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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Ostrich posture or eagle vision on itineracy? Donald W. Haynes, Mar 5, 2008
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
As appointment time approaches across the United Methodist connection, this old war horse and former district superintendent is getting phone calls and e-mails almost daily from distraught pastors who are on the “move list.”
Superintendents across the connection are salivating. Laity are certain their next pastor will be the messiah. Pastors hope there will be less dysfunctionality in their next appointment.
My major regret is that I moved, or was moved, too often.
The itineracy was created for missional deployment to serve the territory; it has evolved into a system of either career advancement or guaranteed employment. Either track patronizes the clergy.
But there are larger concerns than mere career advancement.
Donald Messer’s 1991 book, Send Me? The Itineracy in Crisis, made itineracy the defining characteristic of Methodism to the degree that message was subordinate to method. That volume also changed the spelling from “itinerancy” to “itineracy.”
My response upon reading that book is the same today: “If United Methodism is defined by its methodology rather than its message, God help us.” In seminary class, I often add the postscript, “And I don’t think God will, because as Wesley clearly believed, no polity is delineated in the New Testament.”
A much more analytical and helpful volume is Tom Frank’s Polity, Practice and Mission of The United Methodist Church, but it was published over a decade ago. Since then, both the church and the culture have undergone seismic shifts. The itineracy in its present form must be re-visited.
We have been overly protective of the itineracy and the authority of the bishop to make appointments.
The Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren tradition praises the itineracy as a missionary order by which the bishop sends clergy to the point of missional need rather than clergy accommodation.
But the first schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church came at the first true General Conference in 1792—and the issue was itineracy. The request from James O’Kelly was for the right to appeal one’s appointment to the annual conference session. If the preacher could successfully win support of his colleagues, the bishop would have to send the traveling preacher to an alternate place of service.
The proposal would have destroyed neither itineracy nor the authority of the bishop to select the alternate appointment, but Bishop Asbury vehemently objected, and it was defeated. O’Kelly left the church, and it was nearly 10 years before membership attained its pre-1792 level.
The sanctity of itinerancy, as it was spelled in 1900, was spelled out by Hilary T. Hudson in The Methodist Armor: “1) Congregations give up their right to choose pastors; 2) Ministers surrender their right to select their own field of labor; 3) the appointment is referred to a competent, impartial, untrammeled, but responsible authority arranged by the law of the Church.”
Itineracy was based on the Great Commission: “Go ye into all the world,” not wait for people to come to you.
Hudson cites Jesus, Phillip and Paul as New Testament examples of itinerate preachers, and ends with an infamous statement: “We believe the plan to be providential; it has worked wonders, and we expect to adhere to it till the trump of judgment sounds and time shall be no more.”
Incredibly, the voice of rebuttal to date has been faint.
The defense of itineracy is, “Every church has a preacher and every preacher [in full connection] has a church.” This defense has been tweaked yet remains substantially the same as Hudson had it in 1900.
In 1997, Mr. Frank said, “The challenge now is to reform and create structures through which the church can continue its evangelical witness in a world devastated by poverty... ecological disasters, and social injustice.” Kennon Callahan challenges us in his 1997 book, Effective Church Leadership, to stop our “futile romantic longing for a churched culture.”
Today, it’s as if we are trying to fly jet planes with prop-plane flight manuals and wondering why we have so many crashes.
Though I detest diagnosis without remedy, space will allow me to only cite the concerns that cry out for us to re-consider the itineracy as we have known it:
* Clergy do not and cannot escape the realities of culture—we live in a two-income world. The plaintive cry I hear most often is, “My spouse cannot move or our family budget will be devastated.” Itineracy is creating “weekend marriages” where the spouse in secular employment stays behind during the week.
* Itineracy harms innocent victims. It separates patients with precarious diseases from access to their doctors, increases the burden of caring for aging parents, interrupts institutional care for children with physical or emotional handicaps and uproots people who provide childcare for grandchildren.
* Local churches no longer reflect the old pattern of cookie-cutter uniformity that used to make it easy for bishops to move pastors around. Because of today’s varying worship styles, demographics and church size, what works in one parish will be foreign to another, resulting in great frustration and conflict.
* Church analysts recognize that effective parish ministry calls for the transformation of congregational culture. This takes time—a long time. Researcher Lovett Weems defines culture as, “The way we do things here.” The pastor who is never in one place long enough to understand the culture cannot be a visionary leader.
* Americans are rallying around the word “change” in this election year, but what is the content of this change? In the itineracy model, change for laity means, “Just send us a new preacher,” and for clergy, “Just move me to a different charge.” But revolving-door itineracy never gets to the heart of church dysfunctionality. The old comic strip “Pogo” said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Real change often requires not medicinal salve but major surgery.
* Baby Boomers and Millennials increasingly resist models of authoritarianism. Even the corporate world today has few models of itineracy: management-level leaders change jobs rather than move.
* Local pastors are often used to fill the demand for pastors today. They are not forced to itinerate and many have compelling reasons for not doing so.
* Ordained deacons have neither guaranteed appointment nor required itineracy. The parallel “rails” of the two orders are indeed no longer parallel.
One of the Restrictive Rules of the 1808 Constitution is that no action can “do away with episcopacy nor destroy the plan of itinerant general superintendency.” This is the only constitutional limit on systemic revision of itineracy.
Our bishops could adapt to a model much like the episcopacy of the Episcopal or Lutheran churches. Consultation in appointment-making is often little more than a formality; it must be more consensual, more covenantal.
Let’s challenge the 2008 General Conference to appoint a study committee with a mandate to radically restructure the outmoded model of itineracy.
Dr. Haynes, a retired Western North Carolina clergy, is director of United Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary. e-mail:dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald W. Haynes
