Making room in the UMC for the Spirit’s work

As we were leaving the convention center in Charlotte after a long day of legislative meetings, a friend and prominent leader within our denomination whispered to me something he didn’t want overheard: “Being a global church is really hard work.” His simple yet insightful observation is another way of saying what my colleague Barry Bryant often maintains: Methodism’s biggest challenge is living a contextual theology in a connectional polity.

At this year’s United Methodist general conference—a quadrennial global gathering of delegates representing ecclesial regions throughout the world—the church was striving to express in doctrine and polity its most faithful understanding of who God is calling the Methodist people to be. For generations we have been consumed by debates over biblical authority, human sexuality, regional differences, colonial legacies, the accompanying attempts at decolonizing our polity and theology, and the demographic shifts that have altered the locus of power in the church’s decision-making apparatus.

Put simply, the church’s regions outside the United States now have a greater influence and vitality than those within the US, yet much of the financial and organizational power structure remains firmly ensconced in the US. For much of the last 50 years, traditionalists within the US have been theologically aligned with those outside the US, but those non-US regions have remained financially reliant on the more theologically progressive churchwide leadership. With the sizable exodus of traditionalists from the United Methodist Church over the last five years, the theological and political dynamics shifted considerably, setting up a dramatic and consequential assembly.