By Lonnie Brooks
The United Methodist Church lives connectionally primarily through a hierarchically structured system of conferences, at the top of which is the General Conference. It is the sole body of the Church with authority to speak for the whole Church, and it has the authority to adopt the laws that govern how the Church functions.
The General Conference is made up of delegates selected by each of the regional conferences throughout the world which are called annual conferences. The number of delegates allowed from each annual conference varies roughly with the size of the annual conference, meaning that the more members an annual conference has, the more delegates it has to the General Conference, with the additional provision that no annual conference has fewer than two delegates.
The bishops of the Church preside over the sessions of the General Conference which normally meets once every four years for about two weeks. One of the effects of the COVID pandemic was to preclude the regular meeting of the General Conference that was scheduled to take place in 2020. So, that meeting was delayed by four years, and the meeting of the General Conference that has now convened in Charlotte, North Carolina, has been declared to be the postponed session of General Conference 2020, not the General Conference of 2024.
Lonnie Brooks, a member of St. John and a lay reserve delegate to the General Conference, is offering his insights on daily sessions.
Day 1:
"I think the opening skirmish in the contest over regionalization at the United Methodist General Conference has just been engaged, and in what should be no surprise, the institutional position of supporting the Christmas Covenant proposal without amendment has carried the day.
The Alaska Conference submitted a petition that called for amending the Christmas Covenant in a couple of ways. First, we expanded it to include regionalization in North America by replacing the existing five jurisdictions with three Regional Conferences, one of which would also include British Columbia, and second, we included some provisions that were in the regionalization proposal from the Connectional Table that were not in the Christmas Covenant's legislation.
You can find our petition here:
https://app.box.com/s/jooj2w0863rwylm4ovc2ixsvfbhxk2wc
To see a graphic that depicts the effect of the proposed regionalization in North America, you can follow this link:
https://app.box.com/s/6oycin1qh5p6glq2ehnycbdd5mw1fv4i
Because the opening sentence in the petition referred to a petition previously submitted and recommended the Alaska petition be substituted for that one, the Petitions Secretary ruled the Alaska petition to be out of order and didn't assign a number or include it in the Advance Edition of the Daily Christian Advocate (ADCA). Alaska appealed that decision to the General Conference's Committee on Reference (COR).
Today the COR considered Alaska's appeal and received oral testimony from Alaska lay delegate, Jo Anne Hayden, and from Abby Parker Herrera, the Petitions Secretary, and it upheld Parker Herrera's rejection of the petition.
There is no other petition on offer that represents any real alternative to the Christmas Covenant. And that means that amending the Christmas Covenant legislation in the Legislative Committee, either by substitution or piece by piece, is the only way forward for those who want to see regionalization adopted but in a more complete manner than that proposed by the Christmas Covenant.
The Alaska petition does NOT propose full regionalization of the episcopacy, though it does make a move in that direction by proposing to amend ¶49 of the Book of Discipline by moving election of bishops to the Regional Conferences and deleting all the provisions in that paragraph relating to transfer from one Regional Conference to another of those bishops, essentially leaving that matter up to the General Conference to determine by majority vote outside the Constitution. I have submitted other petitions that are included in the ADCA that complete the regionalization of the episcopacy.
This decision of the Committee on Reference is highly significant, and it might well signal how the General Conference leadership is going to engage in this issue of regionalization."
Portions of the General Conference will be live streamed, and you can watch and listen by following this link:
https://www.resourceumc.org/en/churchwide/general-conference-2020/live-stream