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.
