In this past week, following the United Methodist General Conference, numerous summaries, reports, and characterizations have been offered. True Metho-nerds will have read or watched many of them, from the most celebratory to the most forlorn. I have no reason to expect you to read mine.
But here it is, anyway:
The 2020 General Conference, rescheduled for 2024, marks the beginning of a revival in the United Methodist Church. We are in full reform mode, and history will show that these past five years were a season of tilling and planting. And now, the garden is about to bloom!
We have repented of our colonial structure, and have begun to atone by creating more regional autonomy. We have repented of our discriminatory rules, and have begun to atone by removing restrictions on ordination and marriage for people in the LGBT+ community. We have repented of our divisiveness, and have begun to atone by leaving the season of disaffiliation behind.
Now, I do not mean we have attained perfection, only that we are on our way there. To be sure, the Spirit is still working on us, and there is much to do before the world looks like God wants it to. But now, more than any time in my experience, there is an openness to the Spirit's work. It is this openness to the movement of the Spirit that inspires me.
REGIONALIZATION - In the future, there will be a General Book of Discipline and a General Conference to deal with matters that are important to the entire denomination. Connectional ministries, doctrine, ecumenical relationships, and those kinds of things. And there will be Regional Conferences that will create policies and procedures specific to the regions. Every current Central Conference will become a Regional Conference, and the United States will be a Regional Conference, bringing a level of equity to our system. A team has been created to work on the initial U.S. Regional Conference. For now, there will still be Jurisdictional Conferences in the U.S., but some have suggested changes to that structure, also. Time will tell. And although the plan passed overwhelmingly at GC, it requires amendments to the UMC's constitution, so it must be ratified at the Annual Conferences. Every AC votes, and when all votes are tallied it must pass by a two-thirds majority. That is what is known as an "aggregate vote." We will not know if the plan has passed for another 18 months or so.
REMOVAL OF RESTRICTIONS - As of the end of this General Conference, sexual orientation is no longer a restriction on a person seeking ordination. Also as of the end of this General Conference, there are no longer any restrictions on clergy performing same-sex weddings, nor on congregations hosting them. No requirements were passed, meaning the decision to marry a couple still resides with the pastor. The effort was very much like the "Simple Plan" that was offered in 2019 in that it simply removed restrictive language. Such restrictions were scattered throughout many different sections of the Book of Discipline, and so removing them all required dozens of petitions. (Petitions can only deal with one particular paragraph of the Discipline.) Almost all of these changes passed so overwhelmingly that they were a part of the Consent Calendar process. It only takes twenty people to remove an item from the Consent Calendar in order to debate it on the floor, meaning had there been any serious resistance to the changes it could easily have been brought to floor for debate. There wasn't. And they weren't.
DELETION OF DISAFFILIATION - "Paragraph 2553" was created and passed in 2019 at the special called session of General Conference held in St. Louis. It allowed for congregations to disaffiliate from the denomination if they did not agree with denominational positions on marriage and ordination. Ironically, it was written to allow more progressive congregations a gracious exit, but was used almost exclusively by traditionalist congregations. This paragraph was officially deleted from the Book of Discipline, and every petition seeking to extend this disaffiliation time to allow for more disaffiliations was "rejected in favor of" the petition to delete paragraph 2553. Calls for unity won the day. That's not to say that the UMC is monolithic - far from it. We are as diverse a denomination as we ever were. We simply seem to have lost our appetite for divisiveness. A new spirit of connectionalism is emerging.
There are a dozen other things I could mention. Ordained Deacons now have sacramental authority. The United Methodist Church will soon be in a "full communion" relationship with the Episcopal Church. There will be fewer bishops in the United States, saving the denomination millions of dollars. There is a new retirement plan for United Methodist clergy. There was a lot!
But the headline for me is reform. After 2019, the denomination awoke. What happened at the General Conference in St. Louis did not align with our identity as Methodists. The years of disaffiliations were both heartbreaking and clarifying. Decades of struggle for justice and equity brought us to this kairos moment, and the future ahead seems very bright.
In many ways, the denominational reforms we saw happen in Charlotte were just a matter of playing catch-up to where the people already were. That's how reform always happens, seems to me - from the bottom, up. It is a good time to be United Methodist, and I cannot wait to see what God does with us!
