Western North Carolina Annual Conference United Methodist Church

Today is the final day of Annual Conference, with the worship service led by our Bishop, Ken Carter, the setting of appointments, and the sending forth. This year's assembly at Lake Junaluska was without the drama of last year, and the crowd was smaller because of the 192 congregations that disaffiliated, confirmed by the conference in a special called session in May.

Yet this Annual Conference wasn't without controversy. Apparently the disaffiliation votes in churches have been subject to an unfortunate (in my view) exploitation of the rules. The way these votes work is that the congregation meets in what's called a Church Conference, at which any enrolled member of the local church can vote. It's also a sad fact that many churches don't maintain updated membership rolls, meaning that those membership rolls list as members lots of people who haven't darkened the doors of the church in any way for five, ten, sometimes twenty years. 

Some leaders seeking a particular outcome, generally those seeking to disaffiliate, have set about to recruit those inactive members to show up at the Church Conference to vote. This means that the decision about a church's future in the denomination can be decided by folks who have ignored the vows we take when we join the church: to "faithfully participate in its ministries by our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness." Those who show up on Sundays, give their financial resources and time to the ministries of the church, and otherwise faithfully participate, are sometimes overwhelmed in these votes. 

As a result of this phenomenon, a petition was offered at Annual Conference to establish a definition of active member through evidence of faithfulness to the vows, and to allow the local church governing board (called different things in different local churches) to establish specific metrics for things like attendance and giving. The petition would actually request that General Conference make such a change in the Book of Discipline, for the sole purpose of voting at a Church Conference. After some debate, this petition was approved.

While I support the intent of the petitioners in this matter, I voted against approval of the petition. My rationale is that a local church governing board could establish metrics that might be as easily exploit the rules to achieve their desired outcome. Furthermore such rules could unintentionally disenfranchise certain segments of the church membership. One example of that might be newly confirmed youth who might not meet some financial giving metric.

This also points out the difficulty local churches have in purging inactive members from the membership rolls, an issue that I believe requires further study.

My First Trip to Annual Conference

For the past two days I have been a lay delegate from First United Methodist Church of Waynesville to the Western North Carolina UMC Annual Conference, held at nearby Lake Junaluska. I have been a lifelong Methodist, but this is my first time as a delegate to the Annual Conference. 

First off, the Conference refers both to the group of churches in the geographic area, and the annual meeting of all the representatives of those churches and the clergy appointed to serve those churches. So the terminology can be confusing at times to those who aren't Methodists.

The Conference meeting is part business meeting, part worship, and part patting a lot of good people on the back for doing good work. The worship is outstanding, with Holy Communion at the first worship service; a memorial service to remember clergy and clergy spouses who have died in the past year; the service called "ordering to ministry," where new clergy are ordained; and the closing worship of "sending out" where pastors are appointed for the coming year. The celebration portions of the Conference inform the delegates of good things going on throughout the Conference (area) during the year. 

The business, on the other hand, is like watching C-Span. We vote on the rules for the business sessions, which basically are modified from Roberts' Rules of Order. We vote on the agenda. Then we vote on what's called the "consent agenda," 3 or 4 pages of pro forma business matters. For example, we vote on the slates of nominees for camps, colleges, retirement homes, and other entities affiliated with the Conference. We vote on other similar matters as well. But those are all bundled into this consent agenda, just to save time. 

Then we vote on the Conference budget for the coming year. For the coming year, the Conference budget is over $15.4 million to support the ministries and missions of the Conference. The Conference budget committee does a great job, so that is pretty much pro forma as well.

Then we deal with resolutions brought forward by the Bishop's Cabinet - the clergy appointed as one of the Conference's eight District Superintendents. This year, the Cabinet Resolutions were all for dissolution of churches. These are very small congregations who can no longer function. We approved the dissolution of six congregations across the Conference. We also had petitions from 18 churches requesting disaffiliation, meaning they didn't want to be part of the United Methodist Church. I'll get to that in a minute.

Finally is the big business, the petitions. Any person in the Conference can submit a petition. This year, we had four to deal with, three related to the controversy in our denomination over ordination of LGBTQ+ persons. A group of clergy and laity representing the "traditionalists" submitted a petition that would streamline the process of a church disaffiliating, and directing the Conference Board of Trustees to deal with the real and personal property associated with those churches to be dealt with in a certain way. During the disaffiliation process, the church must vote with at least 2/3 of the membership in agreement to leave the United Methodist Church, and then must negotiate with the Conference Board of Trustees on the disposition of the property that de jure belongs to the Annual Conference.

And that's where the air sort of went out of the sails at this afternoon's Annual Conference business session. Everyone was geared up for a robust, even contentious, discussion over the petition. But Bishop Ken Carter, the Resident Bishop and presiding officer of the Conference, ruled the petition "out of order." His ruling was that the denomination's Constitution and Book of Discipline clearly outline the process and the responsibilities of the parties in dissolution, and that the Annual Conference did not have the authority to modify the provisions in those documents or to limit the authority of the Board of Trustees. The 18 petitions for disaffiliation from individual churches were approved, as they followed the process outlined in the Constitution and Book of Discipline.

What struck me most, however, was that all this took place in an atmosphere of profound respect, reverence, and even sadness. There were no emotional outbursts, no contentious speeches, no demonstrations of any kind. In particular, Bishop Carter set that tone with sober, conciliatory language and clear explanations of the Constitutional and Discipline requirements.

Some may say we at the WNC Annual Conference kicked some can down the road. But in reality, we don't get a chance at the can. That is the purview of the General Conference, now scheduled for 2024.

https://www.wnccumc.org/

The Corruption of Senatorial Virtue

People have usually attributed the fall of the republican order in Rome to the corruption of senatorial virtue and the expansion of empire. Senators came to seek only private interest in their public office. They neglected the unifying worship of the ancient hearths. They convulsed the republic with factionalism and civil strife. The republic collapsed through loss of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good.

This is from William Johnson Everett's gem of a book, God's Federal Republic: Reconstructing Our Governing Symbol. And with his summary above describing the fall of the republican rule in Rome, transitioning to the Casesars, Bill describes so much of what is going on in modern-day America.

The particular sentence describing the neglect of our foundational principles ("unifying worship of the ancient hearths") points to our ignorance, or contempt, of those concepts like the common good, compromise, and the rule of law that our nation's founders set in place over two centuries ago. Even the structural features of our constitutional government, with its separation of powers and checks/balances, are abandoned in the pursuit of "factionalism" and the expansion of political power. "We have to support OUR president, and select OUR judges."

It's just a little thing, but I believe it is telling. With their social media presence, politicians invest significant energy in telling us the virtuous things they do, in order to gain political approval. It is apparently extraordinary, for example, when a politician supports veterans, as current Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) attempts to remind us on Facebook every week. Supporting veterans with all kinds of services, including health care, and education, and housing assistance, is not some extraordinary virtuous act. Rather, that should be taken for granted, expected, a basic responsibility of the civil society through its government. Yet Senator Tillis, in touting this as extraordinary, is simply, in the words of Bill Everett, seeking only his own private interest.

We should also note Bill's definition of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good. An enlistee in the armed forces is therefore virtuous, compared to those who seek through extraordinary means to avoid military service. Those who stood up to King George III more than two centuries ago, pledging their lives, there fortunes, and their sacred honor, sacrificed for the public good. And those who compromised from very principled (and self-serving) positions a decade later to "form a more perfect Union," acted with that same sense of virtue.

I fear that we are losing that virtue, and that our republic is in imminent danger of collapse.

The Stark Contrast

This morning there are two headlines juxtaposed on the New York Times' website.

In one headline, we read Behind Trump’s Dealings With Turkey: Sons-in-Law Married to Power. This describes how President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, officially an Advisor to the President, is working outside normal diplomatic channels with the son-in-law of Turkish President Erdogan and the son-in-law of a wealthy Turkish business tycoon. It is this backdoor diplomacy that resulted in the withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria, allowing the Turkish army to occupy territory once controlled by the Kurds. And at the same time, Trump Towers rises in Istanbul.

In the other, less prominent headline and story, we read Jimmy Carter Hospitalized for Brain Procedure. When former President Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, he was so concerned with the appearance of a conflict of interest that he sold his south Georgia peanut farm.

From the time of Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, through FDR's New Deal, Ike's shepherding of the economy through the post-war boom of the 50's, and with LBJ's Great Society, we generally had an American sense of shared purpose and shared prosperity. That sense wasn't perfect, set against the backdrop of racism and America's original sin of slavery. But we sensed that our leaders understood the social compact and the concept of the common good.

That changed with the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, his breaking the air traffic controllers' union, and the move toward "small government" and deregulation. Gordon Gecko declared that greed is good, and the prosperity gospel carnival barkers joined right in the chorus. So we continued with tax cuts for the wealthy, neutering regulation of financial services, and generally transferring the wealth created by working people (labor) to the ownership class.

And so here we are. Where government policy is nothing more than just another business deal. Where the foundations of our system of government are no longer obstacles to nepotism and self-dealing by government officials. Where legal fictions that exist on paper are imbued with the rights and privileges of natural persons, and the government sides with corporations that have, for example, the right to worship over the rights of individuals.

And that is the threat to our Constitution that we cannot ignore.

Starting a new book

I just received God's Federal Republic by William J. Everett. Bill is a noted professor and scholar of theology and ethics. He and his wife Sylvia, herself a noted liturgical artist, retired here to our small town west of Asheville a few years ago.

According to the summary on Amazon:

Biblical religion is driven by a longing for God's ultimate order of justice and peace. Most of this longing is steeped in the patriarchal symbols of kingship, monarchs, lords, fathers, and princes. This symbolism came to bind European churches to the legitimation of monarchies and empires for over a millennium. The American and now global experiment separated the churches, with their kingdom language, from government dedicated to democratic, republican, and federal constitutional order. Religious efforts to guide and critique government have subsequently suffered from political irrelevance or theocratic nationalism. Everett lifts up the biblical and classical origins of our present republican experiment to construct a theological position and religious symbolism that can imaginatively engage our present public life with a contemporary language permeated with a transcendent vision.

I look forward to Bill's insights into how our language around the Kingdom of God can somehow fit into our 21st-century Constitutional democratic republic, with its First Amendment freedoms.