Regionalization and Connectionalism: The Era of Globalization and World Christianity

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. It is the fourth in a five-part series based on a presentation by Dr. Scott to the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

Questions of local relevance and trans-local connection and of connection and power within the church have played out for Methodists in three separate historical eras: the colonial mission era, the era of political independence and church autonomy, and the era of globalization and world Christianity.

The last national church to become autonomous as part of the second era indicated was the Methodist Church in India in 1980. One quadrennium later, the UMC would absorb formerly autonomous churches in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Burundi, symbolically ushering in the third era, that of globalization and world Christianity.

Secular globalization has its roots in the 1970s, further developed under the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and really came into its own as a concept and reality in the 1990s, promoting a wave of critique and backlash by the 2000s.

Definitions of globalization vary, but there is broad consensus that it reflects increasing connections in political, economic, technological, cultural, social, and religious matters. Globalization also entails increased movement of people, goods, money, and ideas around the world, movements that are made possible by new technologies.

Secular globalization has always had its critics, but promoters of globalization have seen it as ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity for all, based on spreading acceptance of free-market liberal democracy and human rights, made plausible by the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Whatever its merits, the increased international connections that were part of globalization certainly ushered in a new awareness of the international sphere, an awareness that was reflected in the increased popularity of terms such as “global” and “multinational.” While globalization was a multinational phenomenon, the role of American power in shaping and promoting globalization must be acknowledged.

Within The United Methodist Church in the United States, this era saw an increased interest in the church outside the United States. The balance between autonomy and international structural connection swung back in the direction of structural connection. The UMC absorbed churches in not only Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Burundi, as mentioned, but also eventually Cote d’Ivoire. In the 1990s, United Methodists began new mission work in other countries for the first time in almost 70 years. That work included post-Soviet Russia and the Baltics, as well as Southeast Asia and other areas of the world.

Along with this renewed appetite for international expansion came growing numbers of members in African branches of the church that had long been part of the UMC. These two trends led to a new discussion of the “worldwide nature of the church” and what it meant to be a “global” denomination, a conversation launched at the 1992 General Conference.

Prior to this conversation, in the 1980s, some structural changes were made to allow for greater equality between US bishops and bishops in the central conferences and to allow the various agencies of the denomination to work internationally. GBHEM was the first additional agency granted authority by General Conference to work outside the United States, in 1984, a move which led to the founding of Africa University in 1992.

More sweeping changes, including the creation of some sort of regional structure for the United States, were put forward multiple times in the course of this work on the “global” or “worldwide” nature of the church. The 2008 General Conference, the same one that accepted Cote d’Ivoire into the UMC, adopted a series of amendments that would have accomplished such a restructuring, but the amendments were voted down at the annual conference level. Conservatives stoked fears that such a restructuring would allow for recognition of gay clergy in the United States, and such fears doomed the amendments.

As the number of missionaries declined and as funding shifted to prioritize the central conferences that continued in structural relationship with United Methodists in the United States, connections with autonomous churches atrophied. Autonomous churches were not absent from conversations about the worldwide nature of the church, but the focus of the conversation was clearly on the structural relationship between the church in the United States and the church in the central conferences.

As in previous eras, alongside these concerns for structural relationships, other means of connection fostered international relationships as well. As the boards became more international, they began to include United Methodists from more regions of the world in their membership.

Migration continued to be an important factor of connection and a key one in launching mission in Southeast Asia. The number of long-term missionaries declined, but the number of short-term mission participants from the United States skyrocketed, capitalizing on faster, cheaper, easier travel. Students from around the world continued to study in the United States, and new educational ventures such as Africa University and the Methodist e-Academy brought together students from across Africa and Europe, respectively.

American, and to a lesser extent, European money continued to create forms of connection and cooperation, and these connections were increasingly directly between annual conferences or churches rather than mediated through the boards and agencies. Writings drawing from the new academic field of world Christianity became a new way for United Methodists in the United States to understand their fellow United Methodists from elsewhere.

For all this increased interest in the worldwide nature of the church and these new initiatives in connecting the church, the church did not make significant advances towards connection without control. There was increasing talk of mutuality and decolonization, but there were little structural changes in how annual conferences (the basic units of the church) related to one another.

While United Methodists worked with other, autonomous Methodist churches to establish a new autonomous church in Cambodia, this did not prompt a larger conversation about the nature or value of autonomy in the church. As scholar Darryl Stephens has argued, although the number of members involved were similar, the joining of Cote d’Ivoire to The United Methodist Church did not provoke the same sort of rethinking of structure as the 1968 merger that created The United Methodist Church. The church in Cote d’Ivoire was absorbed into the UMC; it did not negotiate a merger.

The United States continued to set the parameters in terms of structure, funding, program, and focus for the denomination, with other areas adapting, often in an unofficial manner. Fears persisted in the church that adaptation might go too far and allow freedoms that were opposed by majorities at the General Conference, and thus the General Conference, with its US-dominated membership and its legislative and judicial processes based on US models, continued to be the central decision-making body for almost all major issues.

Yet, burdened by highly conflictual questions from the American context that had no other venue in which to be debated, General Conference itself struggled to function effectively as a decision-making body for an increasingly multicultural, multilingual, and international body.

Thus, the era of globalization and world Christianity saw the church struggle anew with questions about local relevance and trans-local connection, with questions about relationship and structure, but these questions were never satisfactorily resolved. In this regard, this era was similar to those that came before it. Even satisfactory answers to questions about local relevance and trans-local connection would need to be renegotiated anew in each new era.

For three subsequent eras, The United Methodist Church and its predecessors have failed to really resolve such questions even within the context of that era. As we will talk more about in a few minutes, we are coming to a new era, and so the question remains: Will we do better in this new era than we have in the past?

Up Next: Episcopal Elections in Central and Southern Europe and the Philippines

For many United Methodists in the United States, attention was focused this past week on episcopal elections in the five US jurisdictions. Although those elections are now completed, that is not the end of United Methodist episcopal elections this year. Up next are elections in the Central and Southern Europe Central Conference and the Philippines Central Conference.

The Central and Southern Europe Central Conference will meet November 16-20 in Basel. The Central Conference will elect one bishop, with balloting to begin on Thursday, Nov. 17 and continue to Friday, Nov. 18 if necessary (full agenda here). Unlike in the United States, the Central and Southern Europe Central Conference does not provide information about publicly declared candidates prior to the election, a function of its smaller size with more personal connections and differing cultural understandings.

In addition to its episcopal election, the central conference will also discuss its round table process to address the future of the central conference in the light of varying views of sexuality and departures from the denomination (for more, see this article and this fact sheet, both in German).

Next, the Philippines Central Conference will meet November 24-26 to elect three bishops. All three episcopal seats in the Philippines are up for vote in every episcopal election. There are numerous declared candidates for the episcopacy in the Philippines, and the National Association of Filipino American United Methodists and the Philippines Central Conference College of Bishops organized candidates forums so that Filipino United Methodists can learn more about those candidates. Videos of full forums are available here: [1], [2], and [3], and excerpts from each of the candidates are available in this playlist. 

Note the role of the US-based National Association of Filipino American United Methodists in organizing a candidates' forum for the Philippines. This is a clear indication that many Filipino American United Methodists still have strong ties to their home country and the church there. Episcopal elections always have implications beyond the boundaries in which candidates are elected, and in some instances, this is especially so.

Recommended Viewing: What Is Mission UMVIM Workshop

Rev. Matt Lacey of UMVIM recently hosted an online workshop entitled "What Is Mission?" featuring guest speakers Rev. Carol Lakota Eastin and Dr. David W. Scott, blogmaster of UM & Global. The 50-minute-long video features conversation among the three about the nature of mission, formative experiences in mission, and how congregations can engage in God's mission in the current context. Of particular interest in this workshop was conversation about the relationship between Native Americans and Christian mission. The video is recommended for congregational groups and school settings alike.

Regionalization and Connectionalism: The Era of Political Independence and Church Autonomy

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. It is the third in a five-part series based on a presentation by Dr. Scott to the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

Questions of local relevance and trans-local connection and of connection and power within the church have played out for Methodists in three separate historical eras: the colonial mission era, the era of political independence and church autonomy, and the era of globalization and world Christianity.

The second era in which questions about local relevance and trans-local connection were fiercely debated was the era of political independence and church autonomy, beginning after World War II, but coming to its full force in the 1960s and early 1970s. In this era, the international structures—whether political or churchly—that had been established in the first era were critiqued as a form of dominance and, in some instances, dismantled.

In the secular context, this took the form of nationalism and decolonization leading to political independence for formerly colonized nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Leaders in politics and society critiqued the structures of European and American empires and the unjust exploitation and lack of self-determination that were a part of these structures.

The solution to this problem was seen as the creation of independent nations, a process that required developing a sense of nationhood within colonies, even when the boundary lines of those colonies cut across historic groupings of tribe and religion.

Thus, while nationalism rejected international connections through colonial systems, new nationalisms in the 1960s often bound people together across religion, culture, and ethnicity. Moreover, nationalist movements in one country drew inspiration from nationalist movements in other countries. There was an international edge to 1960s nationalism. While at times nationalism could result in violence or exclusion, commentators of the age spoke of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” forms of nationalism.

This push toward self-government was reflected in the church as well. Branches of Methodism outside the United States were not content to remain dominated by mostly American missionaries, an American mission board, American bishops, and an overwhelmingly American General Conference.

This same trend would impact British Methodism as well, along with other American expressions of Methodism such as the AME Church, AME Zion Church, Free Methodists, Wesleyan Church, and Nazarenes. The British responded to this movement by eventually granting autonomy to branches outside Britain associated with the British church’s mission agency. Other American denominations all made adjustments to their polities to ensure greater international equity within their structures.

For its part, the Methodist Church launched the Commission on the Status of Methodism Overseas, or COSMOS, as it was called. COSMOS was charged with rethinking the relationship between Methodists in the United States and those elsewhere around the world. Through several quadrennia of study and international conferences in Green Lake, WI in 1966 and Atlantic City, NJ in 1970, COSMOS explored models of international connection and responded to requests for autonomy by branches of Methodism outside the United States.

COSMOS considered several possibilities for international structure: national autonomy for all branches of the church, continued central conference status for churches outside the United States, the creation of a central conference for the United States with corresponding changes to General Conference, and the creation of a worldwide council of Methodist Churches.

Ultimately, only the first two possibilities—autonomy or central conference status—were pursued, and COSMOS recommended its own disbanding in 1972. The Methodist Church/EUB Church merger in 1968 took away attention from COSMOS’ work, and other polity possibilities were seen as too difficult and costly. The Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters is the successor to COSMOS.

When offered the choice of autonomy or central conference status, most branches of the church in Asia and all branches in Latin American requested autonomy from The Methodist Church or United Methodist Church between 1964 and 1980. For the Evangelical United Brethren tradition, autonomy and ecumenical merger were the expectation for branches outside the United States, though churches in Switzerland and Germany remained part of the newly created United Methodist Church in 1968.

In all countries, autonomy reflected a desire for greater local decision-making to ensure local relevance. In some countries, it also reflected a desire for greater ecumenical connection within that country. In all instances, conferences choosing autonomy were promised that connection with the UMC would continue after autonomy, both through the mission board and the bishops. The World Methodist Council also helped to foster on-going relationships between the newly autonomous churches and the remaining Methodist and then United Methodist Church.

While the focus of this time period was on questions of structure, including what autonomy meant for the ability to choose one’s own episcopal leadership and make decisions locally in one’s own conference, we must not forget other, more relational forms of connection that bound the church together.

As in the earlier era, missionaries, missionary writings, and mission funding continued as important forms of connection, especially after autonomy, though the number of missionaries deployed around the world began to decline, especially outside Africa. Students from outside the United States studying in the United States became an increasingly important form of international connection and relationship-building in this period, as did migrants to the United States following changes in US laws in 1965.

Theological exchange continued to happen through writings, including through the rise of new liberation and contextual theologies around the world. Such theological exchanges again illustrate the connection between means of local relevance and means of trans-local connection. Contextual theologies were developed for the sake of local relevance, but they also generated a great deal of international interest and discussion.

Despite such innovations in maintaining connection and local relevance, the failure of The Methodist Church and subsequently The United Methodist Church to really make changes to its structures of connection meant that, as in the earlier era, the church continued to be characterized by US dominance. Formal, structural connection meant control by US United Methodists. The General Conference, Judicial Council, and Council of Bishops all continued to be controlled by US Americans. The United States continued to set the pattern and the agenda for the denomination, and the church in other areas could perhaps adapt or adjust as they saw fit.

Central conferences did slowly win increased powers of adaptation, but the range of officially recognized adaptation was still small. Moreover, the church continued to operate with a center-periphery style of thinking in which the church in the United States was the center, and all other branches were peripheral.

The next post will look at the era of globalization and world Christianity.

UM & Global Collection on Theological Education

A new UM & Global collection is now available. This collection examines theological education, including its intersection with mission and Methodism, access to theological education, and the ways in which it is changing in various contexts around the world.

The collection includes eleven posts by Ann Hidalgo, Genilma Boehler, Benjamin L. Hartley, Andrew Harper, David N. Field, Robert A. Hunt, Dana L. Robert, and David W. Scott. As with other collections, there is a set of discussion questions at the end of the volume, intended to help church members, students, and others reflect on how theological educators can help prepare their students and the church as a whole to effectively join in God's mission to the world.

Recommended Viewing: Fresh Expressions Webinars

Discipleship Ministries is sponsoring a year-long series of monthly webinars on Fresh Expressions, the movement to start new forms of church in new places for new people. According to the description, "Fresh Expressions UM is a distinctly Wesleyan Spirit-led movement of new Christian communities that serve the present age. We are seeking to cultivate inclusive, accessible, transformative, and connectional communities of love and grace for people currently neglected by the church."

The announcement notes, "The structure of the symposium is a series of free live-streamed events using Zoom. Each speaker will consider a core theological distinction that needs to be reappropriated to “serve the present age,” and then respond live to your questions. The recordings from these conversations will be made available with a study guide for your teams to work through together."

The webinars will occur the first Thursday of each month. The first webinar will be Nov. 3, featuring Michael Beck talking about "The new 'field preaching': Intercultural hermeneutics and dialogical preaching" and Brian Russell talking about "Idolatherapy: Reading Scripture for Deep Formation in the Love of God, Neighbor, and Self." Registration for the entire series can be found here.

Regionalization and Connectionalism: The Colonial Mission Era

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. It is the second in a five-part series based on a presentation by Dr. Scott to the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries. 

In this and the next two posts, I want to lay out how questions of local relevance and trans-local connection and of connection and power within the church have played out for Methodists in three separate historical eras: the colonial mission era, the era of political independence and church autonomy, and the era of globalization and world Christianity.

The first era is the colonial mission era. This is the age, lasting from the early 19th century to the early 20th century, during which Methodism spread from North America to other places in the world, usually following the lines of secular colonial and commercial expansion.

European colonization of other parts of the globe stretches back to the late 15th century, but the period from the middle of the 19th century through the World Wars is often referred to as the period of “high” colonialism, the era in which Western colonialism achieved its furthest geographic spread and greatest degree of political and economic control over other lands.

Emblematic of this period of high colonialism was the “scramble for Africa,” the competition among European countries to control portions of the African continent, leading to the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, at which Europeans, without African input, agreed among themselves on how to partition Africa.

Of course, colonialism existed in Asia and Latin America as well, and indeed, European colonialism developed in these contexts earlier than it did in central Africa. And we must remember, too, that the United States entered the act of holding foreign colonies in 1898 with its victory in the Spanish-American War.

Along with the extension of European (and American) political control over other areas went the extension of Western economic networks. Often, political control and economic exploitation were deeply intertwined. This phenomenon of economic expansion was one in which the United States participated vigorously after its Civil War, especially in Latin America. As part of both colonialism and commercialism went the extension of various new technologies of transportation and communication: trains, steamships, telegraphs, and even postcards.

This was the context in which American Methodist missions began to spread, first to returned former slaves in West Africa, next to American businessmen in Latin America, then to immigrant homelands in Europe, and then to populous nations in Asia, and so on.

By 1919, when American Methodists from the North and the South celebrated the centenary of their mission agencies, Methodist churches had hundreds of missionaries and tens of thousands of converts in dozens of nations across five continents. Mission work included not only evangelism, but also education, healthcare, literacy, agriculture, and the promotion of democracy and Western culture. This wave of founding new branches of Methodism in new countries crested in the mid-1920s, when financial problems with mission fundraising and budgeting forced consolidation and retrenchment of mission efforts.

These missionaries organized their converts into new branches of their denominational structures, especially in the Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South. As mission historian Wade Crawford Barclay wrote, “There is no record of the Missionary Society having given instructions to their missionaries to transfer to their respective fields the exact pattern of church organization existing at home. It was assumed by all, without question, that this would be done.” That is, missionaries, mission executives, and bishops all assumed that connections across geography must include structural connections.

Nevertheless, founding new branches of the church in new geographic and cultural locations did raise questions about the process of trying to establish “the exact pattern of church organization existing at home.” How exactly should these new branches of the church relate to existing branches? What should be done if local conditions made some elements of the home pattern of church organization impractical, or even impossible? How could the church maintain connection—and often, control—over long distances that made travel and communication slow?

The answers that the church developed, slowly, through experimentation, and often outside the boundaries of existing polity, reflected the means of connection and local relevance that characterized the early church. Missionaries were a form of itinerants and the most important link in holding the various branches of the church together. They were not the only such link—migrants, traveling preachers, and even tourists also made connections across geographic regions of the church.

Nevertheless, missionaries were the most important such link, both in their own travel to the mission field and home for furloughs, and in their voluminous amount of writing. They wrote letters, newspaper articles, magazine articles, books, pamphlets, even calendars, and this volume of writing served to communicate about the home field to those they encountered around the world and to communicate about mission, including the lives and customs of people on the mission field, back to their friends, family, and supporters at home.

Often inspired by visits and letters from missionaries, church members in the United States (and Europe) in turn sent money to the mission field, both through denominational mission structures and directly through personal relationships with missionaries. This generosity underwrote the development of the church around the world, though it also often established long-standing traditions of dependence. Some mission leaders such as William Taylor attempted to cultivate self-support on the mission field, opting for local relevance instead of international financial connection.

As the church outside the United States grew, the structures of the church grew there as well, including both conferences and bishops. Annual conferences outside the United States were formed quite early, already in the 1830s, though initially in an adapted form as “missionary annual conferences.” Central conferences were added later in the 1880s, originally on the local initiative of missionaries in India, though eventually adopted into the regular practice and polity of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and carried over to successor denominations, including the UMC. Jurisdictions in The Methodist Church and The United Methodist Church were modeled in part on central conferences.

Questions about episcopal supervision and the availability of ordination also arose from the church outside the United States, first in Liberia and then elsewhere. This led to a variety of polity experiments in providing episcopal supervision, including travel by general superintendent bishops from the United States, missionary bishops limited to areas outside the United States, and general superintendent bishops appointed to live outside the United States. None of these arrangements were fully satisfactory to both areas of the church outside the United States and to decision-making centers of the church in the United States.

Several branches of the church outside the United States, starting with Japan in 1907 and continuing through Korea, Mexico, and Brazil in 1930, became autonomous churches, structurally separate from their parent denominational bodies, though still connected through missionaries, writings, and money. The desire to unite separate branches of Methodism, local political considerations, and, in the case of Brazil, disputes over episcopal supervision motivated these moves to autonomy. These developments, however, did not initiate a new wave of rethinking the relationship between autonomy and connection. Instead, with the 1939 merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Methodist Protestant Church, the international polity of the new Methodist Church took on a settled character.

In the attempt to ensure both local relevance and trans-local connection, the Methodist churches of this era tended to emphasize trans-local connection over local relevance. Moreover, this was usually connection as a form of control by those in the United States, who in this era exercised dominance over other branches of the church, especially those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Methodists in the United States set the standards, and others were occasionally allowed to adapt those standards to a greater or lesser degree. But Methodists in the United States were slow to recognize the need to adapt the practices of the church to ensure local relevance outside the United States.

When adaptation did happen, it usually did so through American missionaries taking initiative outside the regular system of polity, and even American missionaries were often suspicious of local control by native leaders. American Methodists in this era spread the gospel to others around the world, but the relationships and structures they created to do so stressed connection as control instead of connection as an aid to local relevance.

The next post will look at the era of political independence and church autonomy.