel to Abingdon), and the RENEW network ( 1989 parallel to UM Women), traditionalists created their own parallel structure that provides books, fellowship, events, and missionaries for congregations to support. Within these structures, Traditionalists have free reign over curriculum, theology, and incentives to contribute to their own causes instead of United Methodist ones, siphoning off money and organizing power to themselves.
This shadow denomination’s coordination and messaging has borne significant fruit within the denomination: every General Conference (the Congress-like doctrine making body of The UMC) since 1988 has been a majority of conservatives. Through two subsequent acts of gerrymandering of the General Conference representation, even the massive progressive wave of delegates to the 2022 General Conference is expected to be unable to reach a majority at the next General Conference at the end of August 2022.
Carving out Breathing Space
While the Traditionalists were seeking power and polity control in The UMC, Progressives have been carving out places to save people’s lives.
Beginning with the Gay Men’s Caucus (aka Affirmation) in the 1970s, early acts of promoting the inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, and continuing with strategy of organizing congregations under the Reconciling Ministries Network, LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts are about proclaiming who and where are safe harbors for queer United Methodists. As well, by electing conference and jurisdictional leadership that reflect full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, progressives have grown top-to-bottom full inclusion in the Western Jurisdiction—and sizable majorities in the Northern jurisdictions as well.
This is significant because United Methodist Polity places accountability and organizing at the local and annual conference level. The Wesleyan tenet of local accountability—enshrined, ironically, by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, when they merged with MEC in 1939 to ensure the South would not be led by Northern bishops—meant that the progressive jurisdictions and annual conferences could continue their regional practice of full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons despite what General Conference legislates. Regional authority and accountability is part of the Constitution, requiring a super-majority to change—votes that the Traditionalists do not have.
Progressives and Centrists have a minority in the General Conference, but their regional majorities mean there are sizable sections of United Methodism where full inclusion is practiced and celebrated.
The Withering Storm around 2022
As we anticipate a General Conference 2022, we see these two long-term directions are at a stalemate.
- Traditionalists won battle after battle for the UMC, including the most recent Traditional Plan passed in 2019, but they lost the war—they are perpetually unable to drive out, bring to heel, or eradicate progressives from The UMC. The polity the Southern conservatives put in themselves has led to an unsquashable progressive minority. But the harm continues: Traditionalists are expected to have a majority at the next General Conference and can continue to keep us in the trenches and make it more retributive over the 10 day conference like they did in 2016.
- The progressive/centrist wave won’t have a majority to change the polity, but the American delegates are poised to elect a whole class of inclusive bishops in every jurisdiction, which will put back the Traditionalist goals of finally “owning” the Council of Bishops at least 8 years. An episcopal covenant to “do no harm” that ceases trials and prosecutions in the South is within reach (even if they have to overcome current bishops who prosecute by inaction), leading the majority of the UMC in America to be inclusive by practice even without an inclusive polity, though it won’t be sustainable globally.
The two sides in United Methodism care so much about winning that we’re about to lose everything. In our next article, we’ll examine what’s been happening in our interim time during the pandemic, and why United Methodists need to care for the next year until the 2022 General Conference.
Your Turn
Place and People are as important to Methodist ecclesiology as polity and doctrine. A denomination needs the energy of traditionalists and progressives alike to maintain the gains of its various movements. As we lament what could have been, we need to be eyes-wide-open about how we got here.
Thoughts?
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The problem is that for years Jeremy, Progressive Bishops have controlled Annual Conferences by making sure that anyone who questions or opposes policies invoked by said bishops are blackballed from positions of leadership. The mantra of doing no harm was repeatedly ignored. You have a good account but it is simply more complicated than your writing. Many were told to simply comply or get out of the way. I am not sure that is “doing no harm”.
Funny you say that, because we have a conservative bishop in our conference and that’s exactly what he’s done to anyone even remotely progressive. His district superintendents have stacked their DCOMs so conservatively that no one who is even a little bit liberal with a call to ministry can start the process. Meanwhile, we don’t have enough people to fill pulpits so the DSs are installing barely vetted Baptist pastors and letting them teach Baptist theology in Methodist pulpits, and in one particular case, use church property for extremist alt right activities. Do no harm indeed.
Probably just a simple typo, but the merger was in 1939, not 1929. Interestingly, my deceased dad may have been one of the last preachers ordained Elder in the St. John’s River Conference of the MEC (not “comma South”) in Florida. It was one month before the merger. Yes, there were a number of MEC congregations in Florida back then.
Whoops! Fixed and thank you!!
Paul is right, the merger was in 1939, not 1929. My father attended the Uniting Conference as a Youth participant (in those days youth included what we now call youth and young adult). Also, I know the UMC was once the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., but were we really ever bigger than the Roman Catholic Church? I’d like to know your source on that.
A try, and not a very nice one, to present an overall picture of current Methodism. Biased comments that are not well-informed, are not healthy OR smart for a discussion on moving forward. Cure the Hack, and get a grip.
This is typically of Jeremy. Biased ignorance at its best! No matter what is said to him he doesn’t seem to see it in himself. It s the Johari Window.
This is so clear and so succinct. I have sent it to friends and encouraged them to follow the rest of this series.
As good as it sounds, much of it is incorrect! Sorry you liked it so much.
You should know that most of this is not correct.
I would appreciate knowing exactly what is not correct about this article. Thanks
I hate to burst your bubble, but most of this is not correct.
As a retired UM pastor, I feel compelled to say that the UMC is broken and a shadow of its once impressive self. The itinerant system is antiquated in a time when we long since left a past of almost all white, married, male pastors with wives who subsidized the church, many with incomes from public school teaching and/or private music teaching, formerly relatively portable jobs. Families of all stripes today need two incomes unless they’re independently wealthy, and most spouses’ careers/jobs are not the kind that can be easily transferred from one place to another. We also shot ourselves in the foot by changing pastors every few years, ignoring evidence that it takes several years for a pastor to become effective in a new church. In addition, the absurd affirmation that the Annual Conference is the basic unit of the church has apparently helped lead to the neglect of serious consideration of intergenerational dynamics, family systems, professional-quality human relations standards, etc. The ineptness of bishops and district superintendents has allowed sick churches to stubbornly survive and easily endure relatively short pastorates of clergy who had the skills to make a difference had they had genuine support from the AC leadership.. Add to these, a good-old-boy/girl network that picks the known incompetent over the less “company”-oriented creative qualified candidates for pastoral ministry, conference leadership, and superintendency. Then there’s the unbridled power (second only to the RC Church) of authoritarian bishops (who ignore the Judicial Council ruling requiring consultation in appointment making). What we are left with is poor morale; bitter retirees who want nothing to do with the AC; fewer and fewer seminary educated but more poorly trained and out-of touch pastors from other traditions and churches; many churches struggling to support even part-time clergy; and more and more closing churches. No “mainline” denomination is doing well, though some better than stumbling “Evangelical” congregations these days. And theologically we can no longer stretch the tent beyond its limits to claim inclusiveness of people who are essentially unitarian on the one hand, and, at the same time, fundamentalists who don’t accept the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, or women, let alone LGBTQ, clergy. I’m glad to be involved now in a denomination wherein bishops are actually based in a cathedral church vs. a remote AC office, and where they can be more in touch and accountable, and make regular visits to all of their parishes.
The polity regarding the episcopacy/ appointment is broken. agreed