We Should Know Better
What I remember about the dysfunction of the November Special Called Conference in Arkansas of 2022
The present is a constant proving ground to see if we are actually learning from our history. Do we care to augment our behavior so as to avoid the mistakes of others, or do we carelessly continue to scratch itches without concern for long term scarring?
The Arkansas Annual Conference convened a “special called” conference in November 2022 in order to comply with the administrative needs posed by ¶2553. The United Methodist Church is administratively separated out across the world in annual conferences, those within the United States having a limited “right” to disaffiliate by ¶2553, which sunsets at the end of 2023. Arkansas is one of dozens of conferences making up many of the rules as they go along, trying to implement the statutes of ¶2553. Some conferences have been overtly threatened by the process, refusing to comply (see North Georgia). Others have been very amicable, making it as easy as possible for unhappy churches to leave (see Great Plains or West Texas). Many are in between, adding requirements for disaffiliation that are not stipulated in ¶2553.
When one doesn't belong to an annual conference or know many people in a given conference, one’s eyes somewhat glaze over when hearing new information about how one or another conference is handling disaffiliation. At least mine do. It’s hard to care, despite the connexional (interconnected) nature of Methodism. Something that gives a little more energy for remembering these things is drama. I remember drama beginning on the day of the conference: November 19, 2022. On Twitter, especially, many tweets were floating around, calling foul on the proceedings.
By the following day, enough people had posted the link to the conference proceedings for me to take some interest. I clicked the link and found a video that was, to my recollection, between three and four hours long. I say, “to my recollection” because it has since been taken down or made private, such that the original video cannot be seen, for reasons that I will speculate about in a few.
My understanding of Arkansas is that it very much represents a similar dynamic to my own conference, the Oklahoma Annual Conference. Both are located in the American Midwest, where the majority population still believes in traditional American values, even as we continue to grow further away from them. The leadership of The United Methodist Church skews much further left than the population as a whole. Many see themselves somewhat as cultural missionaries, slowly moving the majority culture to the left while maintaining some semblance of mainline respectability. When I interviewed to potentially come serve the Arkansas Annual Conference in 2015, I was met with open hostility by their Board of Ordained Ministry. It was made clear that they weren’t interested in receiving conservative clergy (in case it isn’t clear, I am one).
Watching the proceedings on the floor of the special called conference, the dynamic was much the same as I have gotten used to in my own setting: conservatives and liberals trying to get along despite polar opposite worldviews. The formality combined with, to my perception, emotive language of the episcopal leadership, Bishop Gary E. Mueller, only served to make for a more stilted dynamic. It was to be his last conference before retiring.
I didn’t watch the whole thing. I’m a pastor of two churches with four small children and the daily needs attending these. I did, however, skip around and watch about an hour of the proceedings. I have since confirmed my own recollections against an article written by Frank E. Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. The bare bones of the proceedings were that there were 38 churches which had completed the conference’s disaffiliation agreement and were seeking ratification of their separation from the denomination. All of them had met the approval of the conference’s Board of Trustees, including at least a 66.7% vote of the general church membership to sever ties with the UMC.
When it came time to vote, the slate of churches which had achieved a 90% vote or higher to disaffiliate (25 of the 38) were handily dismissed as a group. Yet the new thing they did in Arkansas was then to scrutinize the exits of each individual church afterwards. They initiated a painstaking process of reviewing each individual church, followed by a vote on each individual church. Thirteen churches were reviewed in this manner, three of which were eventually voted down. That’s right: Despite their clear compliance with the conference’s disaffiliation agreement and the clear majority of their membership having spoken, the conference refused to release them. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that lawsuits have since followed.
The dynamics were already set for dysfunction. Bishop Mueller had already used a lot of emotional language for the day. I, of course, cannot quote anything specific, as the video evidence has been removed. Yet I remember him, more than once, providing emotional language for processing the day’s events. While smiling and making light jests, he simultaneously spoke of how sad it was to say goodbye to these churches. Moreover, he allowed protestors into the venue. My understanding was that these were from Jonesboro First UMC. They wore t-shirts of the same color and stood around and behind the voting delegates. One could sometimes see them in the background from different camera angles. I remember being able to hear them at one point. As an online viewer, I perceived pressure from both the bishop and from those around the delegates for the delegates to emotionally sympathize with those who wanted to #StayUMC.
I didn’t get to watch all of the speeches for and against the approval of the disaffiliation of each individual church. I do remember watching the portion around Jonesboro FUMC, which was, of course, eventually sidelined, along with Searcy and Cabot. My internal alarm bell went off when one delegate rose to read off her smartphone screen allegations of impropriety in the voting process at Jonesboro. These allegations, of course, had no name attached to them. It was something to the effect that the church leadership brought into membership a large number of their addiction ministry community at the last minute in order to sway the vote, and that there was some kind of emotional manipulation at play over them. There was more than one accusation of impropriety, implicating not only church leadership, but also the oversight of the superintendent.
Another speech was from an older person, talking about how many memories they had growing up and then doing ministry in that church. They mentioned a couple names I actually knew. While living in Little Rock in 2009, as a candidate for ministry in the UMC, I was assigned Rev. Ed Matthews as a mentor to help me go through the discernment process. I met with him every week for a few months at FUMC Little Rock. He was one of the names listed as having been tied to one of these disaffiliating churches, the implication being that we simply cannot part ways with these communities in which respected personalities had served for all those years. I wondered how Rev. Matthews would have liked his memory being used in that way. I honestly don’t know. I liked Ed, although I doubt he would agree with my theology. I wonder if he would want for a church, for sentimental reasons, to be held in a covenant body they no longer wanted to be a part of.
I couldn’t believe the emotional shallowness of it all. The implication was that the conference could not stand to let go of a church because it is tied with nostalgic memories and feelings. This is the same mental process that keeps people in dysfunctional relationships. If an institution cannot reckon with the reality that things change, then it will rightly calcify and decline.
A speech in favor of disaffiliation was the youth pastor at Jonesboro First. He had grown up in that church and spoke to the community’s identity and disposition. He and others reminded the conference that they had completed the process in earnest, and that questioning it at this point was also functionally questioning the integrity of the superintendent and the Board of Trustees.
To be fair, the bishop did eventually consult with his parliamentarian, who reminded the body of the rules stating that they shouldn’t make such allegations or speak in such ways on the floor of the conference. However, this was way too long afterwards. I believe Bishop Mueller, after his decades of service in leadership, knew very well that he should have stopped several things as they were being said, rather than retroactively trying to correct them. I doubt very much that he was unaware that this sort of speech was going to come to the floor when voting on individual churches. In fact, I believe this sort of speech was invited by the format. I believe the entire fallout of this process was seen and incentivized beforehand.
Anyway, when it came time to vote on each church, the council did what it did. I wish I could say I was surprised. It was unprecedented, but then, this whole situation is unprecedented. Any dispassionate observer can see that certain forces are at play that essentially negate whatever clear instructions we have in scripture as to how believers ought to trust one another.
Exhortation - Everything needs to be recorded at this point. We cannot continue to have these reports of what someone supposedly said somewhere without any audio/video evidence. It is too easy to dismiss reports like these as the byproduct of an ideologically warped mind. We need to record things and then copy and keep the recordings for the sake of transparency and keeping one another honest. Any resistance to this can only be seen as a desire to operate in the darkness, which is something Jesus speaks very clearly on (John 3:19).
I have spoken to several people in the Arkansas Conference since the vote. It is a tense place. The conference has been slow-walking churches through the disaffiliation process, only adding anxiety. I’m entirely certain that the voting strategy at the special conference in November exacerbated everything. It was a terrible miscalculation that, rather than learning from, many conferences now contemplate replicating for the short-sighted goal of holding onto a few churches.
For decades, leaders within The United Methodist Church have known that a split was coming. They spoke of it openly and frequently. The Protocol was a recognition of that, one which should have prevailed. The kind of leadership we needed at this point was of voices who could name that up front, be steady and brave in the face of division, and let folks feel how they feel without direction, trusting in them to be adults, as well. I think responsible leadership would say, “Folks, we saw this division coming a long time ago, and we have been given the time and space to prepare. Let’s show the world what Christian love looks like as we bless those who can no longer in good conscience be a part of this institution anymore.” Yet what we have gotten is heavy-handed episcopal leadership that makes emotional appeals, stacks the deck in favor of the institution, and leverages power against unhappy churches. There are exceptions to this posture, but not as many as there should be. And I cannot point to many examples of episcopal leadership saying anything akin to what I have offered. The institution of the UMC has been claimed by the cultural left and, despite a majority of folks in the pews still being conservative, it is established time and again that the institutional leadership has little interest in validating or playing cordially with them. So far as many leaders are concerned, there is only Team UMC or the team of hateful bigots who want to destroy.
My interest in writing all this up at this point in the game is because more than a month ago I spoke with a member of my conference’s Board of Trustees, who said that the committee would be considering the Arkansas voting method for our next special called session, which will be taking place on April 22. I think that would be a terrible mistake.
A partisan response to my concern could readily be volunteered, You simply want to divide. You want as many churches to leave as possible. You carry hatred towards the UMC, and you just want everyone to easily leave without a conversation being held so that you and your other WCA friends can rejoice at the high number of disaffiliations.
I’m not going to deny a degree of resentment towards the institution that raised and then sidelined me. However, owning my own bias, I would argue that the Arkansas strategy is a terrible idea, not just for conservative churches, but for the institution. I think the impact of such a strategy poisons the water and has long term implications with respect to the kind of connexion these remaining churches share.
It isn’t only that lawsuits have resulted from two of the three churches who were denied exit, although that will almost certainly take a toll on the conference finances and manpower. The larger cost is harder to immediately see. It is the hostility developed between conservatives who saw their will trampled by the majority of liberals and institutionalists, the ascendent majority, who now have to justify their behavior every time they look themselves in the mirror. The effect this carries is the gaslighting of the majority towards the minority, and the minority slowly feeling like the water is heating up to boil them alive. Can we blame conservatives for feeling trapped when conferences are quite literally refusing to let them go despite their clear will to go, coupled with their willingness to pay substantial sums of money to leave? For all intents and purposes, they are trapped. In the United States of America, the land of the free, within the church of Jesus Christ, a body known for advancing freedom across the world…something has gone wrong. To be complicit in the continued hardening of hearts among people who have worked together for decades is a miscalculation with both moral and practical implications. After all, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul in the process (Mark 8:34)? I can’t help but wonder if The United Methodist Church is losing its soul in behavior like this.
What about the witness to the world?
The long term effect of these procedural maneuverings will be to more quickly destroy the institution of the UMC. Anyone watching this from the outside wouldn’t generally want to be a part of it.
What about mission and ministry?
While #StayUMC voices decry the mission that will no longer happen, they are quite literally ending vital local ministries around the denomination when they constrain local host churches. Rather than blessing them to continue working separately, they would rather burn it down. Rev. John Miles of Jonesboro First did an excellent video detailing all of the ministries his church does locally that are impacted (negatively) by the actions of the conference.
But I’m a liberal or institutionalist, and I believe my side is the right side of history, so how can these measures be wrong?
Part of being right is conducting oneself in a righteous manner. Relying on procedural maneuvering betrays a lack of confidence in the righteousness of the cause. Overt power politics indicates a rot in the moral fabric of the institution. Insistence on upright conduct would be foundational to any “right side of history” rhetoric. To be clear: One cannot be on the right side of history while practicing coercion, power politics, procedural ninjutsu, or shadow games. Even if you win, you have lost. Speaking of history, a pyrrhic victory is a thing.
I cannot help but see a certain degree of cultural hatred towards the “flyover country” culture from the cultured despisers at the head of the denomination. So many on the left define themselves as primarily against people like me. They see their mission as undoing the public witness of people like me. There is almost a glee in flexing their institutional muscles to constrain folks like me within this body, where we often fear retribution or correction for wrongthink.
I started PlainSpoken partly in an attempt to make sense of this huge, complicated, depressing picture. I had hoped that, by this time, I would understand more than I do. I wish I knew more than I do. But I don’t believe more knowledge will change the overall ethics, nor the practicality, of the issues at question here. I speak and write on these things because others are afraid to, or they are too resentful to do so maturely, while all around us we see a series of decisions made in the direction of dysfunction and resentment. To stand by and be silent has felt like less and less an option for me, despite my vulnerable status as a local licensed pastor.
But we have been entrusted with a commission that we cannot maintain if we do not keep everyone on board!
The newer rhetoric I have heard from the institution is that they are entitled to hold onto local churches that are of missional value. This means they reserve the right to hold onto properties and assets that are centralized in a region of wealth and/or potential growth. This is an overt effort at maintaining affluent urban bodies, regardless of the will of those bodies. The classist implications of such a mindset are categorically so distasteful as to be indefensible, to my mind.
Any plan that requires everyone to get on board and stay on board to succeed is on a one-way track towards tyranny. An approach that does not allow communities to get off the ride will inevitably lead to a very dark place.
But we aren’t congregationalists! Surely the will of the collective overrules the will of the local church.
To justify these decisions, I have heard leadership oppose connectional models of church against congregational models of church. Congregational models are internally governed within the local church, whereas connectional churches are governed from without. Essentially, those who use the term ‘connectional’ in this way are arguing that the will of the local church is secondary to the will of the larger governing body. Local congregations can only depart if the larger collective deems them inessential for the mission of the collective. This way of thinking is just…problematic. One cannot leave unless I agree that they can. Okay. This just smacks of emotional codependency. What is embarrassing to see is just how many supposedly mature Christian leaders think this is a good way to be in the world. If folks want to leave, let them leave. That is as complicated as this needs to be. If one wants to talk ecclesiology to justify retaining unwilling populations with threat of seizing assets in “exigent circumstances,” well, I don’t know how to validate that. Just remember that ¶2553 provides the “right” to leave. If you’re going to do the legalese approach, then realize that you’re stripping congregations of a right.
But John Wesley himself designed the Trust Clause so that the institution could wield authority like this.
It is possible that John Wesley himself would be okay with this heavy-handed approach towards local congregations. He was accused in his day of being an autocrat. I think it is okay for us to say that, because of clear moral implications, we are simply not okay with this form of overt domination of the many over the few. Nobody should be.
Here’s the key takeaway: Any conference that adopts the Arkansas strategy is signaling its desire for emotional dysfunction and the trampling underfoot of the free will of local congregations. They are doing this to their own peril, as this will engender deeper resentment among victims and victors alike, it will result in lawsuits, and it will effectively signal to the mission field that we are a body motivated more by the culture war than for love of Jesus Christ and his family.
It isn’t love that constrains people to be in relationships they don’t want to be in. That doesn’t fit a biblical notion of love. The invention of procedural minutiae (¶2553) doesn’t change that. It should concern everyone that so many seem to have lost this discernment.
If you know any of your conference’s trustees, you might consider talking to them. Even if you don’t, you should pray for them. Make sure they understand the long term implications of such a decision. Make sure you have done your part to help them be at peace with the needed split, and that they carry respect and love for those who want to leave. Folks make these bad decisions when they have learned to disregard the concerns of others. Overt, intentional efforts need to be made to find mutual understanding with those in power. The more we isolate and silo ourselves, the more we seal the fate of misery in the near- and distant-future.