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A UMNS Report
By Linda Bloom*
7:00 A.M. ET August 9, 2012
Agency executives confer during the 2012 United Methodist General
Conference in Tampa, Fla., following the Judicial Council's decision
that a proposed restructuring plan was unconstitutional. From left are:
Karen Greenwaldt, Thomas Kemper, Larry Hollon, Gil Hanke, Robert
Williams, Erin Hawkins and M. Garlinda Burton. A UMNS file photo by
Kathleen Barry.
View in Photo Gallery
Despite the recent collapse of an overall strategy for
restructuring, the bureaucracy of The United Methodist Church is
changing.
Shrinking boards of directors — in some cases, to tiny proportions —
are requiring adjustments in governance and representation for the
denomination’s agencies and commissions.
Budget constraints dictate a streamlining of priorities and realignment of staffing needs.
Renewed commitments to bilateral and multi-agency cooperation are
focusing attention on shared services and common missional priorities.
Gil Hanke, who chairs the General Secretaries Table, a forum for
the church’s top staff executives, said its members are working “with
renewed interest” on issues perceived to be unresolved and new areas of
interaction. “I’m kind of excited about where we are right now,” he
told United Methodist News Service.
The Call to Action,
an effort to reform the denomination, led to restructuring legislation
presented this spring to the 2012 United Methodist General Conference
in Tampa, Fla. General Conference is the denomination’s top lawmaking
body.
The church’s top executives sometimes found themselves on the defensive as the legislation was debated and shaped into Plan UMC.
“There’s this narrative that the general agencies continue to grow
and grow and grow, that there’s this huge bureaucracy, but the truth is
that we’ve gone from 3,100 agency staff to 1,300 over the last 40
years,” said Jim Winkler, Board of Church and Society.
Although some agencies submitted their own legislation
to reduce the size of their boards of directors, Winkler believes a
“mob mentality” prevailed at General Conference over the idea that
agency boards had to be shrunk as a cost-cutting measure.
The Board of Church and Society, which retains a 62-member board,
already had slashed its meeting costs by 40 percent, he said. “I think
we’re going to find out we’ve lost a lot of connections to annual
conferences and local churches by having fewer people represented on
our boards.”
Erin Hawkins of the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race
speaks during the 2012 General Conference. Hawkins believes the church
needs to ensure churches “are relevant in communities where there are
changing demographics.” A UMNS file photo by Skyler E. Nimmons.
View in Photo Gallery
Hanke, who leads the Commission on United Methodist Men, observed
that the full impact of the board reductions did not become real until jurisdictional conferences made appointments this July. Still, he is pleased with the caliber and diversity of his slightly smaller board of directors.
Erin Hawkins, top executive of the Commission on Religion and Race,
said she was disappointed about how the discussion over the need for
realignment of the general church was redirected during the course of
the legislative meeting.
“What it came down to at General Conference, it seemed, was ‘where
can we start to cut,’ which is really not a conversation about the
ministry of the church,” she said.
Only 2 cents out of every dollar in the collection plates go to support general church ministries, but when the final denominational budget for the next four years was adopted, the cuts were substantial, particularly for agencies dependent upon World Service funds.
After the Judicial Council declared Plan UMC unconstitutional on the last day of General Conference, some church members were discouraged and angry and others relieved.
In a May 17 letter to his directors, Thomas Kemper, top executive of
the Board of Global Ministries, expressed regret that more energy at
the top legislative meeting was focused on “rearranging the
denominational furniture” than developing vital congregations.
But Kemper also saw an opportunity for the general agencies to take
the lead in shaping the denominational future, acting in collaboration
to “build productive, unifying approaches to share services and support
one another in the interfaces of mission, discipleship, education and
social justice.”
Making cooperation ‘visible’
Hanke is finding that kind of enthusiasm among other agency leaders
as well. Cooperation was evident before, he pointed out, but not always
apparent to the rest of the church.
“One of the efforts that we, as agencies, are doing is making it
more visible,” he said. “In addition to that, we can’t be satisfied
(only) with what we’ve done in the past.”
In the few months since General Conference concluded, for example,
members of the General Secretaries Table have discussed sharing
services and are evaluating programmatic overlaps to address accusations
about the redundancy of agency programs. “We need to look at those
perceptions, and if they’re the reality, we need to deal with it,”
Hanke said.
A number of collaborations already are in the works, including:
- Creating a scholarship web portal to allow “one-stop shopping” for United Methodist students.
- Pooling resources for learning, teaching and leading United Methodist churches in Africa.
- Starting 1,000 new churches between 2013 and 2016.
- Challenging young adults to create a church that is relevant to them through the Spark12 program.
The Rev. Karen Greenwaldt, top executive, Board of Discipleship,
stressed that her agency welcomes “any new vision of the general church
that reduces the perceived distance between general agencies, annual
conferences and local churches in order to increase the making of
disciples of Jesus Christ.”
Communication and trust
To get its message across, The United Methodist Church not only
must deal with the issue of how it is organized, but also how to reach
the public across a changing media landscape, said the Rev. Larry
Hollon, top executive of United Methodist Communications.
Gil Hanke speaks about scouting ministries during the 2012 General
Conference. Hanke, who chairs the General Secretaries Table, said he is
excited about renewed cooperation among the denomination’s top agency
staff leaders. A UMNS file photo by Mike DuBose.
View in Photo Gallery
Because the mainline denominations, as a whole, “have lost their
voice in public conversation and in cultural influence,” Hollon said,
the denomination’s willingness to be highly visible in the public media
is theologically important. Cooperation among different parts of the
church is key to that visibility.
He cited The United Methodist Church’s full-page ads in the Denver
and Aurora newspapers, as an example. The ad reminds people that a
loving and all-embracing God stands with them in a time of tragedy.
The spirit of collaboration is a benefit of the denomination’s
hallmark connectional system. However, the general agencies must work
harder than ever to stay connected, Winkler said, because the days of
church members being “Methodist-born, Methodist-bred and, when you die,
Methodist-dead” are over.
“In local churches, we’re virtually a refugee center for former
Catholics and Southern Baptists,” he added. “And they don’t know the
denomination that well.”
Neither do some of the neighborhoods in which United Methodist congregations are found, Hawkins pointed out.
“Our need is for congregations that are relevant in communities where
there are changing demographics,” she said. “That piece alone has the
potential to make or break the future of the church.”
*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at http://twitter.com/umcscribe.
News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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