David W. Scott: On International Mission and Cosmopolitanism

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian 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.

International mission, by its nature as international, involves crossing national boundaries and, by its nature as mission, involves Christian practices of love and caring. Thus, international mission necessarily involves caring for and about others who are from a different nationality than oneself.

Put another way, international mission involves an extension of what Geert Hofstede and others have called the "moral circle" - the group of people who are within one's sphere of moral concern - those whom one sees as having the same moral rights as oneself - to life, health, happiness, love, etc. International mission is not the only way such an expansion happens - migration or contact with immigrants is another significant means - but it is an important way for Christians around the world to come into contact with people from other countries.

Granted, this extension may be imperfect and not lasting. Someone may participate in international mission and show concern for others without believing that those others are entitled to be treated by the same standard as oneself. Or, a Christian who takes a short-term mission trip may feel concern about the life conditions of those they encounter while on the trip, but three years later may largely have forgotten this new concern for people in other lands.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, international mission may be completely transformative of how one sees one's moral world. The annals of mission, especially of long-term mission, are replete with stories of Christians in mission who come to have a deep and abiding concern for the people of another country, wanting good for the people of that other country just as much as they want good for the people of their own country.

Beyond even that, there are stories of Christians in mission who come to see themselves as attached not just to another country and their own home country but attached to all countries, to see themselves as "citizens of the world." An academic term that describes this sense of connection to and concern for people all around the world is "cosmopolitan," which literally means "citizen of the world." It is clear that at least some Christians through their engagement in international mission take on a cosmopolitan outlook on life.

There is at least a little academic literature on missionary cosmopolitanism in the past two centuries of Western-led and then global Christian international mission. (See, this book for instance.) But the notion that Christians' sense of citizenship extends beyond a particular nation to encompass all goes all the way back to the roots of Christianity (as in, for instance, the Epistle to Diognetus).

Much of the academic discussion of cosmopolitanism, though, is not linked to religion but rather to secular forms of what might be called globalization - international trade, migration, international professional and cultural networks, etc. Moreover, secular cosmopolitanism is positively correlated with urban areas, wealth, and education and can carry a critique of rural provincialism.

These characteristics of secular cosmopolitanism and the existence of missionary cosmopolitanism raise for me a variety of questions, including the following:

First, to what extent is an openness to people from other countries a prerequisite for becoming involved in international mission, and to what extent is increased concern for people from other countries a result of participating in international mission? Both could be true. In a way akin to prevenient grace, perhaps a nascent openness to concern for others from other countries allows for the actual extension of moral concern to those others after participating in international mission. Yet I am left with the question of whether international mission only transforms the moral circles of those with larger than average moral circles to begin with or whether international mission has the power to potentially transform the moral outlook of anyone.

Second, if it is true that The United Methodist Church is a disproportionately rural church but secular cosmopolitanism is associated with urban living, where one is more likely to encounter people, goods, and ideas from other countries and cultures, then where does that leave the outlook for cultivating cosmopolitanism among United Methodists? Are United Methodists, because of their rural distribution, less likely to adopt cosmopolitan outlooks on the church than people in other, more urban, denominations, or does Methodists' penchant for mission increase their cosmopolitanism?

This question feels particularly important to me as the UMC looks forward to a more world-wide future. The ability to successfully live into that future seems to depend, if not on widespread cosmopolitanism, at least a sustained sense by enough people in enough parts of the church that they have a moral and religious connection to fellow denomination members throughout the world. A successful worldwide church cannot be the work of a few church bureaucrats or denominational insiders but must be rooted in the impulses of people in local congregations.

Third, where does the rising tide of nationalism over the past decade leave international mission and missionary cosmopolitanism? Nationalism emphasizes one's identity in connection to their home nation (however defined). It is thus in tension with cosmopolitanism, which views the world in a supranational way (that is, beyond one nation). Is international mission destined to decline or to become more of a niche endeavor if its association with cosmopolitanism goes against the nationalist trends of the day?

While I do believe that Christianity requires that we enlarge our moral circles, I don't think it necessitates that all Christians adopt a cosmopolitan view of the world. It is possible to live as a good Christian without much of a sense of the world community. Indeed, the vast majority of Christians across time and space have oriented their lives primarily toward local concerns. This localism often does not even rise to the level of nationalism, let alone cosmopolitanism.

Still, as someone who cares about the church as an international body, who cares about mission, including international mission, these questions about international mission and international Christian community on the one side and the idea of cosmopolitanism on the other leave me somewhat unsettled. Even if it will not be a primary concern for all Christians, how does the church keep alive the sense of the transcendent kingdom of God, which is beyond all nations or other allegiances, in the world, but not of it?

UM & Global 10th Anniversary Stats: Contributors

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian 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.

This blog is sponsored by the Association of Methodist Professors of Mission (formerly United Methodist Professors of Mission). At the AMPM meeting two weeks ago, I (David) offered an update on the blog, as I usually do at those meetings.

This update, however, was a special one, as it is now just over 10 years since the blog launched. Therefore, I took the opportunity to compile some special statistics to share with the AMPM, which I also want to share with you, the readers of this blog. I will share statistics and reflections about contributors in this piece and additional statistics in a future piece.

Contributors

Since its start on March 3, 2013, UM & Global has functioned on a three-stranded model of content contribution. It features pieces written by David W. Scott as blogmaster, pieces written by other contributors (AMPM members and beyond), and "Recommended Reading" (or similar) pieces with links and short rationales for reading whatever is linked to. You can see how those three strands of content have varied over the years here:

From all these sources, UM & Global has published 1217 articles so far from 116 authors from 24 countries!

Just over half of authors have come from the United States (reflecting the blog's home within a US academic group), with several authors also coming from Germany, Argentina, the Philippines, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, and the DRC.

Just over half of the authors were white, either white Americans or white Europeans. About 1/6 were Asian or Asian-American, 1/6 were Black African or African-American, and 1/8 were Latin American or US Hispanic. These are, of course, overly broad categories. Moreover, total authorship does not reflect the full diversity of the global church. It is, however, significantly more diverse than its sponsoring body.

2/3rds of contributors have been men, with the remaining 1/3 women. Again, this is less than the parity to which the church and academy should strive, but significantly more gender balanced than the AMPM.

Since not all contributors have written the same number of blogs, with white, American, men contributing more pieces per author, and since I as a white, American, man write the largest number of pieces, the content on this site is less well-balanced than the contributor pool as a whole.

Again, high quality theological reflection depends on contributions from a multitude of perspectives, and the content on UM & Global has not given space, and certainly not equal space, to all possible perspectives, and this representation (or lack thereof) matters.

There are many ways to norm what the distribution of content on the blog should be. Is the comparison point global church membership? US professors in general? US missiology professors in particular? Relative to global church membership, women are underrepresented, Europeans are overrepresented, and Africans are underrepresented. Relative to US professors as a whole, women are underrepresented but racial/ethnic minorities are a larger percentage of blog authors than US professors. I am not familiar with data on the composition of missiologists, but based on my personal sense of the American Society of Missiology, relative to that group, UM & Global authors have been at least equally female and more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities in the United States or to come from outside the United States.

If there's a consolation for me as the editor in these numbers, it's that the blog has gotten better and more representative over its run. When I last compiled such number in fall 2014, the blog contributors were 3/4 men, 71% American, and 61% white. The increase in contributors who are women, not from the United States, and people of color has been the result of conscious and often extensive effort to invite contributions from these groups.

That's the takeaway I'd like to end with. It's easy to get white American men to write stuff about the church. They do it all the time. It takes more work to identify and cultivate alternative voices. But this is critical work that all in church leadership need to be engaged in.

Christianity Tends Towards Nationalism; Mission Keeps It Honest

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian 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.

I have been reading Robert P. Jones' White Too Long recently. The book is a searing indictment of the role of white American Christianity in creating and upholding white supremacy and should be read widely by white American Christians for the sake of their own souls as well as the sake of racial justice.

Among the book's larger argument, I was struck by a passage on p. 75-76:
"While white Christianity was protecting the interests and consciences of those under its canopy, white Christians were also staunchly defending the purity and innocence of the religion itself. They accomplished this principally by projecting an idealized form of white Christianity as somehow independent of the failings of actual white Christians or institutions. ... The problem with this defensive posture is that it prevents us from seeing areas where the religion may have gone off course; where new bearing are needed."
Although Jones is primarily interested in support for white supremacy as an instance in which American Christianity has gone off course (as it certainly is), I got to thinking, "What, speaking broadly across geography and time, are the sorts of ways in which Christianity tends to go off course?"

One of the answers I came to is that Christianity tends towards nationalism. By this I mean that there is a repeated tendency for Christian institutions and individuals to portray the nation (both in the sense of ethne and of nation state) in which they are located in a way that identifies the nations with God's will and action in the world; provides moral covering for the actions of those nations, even when those actions are morally unseemly; conflates national and Christian identity; presents national boundaries as God-ordained; and/or identifies service of the nation with service of God.

Certainly, Jones' book can be read as a description of American Christianity as a support of white nationalism. Another of my recent reads, Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne speaks persuasively about (primarily white) American evangelicalism as a form of American nationalism. And this trend of religious nationalism in the United States goes all the way back to the notion of America as a "city on a hill" with special religious significance for the world.

But this tendency does not only appear in American Christianity. It pops up repeatedly in Christianity around the world and over the centuries, from Eusebius' support for Constantine to the autocephalous churches of Eastern Orthodoxy to the Peace of Westphalia to the patronado system,to the cozy relationship between Christians and governments in many nations in Africa and Latin America today. Time and again, Christian institutions, theologies, and symbols have proven themselves to be able to be bent in service of the ends of nations, even when those ends or the means used to pursue them go against central teachings of the religion.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with nations--society has to be organized somehow--what is problematic is Christians' willingness to identify the this-worldly aims of nations, which are often characterized by a quest for power and resources and moral compromises in their pursuit--with the other-worldly truths of a God of love, justice, and righteousness.

Still, it is possible to see this tendency towards nationalism as the negative side of what, in other ways, is a positive feature of Christianity. This is what Andrew Walls has called the "indigenizing principle"--the ability of Christianity to adapt itself to the cultural and national homes into which it moves. It is this indigenizing principle that has allowed Christianity to spread around the world and take root in so many different places and contexts.

Thus, the solution to Christianity's tendency towards nationalism is not to do away with the indigenizing principle. It is instead to ensure that this principle remains balanced with the other important principle Walls identified in Christianity--the pilgrim principle. It is the pilgrim principle that prevents Christians from becoming too comfortable in the world or in a particular national context. The pilgrim principle reminds Christians to engage with the other, to see God in the face of those who are different from them, to make a distinction between their faith and their nation.

The pilgrim principle can be supported in many different ways, but one of the most significant ways in which Christians have emphasized the importance of the pilgrim principle has been through mission. Mission takes Christians beyond their home national and cultural contexts and shows them God at work elsewhere in the world. It teaches them to see their home nations with different and more critical eyes.

Of course, not all missionaries have been proponents of the pilgrim principle. Some have used mission as a venue for promoting their particular form of nationalism, as the history of Western mission over the past several centuries so amply shows.

Still, as the activity of the church that is most connection to internationalism, mission remains a crucial force in maintaining the balance of the church in its relationship with nations--able to work in any nation, but also able to distinguish itself from the moral justifications and claims to ultimate ontological status that almost all nations engage in. In this way, mission is part of what keeps Christianity honest, what keeps Christianity from going off course.

Recommended Reading: Dakotas connecting across the globe

For American readers of this blog, today is the Fourth of July, the country's national holiday. It is good to celebrate one's country, but I thought a novel way to do that would be to share a reflection on what connects our country, and The United Methodist Church in our country, to other countries, and The United Methodist Church in those countries. Thus, here are some thoughts on that topic by Rev. Rebecca Trefz, Dakotas Conference director of ministries, written after a trip this spring to Africa University: https://www.dakotasumc.org/news/connecting-across-the-globe-rebeccas-random-thoughts/

David Field: Response to Wonder, Love & Praise, Part 3

This blog post is one in a series containing responses to the denomination's proposed ecclesiology document, "Wonder, Love and Praise." These responses are written by United Methodist scholars and practitioners around the world. This piece is the third of three written by Dr. David N. Field, the Academic Coordinator of the Methodist e-Academy in Europe.

International Connectionalism and the Ecclesia
In this third blog I will look at three themes addressed to varying extent in WLP and argue that when related to each other they have significant impact on the understanding of the church that is absent from WLP. These themes are the international character of the UMC, the terminology of ecclesia, and connectionalism.

WLP briefly discusses the meaning and associations of the word ecclesia and settles on an interpretation of it as community. While it does note the political associations of the term as the gathering of the voting citizens, it does not explore these associations. I would propose that these political associations, along with its use in the Septuagint, are significant. The early Christians did not adopt the normal terms for religious or voluntary associations but a term with social and political connotations. It is also interesting to note how Paul interplays the geographic political location (polis) of the church with its identity as the church of God in the introduction to his letters.

The connotations of these references suggest that ecclesia is not merely to be understood as a general term for community paralleling koinonia but as the transnational messianic/eschatological community of the people God which manifests itself in a particular polis. Ecclesia is a community distinguished by its loyalty to the crucified messiah which stands in tension with the broader civic community of that particular polis. As the church developed and spread, it came into increasing tension with the civic community and its social and political structures for two reasons. Firstly, its loyalty to its crucified Lord relatavized all loyalty to civic authorities, including the emperor. Secondly, its communal order (its polity) undermined the dominant social hierarchies and divisions.

The UMC claims to be a manifestation of this ecclesia in the contemporary context. A particular feature of the way it manifests this ecclesia is its polity of connectionalism. In one sense connectionalism emerged as a series of pragmatic responses to particular issues confronting the early Methodist movement and the churches that emerged from it. The result, however, is a complex network which has horizontal and vertical dimensions. Methodist congregations are linked together across geographical space. There are vertical relationships between congregations and conferences. The superintendency and itinerancy provide another interrelated set of networks. Binding these networks together is a set of interlocking covenant relationships centered on the covenant with God renewed regularly in a covenant renewal service.

The result is a complex network providing mutual support, mutual responsibility, mutual oversight and mutual decision making but at the same time is directed toward equipping local churches for mission. This interlocking network emerged at a time when nation states were beginning to come into being in Europe and later in the Americas. Hence it is of significance that Wesley described the early Methodists as “the people called Methodist”. Methodist together formed a new corporate community – a people in a way similar to the approach of the framers of the US constitution when they began with “We the people…”

Wesley envisaged Methodism as an international network – in his time covering England, Ireland, and America – in his words “Methodists all over the world are one people.” It is not insignificant that he chose a French-speaking, Swiss immigrant John William Fletcher to be his successor. The UMC as an international church is an embodiment of this Wesleyan vision. The significance of this international character is experienced differently by people in different parts of the UMC connection. And for many the denomination is still experienced as very US-centric despite its growing numbers outside of the USA. In Europe, where Methodists are mostly small minority churches, being part of an international church is of particular significance. For some, the international character is a burden and a hindrance to moving in a more “progressive” direction on the issue of LGBTQ inclusion. In the US, where the UMC is a major denomination, the focus tends to be on the US context as is evidenced in WLP.

In my previous blog, I argued that contextuality is of fundamental significance for ecclesiology as different contexts provide for diverse embodiments of the divine love. The UMC in Congo has sought to embody love in the context of wars and continuing factional conflicts in which millions have been killed and wounded; and in which hundreds of thousands of women have been raped. The UMC in Russia and Ukraine is working out what koinonia means in response to civil war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Russia. European Methodists are gaining new understandings of what it means to embody love as they engage in ministry to the thousands of refugees and other migrants that are arriving in Europe.

These diverse embodiments are invaluable to the church in other contexts modeling alternatives which challenge, compliment and enrich their own embodiment and understanding of the ecclesia. The international character of the UMC provides a unique opportunity for such mutual learning. However, the present structures of the church remain too US-centric and do not allow for sufficient contextual embodiments of the ecclesia; going into the future, it is imperative that the UMC develops new structures which enable both greater contextuality and more fruitful opportunities for mutual learning and growth.

The international connectional character of the UMC has perhaps more important theological significance in that it provides a remarkable embodiment of the transnational character of the ecclesia of God. In an age of globalization, resurgent nationalism and mass migration the significance of this transnational character needs to be emphasized and expounded.

Three points can be noted for our purposes. Firstly, while a certain love for and pride in one’s own nation is legitimate, to affirm the transnational character of the ecclesia is to submit that legitimate patriotism to critique and in particular circumstances to reject it altogether. Paul’s comments in Philippians that the church’s citizenship is in heaven are worth noting not in an other-worldly sense but in the affirmation that the church is the ecclesia of the ascended Lord who was rejected and crucified by the imperial authorities. When loyalty to the nation and its interests or the pursuit of its greatness compromises in any way our prior loyalty to the crucified Lord and the values and purposes revealed in the cross, they must be rejected. It is always the ecclesia of the crucified Christ and its mission first and the interests of our own nation subordinate to it. Why is it that so many Christians experience the presence of migrants as a threat to their national identity rather than as an opportunity to embody God’s love to them?

Secondly, our relational bonds with our fellow Christians ought to be stronger than our bonds with our fellow citizens. As Paul puts it in Colossians, in Christ there is no longer Greek, Jew, barbarian, or Scythian. We are fellow Christians and siblings in Christ with people from diverse nations, cultures and societies. Together we represent the ecclesia of God in the world.

Thirdly, the church always exists as alien community within particular societies and nations. It is never at home – it is an assembly of foreigners – of immigrants who do not belong. When the church begins to be too comfortable in a given culture or society it is in danger of betraying its true identity as the manifestation of the ecclesia of the crucified and resurrected Lord.

The UMC as an international church is in a unique position to embody the transnational character of the ecclesia – both in its explicit ecclesiology and in its denominational praxis. This can only be achieved when the international character is not viewed as a burden and a problem but as a unique opportunity to discover new ways of embodying what it means to be the church. It will also require a radical questioning of the continuing US-centricity in the structures and mindset of many United Methodists and a critical engagement with the colonialist and paternalist legacy of the past.

Comparative Wesleyan Global Polity - The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church

This is the first in an occasional series of articles comparing the different ways in which Methodist/Wesleyan denominations historically related to The United Methodist Church structure themselves as global bodies. 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.

What would The United Methodist Church look like if it did not have central conferences or jurisdictions and had taken questions about its global nature more seriously in the 1980s and 90s? The answer is probably, “It would look like the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.”

First, some background on the global extent of the AME Church: The AME was founded in 1816 in Philadelphia, primarily by black members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Within eight years, it started societies in Haiti. Work in Canada was added in 1840. Additional work in the Caribbean and South America started in the mid-nineteenth century. The AME expanded to Africa in the 1890s, where the church has grown substantially. Work in India and Europe started in the 1960s. Today, there are 20 episcopal districts, seven of which are entirely outside the United States (six in Africa, one in the Caribbean). Additional work in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, and India is part of predominantly-US episcopal districts. All total, the AME Church has members in 39 countries on five continents.

As noted, one of the primary differences between the UMC and the AME Church is that the AME does not have the UMC’s structure of central conferences and jurisdictions. Instead, the AME is organized into episcopal districts, which are similar to but more important than episcopal areas in the UMC. Representation in church-wide committees and other organizations (other than General Conference) is primarily based on districts. Each episcopal district contains approximately a half dozen annual conferences, which tend to be smaller in geographic scope and membership than UMC annual conferences, since several annual conferences share a bishop.

Bishops are all elected and assigned by the AME General Conference. Bishops must rotate between episcopal districts at least once every eight years, and there are no restrictions on where a bishop can be moved. Thus, the AME preserves the notion of general superintendency better than the UMC does, which has moved much more toward a diocesan model of episcopacy, or at very least a regional model of superintendency, organized around jurisdictions and central conferences.

The downside of episcopal election by General Conference is that Americans, constituting a majority of the delegates at General Conference, stand a better chance of being elected bishop. Historically, most of the bishops serving outside of the US were nonetheless Americans. Currently, bishops from outside the US lead only three out of the 20 districts. Americans lead four districts outside the US. In contrast, central conferences have served to ensure indigenous episcopal leadership in the UMC outside the US.

Whereas the UMC has a system of independent boards and agencies, the AME Church has one General Board with various departments that function like UMC boards and agencies. Thus, the AME Church system is more akin to Plan UMC. The AME departments are headquartered in the US (as are the UMC agencies), and the General Secretary/Chief Information Officer is required to have an office in either Washington, DC, St. Louis, Nashville, or Memphis. The departments and the General Secretary are, however, required by the Discipline to have “voluntary” field representatives in episcopal districts outside the US. UMC program agencies have some sort of presence outside the US, but this is not disciplinarily required, nor is it true of all boards and agencies. The AME Judicial Council is entirely American in membership, whereas the UMC Judicial Council has members from outside the US as well.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the UMC and the AME Church in terms of their global polity, however, is the AME Church’s Global Development Council and Commission on Global Development. As in the UMC, African members of the AME began to agitate in the early 1980s for greater inclusion in what they perceived to be a predominantly US-centric body. The bishops of the denomination took such pressures seriously. While overwhelmingly American, because the AME had retained the principle of general superintendency, the AME bishops were much more aware of what was going on in the church outside the US, since many of them had served episcopal terms in Africa or the Caribbean.

The effort to address African concerns led to some new initiatives in the early 1980s such as partnership-in-mission agreements between American and international branches of the church. These agreements not only facilitated development work outside the US but also sought to develop deeper “mutual understanding” and “more meaningful dialogue and interaction” among AME members from different countries.

Real changes in the global polity of the AME Church, however, awaited the late 1990s and early 200s. Starting in 1996, the church undertook a primarily African-led process of self-study that led to the formation of the Global Development Council. Its duties include to “develop a structure to address the needs, aspirations, beliefs and cultures of the global context,” “promote deeper understanding, collaboration, and cohesion among the AME Churches in Africa, the nations of the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and Canada with those in the United States,” “determine methods to address the unique challenges of the Districts outside of the United States,” and “propose legislation in the General Conference to move the process beyond the Global Development Council.” This is a broad scope of work, much beyond what the UMC’s Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters is commissioned to do. The Global Development Council is a high-powered group, with all bishops, the General Board, and heads of administrative departments involved, as well as representatives from all episcopal districts. Such work is then further supported by the Commission on Global Development, part of the church’s General Board.

This process resulted in substantial changes to the denomination’s Doctrines and Disciplines, its equivalent to the Book of Discipline. These changes included adding a section on “Global Witness and Development in Africa, the Nations of the Caribbean, Europe, South America, and India” that includes a recounting of the history of greater global inclusion in the AME Church. The Doctrines and Disciplines also includes assertions such as “The budgets of the Episcopal Districts 14-20 of the AME Church shall be included in both the responsibilities and benefits of every activity of the church. Districts 14-20 [those outside the US] shall not be treated separately or differently in any way, personal or financial. They shall also participate in the decision-making processes of the church.”

AME Church does lack Central Conferences as a means of adapting polity to local circumstances outside the US. Yet, through the Global Development Council and revisions to the Doctrines and Disciples, it has been much more successful in embracing internationalization and enshrining this value in their polity. Indeed, it is fair to say that while the UMC has emphasized local contextualization, the AME Church has emphasized international inclusion. While there are undoubtedly many factors behind this difference, the retention of a more fully itinerant general superintendency in the AME is likely an important one.

Race, gender, and nationality on UM & Global

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.

Over the last two weeks, I've reported on the percentage of authors by race, gender, and nationality among those blogs submitted to Methoblog and on umc.org's Blogs and Connections page.  This week, it's time to turn the analysis inward and look at who's writing on this blog.

To start with, I as a white American male have written about 2/3rds of the posts on UM & Global over the lifetime of the blog.  As a regular rule, I write the Tuesday post, and a guest writes the Thursday post, but there are weeks where there's been no guest writer, and there were a couple of months at the beginning of the blog that I wrote exclusively.

The guest writers are invited from a network of professors, mission practitioners, and church leaders.  Thus, it is a curated collection of voices, as I discussed last week.  Guest writers are selected by a steering committee for this blog composed of four members of the United Methodist Professors of Mission including two white American males, one white European male living in America, and one white American female.  All but two of the guest writers were living in the US at the time of writing, though I know from personal contact that several of them are originally from countries other than the US.  Where that's the case, I have identified them in the statistics below by their continent of origin.  When I was in any doubt, I assumed the writer was American.

Out of our 31 guest writers, 11 (35%) are white American males, 4 (13%) are white American females, 4 (13%) are white European males, 3 (10%) are Asian-American males, 3 (10%) are Asian males, 2 (6%) are Latino-American males, 1 (3%) is a Latino male, 1 (3%) is an Asian-American female, 1 (3%) is an Asian female, and 1 (3%) is an African-American female.  That leads to 77% male authors, 71% American, and 61% white overall.

As the numbers show, there's been a noticeable gender imbalance in our authorship, reflecting in part gender biases in the academy.  African-American and especially African voices are under-represented on this blog.  There are some technological and linguistic challenges in including African voices, but that's not an excuse.  It is our intention at UM & Global to develop a more representative collection of United Methodist voices from around the world.

The single biggest thing UM & Global could do to present a more representative collection of voices, though, would be for me to write fewer of the posts.  That's actually a plan in the works.  While I will continue to manage the technology aspects of UM & Global and will continue to contribute posts, it is our intention to transition in 2015 to a format more similar to that used by UMC Lead, where there is a collection of regular writers for the blog, of which I will be only one.  These writers will come from among United Methodist professors, missionaries, theologians, and church leaders from around the world.  It will still be a curated collection of voices and probably still not be entirely proportional to the membership, but I do want be sure we are including a set of voices that reflects even if it does not quite proportionately represent the racial, gender, and national diversity of the UMC.

American Independence Day & Lithuanian Statehood Day

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.

Thursday was the Fourth of July, aka Independence Day in the United States, the biggest patriotic festival of the year.  The holiday commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence (from Britain) on July 4, 1776.  Americans across the country celebrated with fireworks, speeches, music, backyard cookouts (featuring classic American food such as hamburgers and sweet corn), and lots of American flags.

Today is the sixth of July, aka Statehood Day in Lithuania.  Statehood Day commemorates the coronation of King Mindaugas, the only king of Lithuania, in 1253.  It's only one of three holidays commemorating important beginnings for the Lithuanian nation (the others recognize the restoration of the nation in 1918 and 1990), but it will nevertheless be observed by speeches, music, celebration, and flags, not that differently from Independence Day in America.

There are United Methodists in both countries.  I know that many United Methodists in the United States will hear Independence Day referenced in their worship services on Sunday.  Some United Methodist congregations will no doubt sing various patriotic hymns as part of the worship, and American flags will be in the sanctuaries of many American United Methodist Churches.  While I'm less certain of this, I suspect that Statehood Day may get some references in United Methodist worship in Lithuania this coming Sunday as well.  Mindaugas was the first Lithuanian ruler to convert to Christianity, though he (like most medieval rulers) was not a paragon of Christian virtue.  While Lithuanian United Methodists won't be singing, "God Bless America," that doesn't mean they won't be proud of their country and happy to celebrate it.

The juxtaposition of these two national holidays and the roles that they play in the lives of United Methodists in both countries raise some questions about the global nature of The United Methodist Church.  How does the UMC as a global church encompass the patriotic fervor of citizens of a host of nations?  How does it affirm the importance of national community while simultaneously reminding United Methodists that we are all ultimately citizens of heaven first and foremost?  How does United Methodism accommodate itself to national settings while at the same time forging international connections and religious bonds?  These questions are not easy to answer, but as you're in worship this Sunday, wherever that may be, spend a few minutes considering them.