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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: On restructuring the church: a less-complex path forward Andrew C. Thompson, Jun 23, 2010
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
A year ago at this time, a raft of proposed amendments to the constitution of the United Methodist Church was being considered in annual conferences all over the connection. The result was that rarest of circumstances in the life of the church: Passionate debate about church polity.
The word “polity” is related to the word “politics.” In the church, it refers to the way our denomination is structured and governed.
The United Methodist Church’s polity is contained in our Book of Discipline—a collection of canon law that contains everything from our official doctrine to the nuts and bolts of how local churches are organized. The church’s constitution is also there, front-and-center in Part I of the Discipline.
Twenty-three constitutional amendments passed by the 2008 General Conference were designed to significantly alter our polity. Such amendments must be ratified by a two-thirds affirmative vote of the members of all our annual conferences. When votes in annual conferences were tallied, these amendments were defeated.
The amendments’ underlying issues are still with us, though, and they’ll be raised at the next General Conference in 2012. The debate is not over. I want to weigh in now on the relevant issues in the hope of offering a constructive way forward.
So what is this all about?
The main issue that drove the “Worldwide Nature of the Church” proposal has to do with the way the United Methodist Church is structured. The denomination is demarcated between the church in the U.S. and the church everywhere else (Africa, Europe and Asia). The U.S. church is divided into “jurisdictional conferences,” whereas the church overseas is divided into “central conferences.” Lest this get confusing, the important point is this: As a church body originally founded in the U.S. which then spread overseas through mission work, our constitution makes us appear to be organized as an American denomination with missional outposts in other parts of the globe.
That needs to be changed.
According to the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration, the United Methodist Church, when founded in 1968, counted 92.5 percent of its members in North America. By 2006, that number was down to 64.6 percent. Today, a third of all United Methodists live in Africa, where the church is growing rapidly. The church in the Philippines continues to grow as well. So our denominational structure is increasingly out of step with reality.
Most people agree that we need to seek uniformity in our polity, but there is sharp disagreement over how to achieve it. Opponents of the defeated amendments (and I was one of them) tended to focus on three issues: a concern not to add layers of bureaucracy to the church, a concern not to “devolve” the church into regional units that would take on the character of autonomous national churches, and a concern to know clearly how any changes would affect the church in the long term.
Here is my solution.
The biggest flaw of the worldwide church amendments is that they sought to restructure the entire UMC according to how the church in the U.S. is organized. Thus, the layer of “regional” conference would have been added to the structure of the church in the U.S., while the central conferences elsewhere would have been renamed “regional” conferences and given the option of developing their own jurisdictional conference structures. Some powers (though that was never made clear) would have devolved to these jurisdictional and regional conference bodies.
We can restructure better not by addition but by subtraction.
First, we need simply to eliminate the U.S. jurisdictional conferences altogether. The five current jurisdictions in the U.S. would be melded into one single central/regional conference. Whether the central conferences are then called “central” or “regional” is immaterial, but for sake of argument we’ll call them “regional.”
If we can all agree that our current structure is overly bureaucratic and burdened with too many layers of hierarchy, eliminating the jurisdictional structure—the 1939 origin of which was rooted in racism and sectionalism—would address both problems.
All regional conferences would then have responsibility for the election of bishops (as jurisdictional and central conferences do now). In fact, the amendment process to make this proposal effective would be to excise Article II of Section I and Articles I-V of Section IV in the constitution—those parts concerned with jurisdictional conferences. Other than that, a little re-wording will take care of the rest. The second part of my proposal would be to address the concerns raised about the contextually specific needs of different regions around the world, including hymnals, evangelism and church planting, and ordination requirements.
Many of these can be handled as administrative matters. The Book of Discipline already empowers central conferences to “promote the evangelistic, educational, missionary, social-concern, and benevolent interests and institutions of the Church within their boundaries” (¶31).
Others can be addressed by an intentional ordering of respective agendas by the General Conference, the general boards and agencies, and the episcopal leadership of each regional conference.
But it will be important not to devolve significant legislative and judicial powers from the general church level down to the regions for two reasons. First, their centralization is essential to the uniformity of our doctrine and ministry; and second, a devolution of powers will inevitably tend toward autonomous churches with a nationalistic character.
Specific details can be worked out, a process made infinitely easier with a reformed structure that is less rather than more complex.
Some Methodists both here and overseas often express concern about the “dominance” of the American perspective at General Conference. The solution to this very real problem is easy enough: self-discipline and patience. We American Methodists can exercise self-discipline and put the concerns of our overseas brethren first when we gather. And with a little patience, we’ll likely see that delegate numbers in General Conference are going to even out fairly quickly.
I’ve not yet seen a formal proposal to do away with our jurisdictional structure. Now is the time to consider it.
Andrew C. Thompson
