Should the UMC have missional rather than geographic annual conferences?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

For the last two weeks, I have been looking at the question of how we can structurally support innovation in The United Methodist Church. I have argued that this is a particularly important question for those interested in mission since mission is a primary form of innovation for the church. Last week, I examined the evangelical approach, which is to have a low bar for the creation of new, separate structures to support innovation in churches and mission work.

This week, I’ll look at Catholicism as an alternative model of innovation. For those committed to overarching organizational unity, Catholicism is a good model. Not only does Catholicism have an overarching organizational unity, the Roman Catholic Church is one of the oldest human organizations on the planet. It’s over 1500 years older than the oldest nonprofits and fraternal organizations, a millennium older than the oldest universities, and 500 years older than the oldest companies.

If evangelicals innovate by starting new, separate organizations, Catholics have another approach to innovation – the creation of new units within the larger organization. One of the main ways this has happened is through the creation of new orders. New orders were historically able to pioneer new forms of devotion (prayer, preaching, pilgrimage, etc.) that drew people closer to the church. They were also often responsible for the evangelization of new geographic areas. Thus, the creation of a new order was a way to sanction some innovation in Catholic religiosity or geographic coverage.

Individual orders have had the tendency to become susceptible to the same sort of organizational stagnation I wrote about in my initial post, but since the Catholic church is always open to new orders and sub-orders, it is not dependent on the vitality of any one of these orders. There was a persistent pattern in medieval Catholicism of the creation of new monastic orders that would implement reforms, achieve success, become stagnant, and then decline and need reform themselves. Then the cycle would start over again.

Protestants don’t have orders, so the question is what structures do we have that could serve the same function? The basic structure of Methodism is the annual conference. Annual conferences do several of the same things that Catholic orders do – they recruit, ordain, and missionally deploy clergy. They also carry out a variety of programs such as health and welfare ministries that Catholic orders frequently do.

Yet annual conferences currently have several problems that inhibit them from consistently and effectively supporting innovation. There is a tendency for annual conferences to reflect the same sort of organizational bureaucratic malaise and rigidity from which the denomination as a whole suffers. Also, the geographic organization of annual conferences leads to less innovation when they are not in a pioneer situation with clear margins along which to expand. In most places, the geographic organization of established annual conferences tends to lead to a pastoral and maintenance focus on existing congregations.

The Mission Initiatives sponsored by Global Ministries are good examples of organizational structures that support growing, innovative mission in areas without a historic United Methodist presence. But the question remains of how United Methodists in areas with a long-established presence can continue to be innovative. There are some annual conferences that have effectively supported innovative ministries within their own, long-established geographic limits. The Florida Annual Conference’s Fresh Expressions initiative is one such example. Yet such instances seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

Another possible solution to organizationally supporting innovation in the UMC would be to allow United Methodists to create new units within the larger church that would focus on some particular form of innovative ministry. If annual conferences are the basic units of United Methodism, this could mean the creation of missionally-defined rather than geographically-bounded annual conferences.

This approach has happened before in Methodism. Examples include the various ethnic or language-group annual conferences or the Red Bird Mission Conference. These annual conferences geographically overlap(ped) other (Anglo) annual conferences but were focused on missional outreach to a particular group facilitated by a flexible organizational system controlled by those doing the outreach. While that was usually defined in terms of a particular ethnic and/or immigrant group, there’s no particular reason why that same approach could not be used for other missional foci.

It’s important to say that the people doing the innovation must be the ones in charge of selecting this option and then customizing it for their needs. It can’t be an imposition by others. The Central Jurisdiction is a tragic example of a separate, non-geographically defined structure that was imposed on others because of the prejudices of the dominant group, not chosen by a particular group to give themselves organizational freedom to adapt and innovate. I am not calling for anything resembling the Central Jurisdiction.

Another version of this approach to creating new organizations within a wider umbrella is found in the third, multi-branch model under consideration by the Commission on a Way Forward. The multi-branch model seems to authorize this sort of new structures within a larger system. But these structures are defined only by the one issue of sexuality and are more for the sake of keeping peace than fostering innovation. United Methodists need to be able to innovate in other ways beyond the one issue of sexuality. Moreover, such an approach could happen within a unified church as well as a multi-branch church. The examples cited above were all part of unified churches.

This approach to sponsoring innovation should, though, lead us to think more deeply about what unifies us. Catholics have certain theological, spiritual, and organizational common touchpoints that keep them together despite a proliferation of sub-organizations. United Methodists will have to find our own.

Among the most important must be our understanding of unity. Authorizing new structures within the larger group works when we see unity not as about institutional uniformity but rather as about bonds of spiritual connection. I have argued elsewhere (here, here, here, and here) that a relational understanding of unity is the best approach to unity. Here’s another reason why: Thinking of unity relationally open us up to innovative ministries and mission.

Plan Now: Season of Creation starts Sept. 1

This Thursday, Sept. 1st is the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation and inaugurates a five-week-long Season of Creation, which lasts until Oct. 4th, as this press release from the WCC notes. The World Day of Prayer and the Season of Creation are ecumenical efforts uniting Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, and Protestants. Christians from those traditions are invited to engage in prayer and take action on issues related to creation care during this five-week period.

This event (or series of events) is significant for several reasons:

1. It reflects the growing importance of creation care as an area of missiological action and reflection. Care for creation is, for instance, an important theme in the WCC's recent affirmation on mission and evangelism, Together Towards Life.

2. It originated with the Orthodox but has become an ecumenical event. The WCC press release notes, "The late Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I proclaimed 1 September as a day of prayer for the environment in 1989. The Orthodox church year starts that day with a commemoration of how God created the world." Oct. 4th was chosen as the end day because it is the feast of St. Francis in the Catholic Church. Thus, the five week-long Season of Creation was born of ecumenical interaction that combined affirmations from Orthodox and Catholic traditions. The movement continues as an ecumenical one, with Anglicans and conciliar Protestants now joined in support.

Arun Jones: How the Catholics can be a global church

This blog post is the first in a two-part series by Arun Jones, Dan and Lillian Hankey Associate Professor of World Evangelism at Candler School of Theology. In these two pieces, Dr. Jones examines how other Christian traditions function as global churches for the sake of making comparisons with The United Methodist Church.

It seems to me that there are two Christian traditions that are successfully pulling off the feat of being truly global in today’s world.  These are Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.  I think they are successful for very different reasons – their mutual antagonism in many places speaks to that difference!  Let me reflect on how the Catholics can be global.

My experience of Roman Catholicism is as much a lived experience as an academic one.  While my courses in church history and in Roman Catholic missiology have provided me with my academic knowledge, living with Roman Catholics (including close family members) in India, the Philippines and the U.S.A. is really the source of these reflections on global Catholicism.  As I moved from one country to another in my young adulthood, I was struck at how different Catholicism is in each context: how the self-understanding of what it means to be Catholic changed from country to country.  Despite my disagreements with certain Catholic doctrine, I have wondered in amazement, “How is this possible?”

Roman Catholics are bound together by a common liturgy (for the most part – however, there are at least 3 different Roman Catholic rites in India alone) and a common set of doctrines and laws.  However, Catholicism allows for flexibility in the following ways.

It allows for multiple readings of common practices and texts.  By “reading” I mean something close to “interpretation.”  The impact of words, of teachings, of gestures is different in different cultural, national and linguistic contexts.  And Roman Catholicism, on the whole, is fine with that.  I think most of us Protestants (and the press) get so caught up with the few internal fights that Catholics have about proper interpretation of doctrine and practice that we forget the many, many ways in which our sisters and brothers are happily “reading” their faith differently.

Secondly, Roman Catholicism allows for multiple practices.  There are devotions, saints, liturgies, pilgrimages, and other practices in different contexts that the Catholics in those contexts understand to be absolutely vital to their faith, and which are completely irrelevant to Catholics outside the context.  I was struck by this the first time I read about the devotion to the black Nazarene in Manila, the Philippines, and how I had heard of nothing like it in India.  Yet that devotion is vital to the faith of millions of Filipino Catholics.

Thirdly, Catholicism allows for multiple Catholic identities.  A few years ago I was having a pleasant conversation with some Catholic priests in New Delhi, and I asked them about the discussion on priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church in India.  This particular group of priests looked at me like I was out of my mind – for them, at least, there was no discussion!  I then realized how the Indian religious context, which has a very strong tradition of holy men and holy women who are celibate ascetics, could very well make celibacy a prize and not a burden for priests and nuns.  Similarly the various branches of the Orthodox tradition in India take great pride in the fact that their bishops must be celibate.  In the Philippines, on the other hand, I found lay people who felt sorry for priests because they could not marry, and even excused priests who were known to have a “family” somewhere.  For Filipino priests and nuns, Catholic identity lies elsewhere.  And the same goes for laity – to be an American Catholic is quite a unique experience in worldwide Catholicism in some ways.  I have come to the conclusion that in the U.S.A., Roman Catholicism is paradoxically the largest denomination and yet thrives on an identity that sees itself as a minority Christian tradition.

My point here is not to minimize the problems of the Roman Catholic Church – we all have problems, and will have them until Christ returns in glory – but to point out how the Roman Catholic Church in some ways handles the issue of unity in diversity.  We Protestants are probably too logocentric, insisting on “correct” readings first of Scripture and subsequently of doctrine and subsequently of practice, to deal with diversity the way our Catholic sisters and brothers do (and the diversity I have pointed out is mostly a lay initiative).  So we United Methodists are floating ideas of having different “Disciplines” for different parts of the world, instead of giving flexibility in “reading” the same Discipline.  But as the difficulties of the worldwide nature of Protestantism are making clear, I don’t think we have come up with a good alternative to the Roman Catholic way of being catholic.  And maybe reflecting on the Roman Catholic experience can help us to start thinking differently about what worldwide United Methodism can and actually should mean.