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By Lonnie Brooks
The plenary process this morning at the United Methodist General Conference was unprecedented in recent times, and, though I haven't checked and don't intend to check, maybe for all of the history of the branch of the Methodist movement that has become The United Methodist Church. For one thing, it began at 8:00am with a worship service, and then, without a break, it didn't end until well after 12:30pm, blowing right past orders of the day in the burst of enthusiasm to complete the work on worldwide regionalization of the Church.
Another thing that happened was a really strange anomaly. We've fairly recently set up a system to correct for past disregard for the importance of those United Methodists from parts of the Church outside the United States, called central conferences. The heart of that system is the creation of a Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters. It was empowered to review legislative proposals from other committees when such proposals related to Central Conferences, but ever since its creation, its mission has expanded, and now it has original jurisdiction over many petitions. And what's really strange is that unlike other legislative committees, it exists year round. And as a perpetual committee it not only has authority to submit legislation, it DID submit all 8 of the petitions for Worldwide Regionalization, then 5 of those petitions that it submitted were referred to it by the Petitions Secretary for a recommendation. It doesn't take a genius to figure what its recommendation was going to be. The vote was unanimous!
All five of the eight regionalization petitions SCCCM recommended were adopted by the plenary session by very wide margins, including the one that was the heart and soul of regionalization, the amendment of the Constitution of the Church. The margin was pushing toward 90%, way beyond the 67% requirement for sending the constitutional amendments to the annual conferences for ratification.
Notably, an amendment that proposed to add a provision to remove from the Constitution the authorization of jurisdictions in the United States failed, so the proposal moves forward with its call for a single regional conference in the USA and 7 regional conferences in the rest of the world--3 in Africa, 3 in Europe, and 1 in the Philippines.
Additionally, it is noteworthy that none of these regionalization petitions proposes to regionalize the episcopacy. There are other petitions outside this package that propose to do that, so there's still hope for that idea.
So, the plan from the Commission on the General Conference to have each legislative committee at the beginning discuss regionalization as a principle was made moot, and my informal proposal to form a committee of the whole was, in fact, realized by having the whole General Conference deal with the substance of the matter in its first plenary session dealing with legislation, given that the committee that made the recommendation on the petitions was the body that submitted the petitions.