Recommended Reading: Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia

The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia launched at the beginning of the month. This online resource contains life stories of Christian leaders from Asia, both indigenous leaders and foreign missionaries. The project will continue to add biographies from across Asia, but the initial batch of biographies draw especially from Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Many of those biographies are of Methodists. Thus, the Dictionary makes an excellent resource for those interested in learning about the history of Methodism in Southeast Asia. There will be an official launch event online on April 17th at 8:00pm Malaysia time at which more information about the Dictionary will be shared.

General Conference roundup: Global structures and leaders

This is the first of several posts presenting a roundup of General Conference actions related to the foci of this blog. This first post looks at the General Conference actions related to global structures and leaders in The United Methodist Church.

General Conference approved continued work on a global Book of Discipline and global Social Principles. Proposals for a US central conference died in committee.

General Conference approved five more bishops for Africa starting in 2020, going with the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters' recommendation rather than a motion to add two new bishops immediately to Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

General Conference approved a provisional central conference for Southeast Asia and Mongolia, allowing missions there to go forward with the process of forming Annual Conferences and thereby beginning to determine their own pastoral leadership. It also approved a provisional Rwanda Annual Conference and deferred the creation of a Uganda Annual Conference to the West Africa Central Conference.

During General Conference, the Judicial Council elected N. Oswald Tweh, Sr., a Liberian, as the head of the Council, the first from outside the US to hold that position.

Responding to a request for a declaratory decision from the General Conference, the Judicial Council ruled that a Central Conference as a body, not its bishops, has the authority to set the time and place of its meetings, addressing questions regarding the 2016 meeting of the Congo Central Conference.

The next roundup, which will be posted next week, will look at actions related to mission work.

Mission and the instability of ecclesial structure

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Assistant Professor of Religion and Pieper Chair of Servant Leadership at Ripon College.

As was announced last month, the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) is requesting next General Conference to approve the creation of a new ecclesial entity within The United Methodist Church: an Asia Provisional Central Conference. This step would allow for the creation of provisional annual conferences in Vietnam, Laos, and Mongolia, all current sites of developing Methodist mission work, and presumably in other potential future mission territories in Asia.

This request will come before a General Conference that is sure to review many proposals for global restructuring of the denomination. These restructuring plans, by and large, operate with a four-fold division of United Methodist geography: the United States, Africa, the Philippines, and Europe. While I don't expect the proposed Asia Provisional Central Conference to play a significant role in these discussions, it should nonetheless give us pause or at least provide perspective as we envision new global ecclesiastical realignments, for an "Asia" Provisional Central Conference does not neatly fit into the commonly presumed United Methodist four-fold geographic division described above.

Of course, it would be easy to combine this proposed Asia Provisional Central Conference with the Philippine Central Conference into a larger Asia-Pacific Central Conference, or something to that effect, but there's a larger point here. That point is that mission inherently destabilizes whatever geographic, administrative, ecclesial structures the church creates for itself. Those structures are predicated on boundaries, and mission is an inherently boundary-crossing endeavor.

This tension between mission and ecclesial structure in an important one for the UMC in particular, a denominational body that has always been significantly engaged in mission in many forms and has always done much of its self-reflection through the creation of church structure, not through theology. Nevertheless, if properly cognized, this tension has the potential to be a productive one, with mission feeding into the process of on-going self-reflection through self-restructuring.

Thus, as long as the UMC continues to be a church in mission (and we should pray that's as long as we are a church), we will need to remain open to our ecclesial structures being periodically reshaped and our ecclesial boundaries being periodically redrawn because of the the fruits of that mission, in Asia and all around the globe.