Why pray for General Conference?

A Disciples perspective on a Methodist gathering

If I were to say “remember to keep General Conference in your prayers” it would be understandable if you assumed I was United Methodist. [scroll down, it’s a quirk of the graphic below…]

I am not, though I have been given various forms of standing over the years by the West Ohio Conference. I am ordained by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) to ministry, with standing in Ohio currently. However, I’ve worked closely with United Methodists over the years, not the least of which is because Methodist parishes have often been down the block or even across the street from Disciples churches where I’ve attended or served.

More generally, you might think on learning that about me that my exhortations to “pray for General Conference” is purely a collegial act, being a friendly neighbor, like including a neighbor’s upcoming surgery in a Sunday prayer time. But I am a bit more insistent than that.

If you aren’t a member, let alone clergy person, in the United Methodist Church, why would you pray for their (checks notes) every four year legislative meeting?

Fair question. But one to which I have a few answers.

First, I would note that this is the first General Conference (let’s say GC) which the United Methodist Church (henceforth UMC) has held in nearly eight years. There was a Special Conference in 2019 to try and resolve tensions in UMC polity that . . . didn’t work. It was “special” and not the general legislative session which normally handles a variety of matters, but targeted. There was to be a GC in 2020 and I think we know what happened that year; the UMC tried to schedule a new GC in 2022 but hit logistical snags intensified by issues around travel and visas for the international representatives in the wake of COVID. The UMC is an international church, not just the US or North America like many church bodies are here; in fact, the African membership of UMC churches may actually exceed the US membership about now.

So it’s a big deal, having been postponed twice. Their general church agencies also are needing budget guidance, which is supposed to happen at GC sessions; the proposal coming forward is for a 44% cut. That’s not nothing.

Still, what’s this got to do with any other religious tradition? I’m going to explain myself largely in terms of the Disciples of Christ, but you could do a quick translation of most of this into the terms of many other US faith traditions.

1. As I said, Methodists are often right across the street, with all that implies. They really are our neighbors in many cases, and so whether it’s the community Thanksgiving service or Vacation Bible School in town after town around the Midwest, or state level ecumenical programs like a council of churches or other organized bodies, we Disciples work with Methodists all the time.

2. Our members and their members talk to each other. Prayer, among other effects, leads to awareness, consciousness, concern, sensitivity. If we pray for General Conference — which is from tomorrow, April 23 to May 3, so you still have plenty of time to pray! — we will be more mindful of what’s going on with the UMC. If we are across the street from each other, odds are excellent our members are eating in the same restaurants, bowling in the same leagues, even related to each other. They talk.

3. Many of our strongest leaders grew up Methodist. At least for Disciples in the Midwest, but I have found (secondhand) that this is very widely true, that we all have quite a few elders and deacons and officers who grew up Methodist. This comes up not infrequently in conversations about how ministers move between churches, on what role the region plays in our property management (for Disciples, none; for UMC, lots and lots), and as to how our fiscal obligations work out between the local and wider church (Disciples don’t have apportionments). So clergy are re-translating Methodism sometimes for even long-standing Disciples leaders.

4. Methodism plays a major role, historically, in many of the communities where we serve. Even a somewhat shrunken United Methodist congregation can have an outsize role in many Midwestern towns (again, I’m speaking to what I know) as to who meets in their building, what people associate with their position in the community, and how shared events are convened, like CROP Walks or the noontime National Day of Prayer, etc. They may not be the biggest, but the UMC church often plays the biggest role, at least in the minds of otherwise secular community leaders.

5. Methodism has set the tone and the pace for much of the last century’s activism and civic voice for Christians in our communities. I grew up in the Chicago area, where the Catholic Church tends to be the default “church” in the public mind, and mostly in Valparaiso, Indiana which has had a major Lutheran presence . . . but Methodism has been the “glue” tradition in many ways. They often anchored campus ministries at state campuses, and they staffed the lobbyists in state capitals.

6. Methodist institutions have shaped, well, us. In Ohio, we Disciples don’t have a seminary of our own; some historically ended up at Christian Theological Seminary (CTS) in Indiana or Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky, but Methodist Theological School in Ohio has trained many Disciples seminarians over the years. As a CTS alum, our student body there was in the 1980s 40% Disciples, 40% UMC, and 20% everyone else; Methodists in Indiana had to go to Ohio or Chicago for “their” seminaries, but many went to “ours.” I mentioned campus ministries, and a number of other ecumenical programs historically had Methodists at the forefront.

7. Have you recently referred to “scripture, tradition, reason, and experience” as formative for Christian understanding? That’s actually a Methodist formulation (not that there’s anything wrong with that) by a UMC theologian named Albert Outler. He assembled the “Wesleyan quadrilateral” in the 1960s from his study of John Wesley’s writing and sermons in the Eighteenth Century, but it has become a core methodological tool for the UMC. Also, and this item #7 could get quite long if I let it, you may be surprised to learn that much before 1970 very few Disciples congregations had a full set of “paraments” in liturgical colors, nor did many of our Worship Committees know what liturgical colors were. In brief, and I know this will irritate some BEM fans - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism,_Eucharist_and_Ministry - most of our Disciples liturgical “traditions” we picked up cheap from Cokesbury in the 1980s. This is an argument for another post, but my point isn’t polemical here, just a statement of fact: we have a history in the last century of swiping Methodist stuff and forgetting where we got it from. So my point in general is that when Methodists like stuff, our members and leaders and even clergy often start to like it and copy it. At minimum, we need to keep up with what’s going on. (I will avoid getting into the current arguments around “And with your spirit” in responsive readings…)

8. A few of you may call this “burying the lede” but there’s a method to my madness. In case you haven’t noticed, and if you haven’t you really needed to be reading this post, the UMC has gone through a big awful horrendous split since that Special Conference in 2019. Some expected that meeting to go one way, it went another, and long story short, there’s now a Global Methodist Church (GMC), which has about a third of the UMC’s former membership. They also don’t have apportionments, guaranteed appointments for ordained elders in full connection*, nor do they accept LGBT+ persons into ministry. Check the signage: a UMC church near you may not be UMC anymore. They may be GMC . . . and if so, they may need to ask you about how clergy search processes work for small congregations in the near future, because UMC churches have not had to do that in living memory. They may also be curious about how to handle major capital issues with property, since their conferences (equivalent to our regions) aren’t going to be the owners of the real estate as the annual conferences are in the UMC. It’s a culture shock and practical ministry transition still going on around us . . . and after GC 2024, there may be a few more trying out that path.

The point was, and is, prayer. Praying for the UMC GC, because while I can give you five links assuring you and me that the outcome will be “x,” I wouldn’t bet a small stack of dimes on the final situation for the UMC come May 4. I’m interested, but baffled. Regionalization would take a long post to define and explain, rewriting UMC Social Principals [ https://www.umc.org/en/who-we-are/what-we-believe/our-social-positions ] has to do with a set of statements people think we Disciples have (but we do NOT), and removing anti-LGBTQ statements from the statements and policies of the UMC is expected, but dependent on the outcome of the regionalization proposals.

The polity questions around regionalization and church governance are catnip to a teacher of church history and polity, but they may read like Greek to many of you. Like Robert’s Rules of Order, they can be honored more in the breach than in practice. Polity, like parliamentary procedure, seems useless until you actually want to do something.

Advocates of full inclusion of LGBTQ persons into ministry and church life are themselves working and praying for a regionalization proposal that allows the UMC in Africa to uphold a different set of standards than the North American UMC does (to sum up a complex issue simply), because it is well understood that the UMC churches and members in Africa do not support full inclusion of LGBTQ persons, and as I noted previously, they are an effective majority, but for reasons both unintentional and I suspect quite intentional, the whole series of delays and reallocations and visa restrictions means Africa does NOT have a majority of votes at GC. Will regionalization pass, to allow US portions of the UMC to have LGBTQ inclusion where the African parts do not agree? Again, I wouldn’t bet a short stack of dimes on the outcome. I just don’t know.

When I don’t know, I pray. Knowledge is good; prayer is even better.

I sincerely pray for my friends and colleagues and fellow clergy in the United Methodist Church. I have a number of friends and fellow servants of God in the new GMC, which may yet be getting a bit bigger once we get past May 3. Of course, everyone said after 2019 we had everything wrapped up, and look at how long we’ve been kicking the can since then. So I pray for the GMC, too. They’re in the neighborhood.

It makes sense for us to be in prayer for sincere fellow Christians who are seeking God’s will for their work. So I am. I can do no other.

Yet while I think both Methodist factions are sincere, I think they each lack a certain amount of perspective the other could help provide. The fact that they’ve chosen separation grieves me. Especially because I am part of a tradition that has twice tried to separate into unity. It worked neither time for us, in the pre-1920 split, nor in the 1926 to 1968 and after division. We are slowly eroding into a third, with more of our local churches “choosing” closure than separation, but it lessens us either way.

Candidly? I think the GMC has leadership that’s more excited about shedding apportionments of 14% and escaping an oath to itineracy (mind you, I don’t affirm itineracy as a core value either, but I never did) than they are aggrieved about being tied through connectional ministry to LGBTQ affirming leadership. Likewise, I think the UMC is more committed to a sense of justice around LGBTQ affirmation than they are to maintaining connection within Methodism, which is itself a part of a vow once taken. All of which is to say: I’m not talking about which “side” I’m on. I think division could leave both fractions the less. But again, I’m not Methodist.

So I pray. I pray that God might guide them, and lead the divided elements of what was once United Methodism into faithful living as two religious bodies, both of which are present in my neighborhood. And I would humbly suggest that others might do well to pray for General Conference, as it seeks a path forward, and plans out a polity for United Methodist Churches. 

https://www.resourceumc.org/en/churchwide/general-conference-2020

And by default, nudges into place a polity for the Global Methodist Church. I’m praying for them, too. Because in a funny way, I really do think we’re all in this together.

Because the boss prays “that they may all be one.”