General Assembly 2025 preview

The road to Memphis and "Beyond" for the Disciples of Christ

Today, Saturday July 12, my religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) — or “the Disciples” for short — will be meeting in Memphis for our General Assembly.

I last attended one in person with my father in 2019, when it was held in Des Moines, Iowa. The long-standing pattern has been for our General Assemblies (GA) to be held every other year; my dad started going as a congregational voting delegate in 1985 when it was previously in Des Moines, in part because of most of his family being there where he grew up and went to college, and over the years he attended more of them than I did, I think.

That’s half my workshop room in Des Moines; Dad is at the far left. I asked him if he was cold, and he looked at me puzzled: “No, why?”

Dad died in 2020 as COVID got rolling; the GA for 2021 was supposed to be in Louisville but the restrictions still general leading up to that summer meant it became a virtual assembly. The planning shifted and Louisville was the home for the 2023 GA, and Memphis was adjusted back to 2025. At Louisville, the GA voted on some significant changes to our polity, which you can read about here:

One obvious shift (I don’t think the most significant, but see the link for more details on what I think was/is going to make a bigger difference in our common life in the near future) is we approved going to annual, not biannual GAs, but the in-person gatherings would be held every third year, the other two being online, with an emphasis on the new plan for each congregation to have three voting delegates who would maintain three year terms, and serve as connective tissue between congregations and the GA.

The plan was, due to existing contracts, we’d have a GA in Memphis in 2025, but the next in-person gathering would be in 2028, location to be shared at that event. There is a “Time & Place committee” (which is now the General Board as a whole) which works with staff of the Office of General Minister & President (OGMP) to identify venues and costs and sign contracts.

They’ve been working, but costs are (as in so many other things, especially around hospitality) increasing. The growing fear was that the OGMP could sign a contract as the guarantor of certain minimums, and be left holding the bag if, for instance, we had less than 2,000 show up. We didn’t reach 3,000 in Louisville, and forecasts for Memphis were predicting something shy of that number this time, too. Close, but no cigar. And convention centers with banquet halls and associated hotels mostly ask for a three year advance commitment with an assortment of minimum hotel reservations and meals served in connection with the event — THEY don’t care how many are registered, just if we bring in enough paying customers to the surrounding lodgings and keep the catering business (and sometimes exhibit hall union staff) working. Miss your minimum, and you write a big post-event check . . . and the OGMP doesn’t have it.

So it is we will be informed that plans for a 2028 in-person meeting need to be put on ice, given the economic uncertainties of how many might come, and what these events are costing nowadays in guaranteed minimum hotel nights, banquet costs, and the general logistics of even having 2,500 attend. So I understand the decision to not commit resources to a 2028 GA — we could end up with a six figure bill for NOT holding one if we start signing contracts in 2025.

Will this be “the last” General Assembly? I’m not quite that pessimistic, but it will certainly be the last of this sort, as we’ve held them since 1968:

https://disciples.org/our-identity/our-structure/the-general-assembly-and-general-board/past-general-assemblies/

…with continuity to 1917 as the former International Convention model:

https://disciples.org/our-identity/our-structure/the-general-assembly-and-general-board/past-general-assemblies/international-convention/

…and conventions of a sort all the way back to 1849:

https://disciples.org/our-identity/our-structure/the-general-assembly-and-general-board/past-general-assemblies/general-convention/

If you trace those national & general gatherings back, you’ll see gaps due to wartime rationing & economic instability. This isn’t the first time we’ve been here. And you can see the numbers rise & fall, as much due to cultural expectations around church life & representation as an immediate index of the health of the communion as defined in each era.

The biggest change, I would argue, is that GAs have always attracted Institutionalists. Mark that word, because I anticipate the next five days you’ll be hearing a bunch from me about the uneasy relationships, in the wider church, across ecumenical lines, and within regions, between Institutionalists and Idealists. That’s the divide we’re hung up on right now, and I am uncertain how this will be navigated in the coming years.

Sure, there are all sorts of other reasons you can point to for declining attendance at GAs, starting with the very simple point that across the continent, attendance in our congregations has declined, drastically even, and congregational registrants have long been the bread and butter of GAs.

I should pause for any non-Disciples readers and explain: in our post-Restructure model since 1968, all clergy with standing get a vote, whether they are serving a pulpit as a parish minister, a chaplain, a different sort of job but still supply preaching, or retired. All clergy, ordained & commissioned, get a vote. And each church got votes based on membership, so it could be two, it could be twelve. In practice, lots of small churches for years sent their minister, and often their spouse was made a congregational representative — the church board has to vote on who is the representative, and if no one else was going, it could be the spouse and an older child as often was the case — but in some churches, even small ones, there were GA hardcores, often women with a history around Quadrennials (a different subject, IYKYK), who never missed a GA and by dint of simply going got the congregational nod.

Which adds up, in practice, to the average GA floor vote being about half clergy, half church representatives; few big churches filled out their entire allocation. In part, because in the old International Convention and the early years of the GA, it was understood that at minimum the local church would pay for or reimburse for the registration (which was long a minimal amount), the travel, the lodgings, and the meals . . . hence, the love of the breakfasts and luncheons and banquets which could be tidily folded into the reimbursement. For both their minister and their representatives.

To my dad’s great consternation, that started changing in the 1990s. Few churches paid it all, most had a set amount like $500 or a $1000 if you were lucky that was all you could get reimbursed, and by 2003 in Charlotte, the common ministerial experience was “you can go if you want, I guess” from the congregations, which would pay for your registration. This is exacerbated by the reality that by 2000 we had moved into the situation for most clergy where the spouse generally made more than the minister, so a decision to attend GA and pay most of it out of one’s own pocket would often run up against a spouse’s “are you kidding me?” The 1997 Denver GA created a burst of (in my humble opinion) foolish optimism about the whole model, as quite a few clergy families went for the option of a family vacation wrapped around a trip to the Rockies, but by 2013 in Orlando it was clear this unofficial compromise did not have “legs” to it.

All of which means clergy start declining to attend, just as costs are increasing well beyond the capacities of the OGMP to cap (if we are to have a plenary session space doubling for massive worship and an exhibit hall, i.e. a modern convention center, you can’t encourage people in significant numbers to double up in dorms at a nearby college or camp, as I often see people asking, because you NEED the numbers of hotel reservations to stay above a guaranteed minimum, or you pay a HUGE penalty since that’s how you pay for the hall). What surprised me was that our separated cousins in the independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ — who formally began their split from the Disciples in Memphis, in November of 1926, not quite 100 years ago! — had to shutter their North American Christian Convention (NACC) gathering over a decade back, after having exceeded our attendance for many years and some of us heard about it from them, often.

No one is laughing now, though. The same economic and polity factors hit the Churches of Christ congregations, and clergy were told “here’s $500” and when the family looked at the cost of attending, they declined. They lost the ability to meet their minimums, and reconfigured into a missions event and some other gatherings, but the NACC is no more.

Today’s General Assembly attendance is still largely a group of Institutionalists. People who by temperament and history and familiarity are used to supporting Institutions. You remember institutions, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson said “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” We can interrogate the sexism of that statement, but as I teach in my Disciples of Christ history & polity classes, we still have a great deal of Alexander Campbell’s shadow across our assemblies, which have not in the past been delegate assemblies, per se. People don’t “represent” their congregations in a political sense, nor do clergy. Some have argued that GA resolutions and votes don’t accurately represent the membership at large; historically the response has been a) the GA only speaks for the GA, and not for, but TO the local church as an advisory matter, and b) it’s a y’all come event, so if you don’t get represented, whose fault is that?

The y’all has gotten smaller, though. There are church members who simply come because of the fellowship, the opportunities for wider exposure to how the Gospel is at work in places different than your home, to experience worship with a few thousand around you, not just a few dozen. But not as many.

Institutionalists have been the literal bread & butter of GAs. They help pay the bills by being there. And the example of the NACC shows it’s not simply a liberal/conservative thing at work in how Institutionalists are just fewer in number, let alone how church attendance in general is supported by Institutionalists. Our society is less institutionally driven, as Robert Putnam started pointing out in 2000 with “Bowling Alone.” Whether your preferred institution is conservative in orientation, or progressive, there just aren’t as many Institutionalists to keep them going. Ask anyone who has to recruit, train, and retain volunteers for sports, Scouting, or any other community activity. Getting a candidate for a board or committee? Oy.

What we do have, though, are Idealists. And the church in general has had trouble figuring out what to do with Idealists. Let me reach over to Prof. Putnam’s book a moment: his thesis in a nutshell was that from the 1950s to the then-present of 2000, the number of games bowled had not really dropped, but the number of people who had joined bowling leagues had fallen through the hardwood floor. He extended this metaphor out through the community. In my application here, Idealists still want to bowl, but they aren’t into bowling shirts or buying their own shoes for the lanes or joining a league. They want to show up, on their schedule mostly, and bowl, just not in the institutional setting of a structured league. A bowling alley can shrug and increase the number of “open bowling” slots.

The thing is, you need institutions. You can end them, but over time you establish officers and committees and commissions and yes, boards. We can discuss Prince Kropotkin and the theory and practice of anarchism some other day, but in general, you need institutions to maintain certain, well, institutions. Like (gulp) owning buildings and property. Decrying church buildings has become quite the popular stance in church life, even (especially?) among clergy, but if you’ve ever rented space you don’t control and done set up and tear down every Sunday for a decade, you know darn well why churches end up owning property and building buildings.

Or in a parallel way, in Ohio, Herald Monroe saw in the immediate aftermath of World War II that colleges and conference centers we didn’t own could shift our scheduled weeks for CYF Conference or Chi Rho camps when it suited them. Our events were getting shunted to early June and into August. So he went out looking for what would become Camp Christian in Magnetic Springs: a site relatively centrally located, that could meet our needs for youth gatherings as the Ohio Society of Christian Churches. We bought land and built buildings, and Camp Christian became an institution.

The point of tension is that while the Institutionalists are people more likely to say yes when you ask them to be on a board of oversight and management which meets year-round (because property and assets have year-round needs), the Idealists will carve out a whole week in the summer, and pour out their hearts and of themselves for the program. You get Idealist directors and assistant directors and counselors and staff, but the budgets and planning are set by the Institutionalists. They sometimes argue, okay? Which can be a constructive sort of disagreement over time, a creative tension.

We are losing the Institutionalists. Partly because our society as a whole isn’t producing them, and partly because our own polity hasn’t been able to jump into the growing gap and figure out how to create our own at least narrow gauge Institutionalists. So we are seeing our organizational life increasingly run by Idealists. They mean well, but they bristle at things like attendance requirements (you know, “any board member missing more than two meetings a year without excuse may be removed for non-participation,” etc.) or even parliamentary procedure. They’re great about the mission, and they work hard at events, but the longer term slog is just not their thing. It’s a little like distance runners versus sprinters. A 200 meter star isn’t likely to win the marathon, and vice versa.

Idealists have a complicated relationship with things like General Assemblies, let alone local church life. Idealists like people; perhaps somewhat unfairly, you can hear Idealists occasionally accuse Institutionalists of loving buildings or traditions more than people, but I think that’s an unfair generalization. Idealists do come to a GA, though, more to see people than to maintain institutions, and Institutionalists will, for instance, break off a conversation “because the business session is starting in ten minutes in the plenary hall!” We — yes, I’ll admit to being a bit of an Institutionalist, if only for this exercise — actually want to go to the business session, hear the reports of the general units, even read the dockets.

Idealists do flock in, though, when a resolution is brought to the floor. Voting or not, they want to hear the debate, would go to microphone 5 and move to extend debate if they could, and are deeply invested in the outcome of the motion.

I’ll be honest: while I think it’s the case that many of us are a mix of the two streams, Idealist and Institutionalist, it does look to me like the goal of most of the changes being made to the General Assembly process and the rest of our governance is intended to make it more congenial and encouraging and affirming of Idealists. Which makes a certain practical sense, given that the demographics out there indicate there are a growing cadre of Idealists, while Institutionalists are waning. They’re getting older plus the younger Institutionalists are few and far between. So we are looking to a more Idealist oriented GA.

Which opens up one question: where does the Institutionalist work get done, and who’s doing it? For the most part, that continues to be the work of the General Board, and to some degree the Executive Committee. As noted in the linked essay above from two years ago, there’s a certain amount of consolidation & centralization here, but given the budget constraints, that’s sensible & necessary. To repeat from 2023, we’ve shrunk the General Board from about 60 to around 45, with an Executive Committee of 9 (noting cautiously a quorum of 6 needed to act), and maintained with a General Nominating Committee (GNC) which will have ten members, of which “One-half of the members at the time of their election shall be from the membership of the General Board, and not more than one-half nor less than one-third shall be ministers.” They will have have six year terms. That means about 50 Institutionalists will be needed to commit to meeting in person “at least” twice a year, if you add up the General Board plus the 5 GNC members not on the General Board.

Their stated task per “The Design” is to establish mission priorities (line 648) and take action (line 651) on matters of social witness. They will coordinate and review and evaluate our missional activity as a church, and work to make it structurally coherent (lines 660-1). And per lines 670 to 678 they will examine closely “the church-wide mission funding system” including allocating and reallocating funds, specifically Disciples Mission Fund (DMF) giving. That should keep them busy.

We have long had a theoretical counterweight to the former General Board structure (which tilted somewhat towards regional leadership previously) and Administrative Committee (which was much bigger than 9, with the complications you can imagine), by way of the weight of numbers at GAs. Just the idea of a mass meeting ethos coming together to hear and even vote — not all voted, but near enough, especially compared to how UCCs or Methodists or Presbyterians do it — exerted a moderating influence, or so the thinking went. But I heard discussions in Columbus, Ohio for GA 2015 & more emphatically at Indianapolis’s GA 2017 about how every motion seemed to pass unanimously, and how dissent was oddly non-existent. There were comments made from the floor about the effective silence around voting “nay,” but it didn’t change in Des Moines for 2019, either.

Some of this can be read as my suggesting this is all the result of mostly progressive Idealists outnumbering moderate if not mildly conservative Institutionalists, but again I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. For many reasons, I could argue most conservatives and even many moderates have indeed stopped going to GAs based on all sorts of metrics, and that the Disciples are organizationally and even institutionally more progressive than we were, say, twenty years ago, all of which is part of an ongoing “Big Sort” of community demographics, which have had a significant impact on our congregations. Our Institutionalists are aging out (aka dying), and while there ARE younger institutionally-minded people in our churches and in Disciples leadership, their orientation is primarily Idealistic. If you compare it to a preference for contemporary music worship styles over hymnbook and organs in Sunday services, you won’t be far wrong. There were plenty of very liberal Institutionalists in the 1950s & 1960s, and I’ve known my share of conservative Idealists back in the 1980s & 1990s, but today the Disciples Institutionalist cohort is mostly moderate to progressive, and the Idealists code more progressive to even more so.

A Marxist friend of mine likes to say in his opinion the Democratic Party reads center-right, while the Republican Party is extreme right, and that a left-leaning partisan has no home in the two major parties. I don’t entirely agree with him (there’s a frame of reference question about Americans versus other national populations which I think is a relevant limiting factor), but I take his point at face value. You can take that sort of analysis and flip it for Disciples: there is no longer any cohort of any meaningful size that thinks women should not be elders or preachers within the fellowship, and I think it’s been a long time since there was any sort of debate among Disciples as such about who should be banned from the communion table. If someone wanted to use all that to say there’s no conservative faction anymore in the Disciples, there’s a definitional way to say it I couldn’t argue with — and that would mean we’re really looking at any remaining “factionalism” within the Disciples as center-left Institutionalists, and farther left Idealists.

I think that defines pretty well where we’re at now, heading into Memphis GA 2025, except there’s a third party at work which I’ll get into later. The general discussion around ways and means for where Disciples positions and programs will go after this summer is going to be defined by initiatives pushed by Idealists, which will then be modified by Institutionalists.

Modified, not so much out of a political or partisan difference of opinion, but because those annoying Institutionalists are the ones still looking at the numbers (you know, budgets, projections, rosters, the boring stuff). Institutionalists often agree with Idealists, but they also know they have to attend the next Finance team meeting, or figure out how to pay the insurance bill for liability, stuff like that. I’ll say one last time: I know there are passionate Idealists who care a great deal about making the accounts balance and for fiscal integrity, but the general pattern is for Idealists to want what they believe is right, while Institutionalists want what they believe will work.

That’s where we go back to the Emerson quote, and how “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Alexander Campbell was a great believer in emphasizing “what works.” As my students always learn when I’m teaching Disciples history & polity, he is (or should be) a chastening lesson to us in how he barred any public discussion of abolitionism — which he supported, in words & deeds, personally — in the Disciples of Christ. He broke fellowship with fellow ministers & leaders if they prioritized preaching against slavery from the pulpit, because he had traveled extensively in the Deep South, and was acutely aware of how much pro-slavery opposition such a stand would provoke. So he said “let’s not talk about it as a church.” He basically said let’s save souls for the Kingdom now, and work on slavery later when we have a majority of right-thinking people in our movement (he also was in the wishful thinking camp of believing slavery would wither away on its own, as he’d seen in the Northern Panhandle of Virginia, soon to become West Virginia during the Civil War).

Alexander Campbell was wrong. I don’t draw from that fact the consequent argument that Institutionalists are always, or even usually wrong, but I know some do. I think a balanced representational covenantal community can balance what works with what’s right . . . and I also know some will read that and say “that’s pure Institutionalism, and I say the heck with it.” The old school Latin tag is “Fiat justitia ruat caelum” or “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

Which is where a pure Idealist view would say we as Disciples should take stands regardless of how cost effective they are to carry out, or how many members or congregations would depart if we do so. That was the understanding of what we approved in Orlando in 2013, not as a binding requirement on all our churches, but as an increasingly understood benchmark for our common life, that LGBTQ+ persons would be accepted & affirmed. I think it was the right resolution at the right time for our communion as it was at the time (and now as we are), but there was a fair amount of consternation about how many Hispanic churches we lost, and some discussion about how we could have handled that differently seeking justice and inclusion both. Of course, we’ll never know, but it’s that sort of retrospective consideration that keeps a bit of balance between the shrinking Institutionalist cadre and our rising Idealist norms. We may not be sure how growth is possible right now for us, but we still debate what it might take to at least reduce the rate of decline.

In that context, my curiosity about the aftermath of Memphis 2025 — and I’m rushing things, I know, since the GA will continue through Tuesday night — is how the whole “three representatives per congregation” model of an ongoing General Assembly process will play out. Those three connected and attentive people could be a real source of vital communication between our wider aspirations and local realities, especially as it could/can/should be a two-way communication, from the two thousand or so I expect at best to be formally designated out of the congregations, to the 45 or so General Board members and the related OGMP staff and general unit officers. A meaningfully two-way dialogue between local church representatives and the wider communion leadership could make both aspects of our church wiser and more effective, as voices for God’s good news into our communities.

Because I still have a very odd belief about the future of the Disciples of Christ. I think our future is in congregations. I know, it’s perverse, and counter to an awful lot of what I’ve been taught in a variety of official and unofficial settings, but I think the local assembly of faithful believers still can hear God speaking, and be Christ’s hands and feet going forth to do healing work, and on occasion stand up to the powers and principalities in their county or township. Oh yeah, and to Presidents, too.

Congregations are the most truly adaptable form of the Body of Christ we have. Clergy can be nimble and turn on a dime, but they need the whole armor of God plus the transportation of the ship of faith to get them to where they need to be. The institutional church is more the Queen Mary, a sturdy vessel but it just doesn’t make sharp turns. Taking the Gospel out into practice generally calls for an assembly, a fellowship, the local church . . . but the local church can take SO many forms. Small rural parishes with commissioned ministers preaching, massive urban ministries with a huge staff and a major physical plant, an educational organization (I’m saying seminaries are just churches of a very particular sort here, a controversial view in some quarters), even a kind of monastic community with shared residences and even resources (okay, I’m not sure Disciples have any of these, but it’s been discussed, and other mainline/oldline traditions do).

I think the future of Disciples as a particular tradition of Christian faith and practice is in a radical diversity of forms for the local church, and that’s the hybrid between the Institutional mindset and Idealist mentalities we haven’t yet mastered. We tend to default to a short list of historically recent forms and think they’re how we’ve done it since Ephesus, and in most cases we’re just plain wrong. My biggest worry about our future is that the economics and pressures of decline tend to evoke a tendency to impose a rigid conformity on “what’s left.” It’s the old “squeezing the handful of sand tighter” problem — you squeeze more, it just trickles away faster.

We’re on a beach, perhaps with not so much Alexander Campbell as our guide right now (he has good things to say, and I’ll come back to them later), but Sir Isaac Newton. Not so much the gravity observing Newton, or the Newton who invented calculus (darn him) but the Sir Isaac who said “I must confess to a feeling of profound humility in the presence of a universe which transcends us at almost every point… I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

There is a theological humility that is going to be needed as we wade further into the shallows of the vast ocean of discovery that still awaits us, as Christians, and as a Christian tradition. In our brief history to date, we have found a few pretty shells and smooth pebbles, but there is a vast ocean of truth waiting to be more fully understood, even by faithful believers. We don’t have to understand everything in order to be fully accepted by God, but if we start thinking we do understand everything fully, we might lose some of that awareness that God loves us just as we are . . . even when we make mistakes.

Certainty is a mistake that can be made in both conservative and progressive directions. Part of the “Big Sort” is how the extremes of our civic discourse are getting increasingly certain of their rightness, making the distance between them perhaps not farther, but deepening the divide and making it harder to bridge. My hope in Memphis and the processes that develop out of this meeting is that our remaining Institutionalists and evolving Idealists can avoid too much epistemological certainty or organizational rigor about who’s right and what we should do about it, and open up more space — if with reasonable and necessary safeguards! — for a wide range of Disciples of Christ communities to develop and thrive.