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General Conference and the law of unintended consequences
By Riley B. Case

Creative change comes from unexpected sources. Just in the years I have pastored who could have anticipated:

• Vatican II. The local Catholic priest in the town I was serving called me up and wondered if we could get our youth groups together. Sixty teenagers, Catholic and Protestant, shared faith in a way they had never done in their lives, though they had always been in school together.

• Charismatic renewal. In the community I was serving it started with Catholics, then spread to Mennonites, Methodists, and Episcopalians.

 • The Jesus People. Doug, a lapsed member of my church, showed up one day with a beard, long hair, grungy clothes, a big smile, and a Bible. Soon we had six or eight of these strange new Christians, converted out of the drug culture, playing guitar and talking to our youth group about Jesus (to the chagrin of the parents).

• Evangelical renewal on the college campuses. The first InterVarsity Missions Conference at Urbana that I attended had 5,000 students wanting to win the world for Christ. Soon the same conference registered 17,000. Campus Crusade in 1972 gathered 125,000 in Dallas. The coming generations would not be without a Christian witness.

• A revolution in music. I only reluctantly attended my first Christian rock ’n’ roll concert. I was duly offended, then thrilled when hundreds of teenagers responded to an invitation.

• Christianity where it wasn’t supposed to be. I read a sad book about Christianity in China, how it had been wiped out by the Communist revolution. Then we discovered a few years later that, unknown to most of us in the West, Christianity was alive in China (and in other places) with more Christians there today than before Communism.

• United Methodism in other places. I remember the report of a United Methodist in the Congo that, despite poverty and war, fifty new churches had been established in one year in one district.

I would never have predicted any of these God-events. As far as I know none were set in motion by church planning teams, or predicted by knowledgeable pundits, or envisioned by denominational conferences.

Which brings up the subject of the United Methodist General Conferences, which are set in motion by church planning teams, make use of knowledgeable pundits, and are denominational conferences, specializing in “vision.”

I attended my first General Conference in Pittsburgh in 1964 and have been to many since then, including five times as a delegate. I believe I have approached every General Conference with a sense of awe: this conference has the possibility of setting in motion important developments for good—or not so good—that will determine the future of the church.

I have come to believe that overall these conferences have not served us well. Indeed, I wonder if we would have made the decisions we made if we could have known how they would have turned out. Not that the intentions were not good, nor the planning not extensive. It is rather that we have suffered the law of unintended consequences. Our actions simply did not bring about the hoped-for results.

One of the most highly-touted decisions in the last forty years was the merger of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) churches (1968-1970-1972). The merger came about during the heady days of institutional ecumenism. The merger had almost 100 percent support from both Methodists and EUBs. The two denominations shared a common Wesleyan doctrine, a revivalist past, and an episcopal form of church government. Many Methodist evangelicals favored the merger because we believed EUB evangelicalism might be a force for good in the new denomination (which, unfortunately, never happened). But apart from the hope of doctrinal and spiritual renewal through EUB influence, arguments for merger appealed to mission, efficiency, and an enlarged witness.

Institutionally, the merger worked. We formed ourselves into conferences headed by bishops. We worked out legal issues. We tried hard to convince ourselves we were one, big happy family and the work of the Lord was progressing. Practically, however, it was a different story. Despite quotas systems and guaranteed representation the fact is that the EUBs were simply swallowed up in a corporate take over. EUBs lost a seminary, some pretty good Sunday school material, many conference grounds and camp facilities, and a sense of identity. Before the merger, EUBs argued they did not have name recognition. They soon found out name recognition was no great blessing.

A study of former “First” county-seat EUB churches in North Indiana twenty-five years after the merger found that 25 of 27 “First” churches had declined dramatically, and several had closed. These churches lost an identity and the confidence that went with being a “First” church.

While the merger personally benefited many former EUB pastors, churches suffered. The 1966 statistics show a Methodist-EUB combined membership of 11,042,996. Four years later the membership of the new denomination was 10,334,521, a decrease of a discouraging and unbelievable 708,475 members. The losses were greatest in conferences with the highest concentration of former EUB churches. The United Methodist Church lost in four years almost as many members as the entire EUB church had before the merger. Two years later, the 1972 statistics reported another 271,475 lost members.

An entire group of EUB churches in the northwest opted out of the merger because they were aware of the liberalism of the Methodist Church in the Northwest, and they believed there would be no future for them in that theological climate. They were right. They formed the Evangelical Church of America, a denomination today with 17,000 members, equal to about half of present membership of the Oregon-Idaho UM Conference.

Assurances made to EUBs about some of their distinctive practices were never kept. For example, EUBs were told their traditions and their broad-minded approach to baptism would be honored. It was quickly apparent that the assurances meant nothing, and today common former-EUB practices (infant dedication and re-baptism) are declared unacceptable and even bases for a chargeable offense.

A more serious consequence passed on by the Methodist-EUB merger was restructuring. At the time there was a lot of excitement about how a new structure would be suited for the times, would make for more effective ministry, and would position the church for a glorious future. None of that took place.

What happened in 1972 was the realignment of boards and agencies in a manner that would concentrate power in the agencies advocating for liberation theology and social change. One superboard, the General Board of Global Ministries, gathered to itself the work done by several program agencies of the former Methodist and EUB churches. As the result of a complex quota system, the Women’s Division carried the balance of power in the board, which, among other things, began dismantling Methodism’s missionary force (reduced from 2,000 missionaries to just over 200 today). Unchecked by any other authority in the church, the board became known for its support of causes like the Sandinistas, Cuban socialism, and Robert Magabe’s Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe.

The restructuring elevated the former Commission on Social Concerns (which had not even existed before 1952) into the status of a General Board. Meanwhile, major agencies before restructure with responsibilities for evangelism, education, laity, and worship, were all subsumed as divisions and diminished under the General Board of Discipleship.

The decline in morale at the Board of Discipleship was immediately noticeable. For years some of the most prestigious positions in the former Methodist Church were associated with the Board of Education. Editors set the tone and direction of church programs and wrote grand-schemed books about the coming kingdom. The new structure split the old Board of Education into a number of pieces. New structure brought new educational philosophy. The Methodist Youth Fellowship, successor to Epworth League, and one of the most effective youth programs in the former Methodist church, was simply eliminated (“too Mickey Mouse”).

In 1967 there were 13 youth staff under the former Methodist Board of Education, 15 secretaries, 52 full-time conference directors, and 1,200,000 pieces of curriculum material per quarter. By 1976 the merged church counted one part-time youth staff, one secretary, and 400,000 pieces of curriculum materials per quarter. The Youth Service Fund, a source of missions giving from youth, simply dried up. Church school enrollment declined from nearly 7 million in 1966 to less than 4 million in 1985.

No one would have predicted the disintegration of youth ministry and the rapid decline of Sunday school enrollment before restructuring. Some today would argue that there were other factors besides restructuring that contributed to the decline (social ferment leading to the mistrust of all institutions, and, of course, defective theology) but it is hard to make the case that such rapid disintegration could have come without the facilitating actions of naïve General Conferences about what was best for the church. 

The restructuring of 1972 also gave to the church the concept of the Council on Ministries, which was based on the old Program Council of the former EUB Church. The Council on Ministries was given the responsibility to coordinate, evaluate, and to hold accountable the program agencies, which basically did not want to be coordinated and evaluated and held accountable. What looked good on paper simply never worked, either on a general church level, or on a conference level, or on a district level, or on a local church level, or on any level. It was eventually replaced with the “Connectional Table” several years ago.

One of the new superboards of the1972 restructuring was the Board of Higher Education and the Ministry. With the help of succeeding General Conferences and a never-ending series of special task forces and studies, the board managed to take a working and relatively simple understanding of ministry and make it complex, confusing, and frustrating—characterized by layers of bureaucracies and unnecessary hoops to jump through. For all the mountains we now make prospective ministers climb, we are not seeing better and more numerous candidates for ministry.

Consider: the church has deaconesses, who are related to the National Division; diaconal ministers, who are commissioned and considered lay; deacons, who were once diaconal ministers and lay but are now “clergy” ordained to Word (except “Word” means something different for them) and service; persons who were once ordained “deacons” in preparation for being elder but who now are “commissioned” (except that may change) while serving a probationary period.

Ordained deacons are not to administer sacraments but local pastors can. Deacons may be ordained as pastors but that does not mean they are licensed for pastoral ministry. Local pastors (preachers) were once lay but now are clergy, but not elders; clergy are elders but not necessarily pastors.

The 2004 Book of Discipline has 140 entries in the index for “ordained ministry,” more than double any other topic. This is 140 times the number of entries for “ordained ministry” in the 1968 Methodist Book of Discipline (which had one entry).

And what more shall be said of programs, initiatives, missional priorities, task forces, and studies? Or about commissions which seem to exist primarily to monitor other agencies in the church?

Because of this history we ought to be apprehensive to the point of panic about the most grand, colossal, restructuring configuration to date, namely, the proposal before the 2008 General Conference to separate the global church into regional or central conferences. There would be a global General Conference, then Central Conferences based on “regions.” The Central Conferences would have their own agencies, their own hymnal, and their own Book of Discipline that would set its own rules for membership and ministry.

If it feels a lot like segregation, it basically is segregation. If it feels like the United States is worried about the influence of the growing church overseas, especially in Africa, it is because there is a real fear. Because of decreasing U.S. membership and increasing overseas membership, without a protectionist wall to keep out the outsiders, the United Methodist Church could quickly have a situation where Africans might have the balance of power to affect how the budget is spent, and how programs are initiated.

For example, the present Ministerial Education Fund spends 15 million dollars a year to subsidize American seminaries while African seminaries get next to nothing. Supposing the Africans wanted a more equal distribution of funds to support ministerial training in Africa? The way to avoid that situation is to deny the overseas church any say as to how those funds are spent.

The proposal is loaded with unknowns. It has not been initiated by the church overseas. It would certainly involve more layers of bureaucracy, the very thing that is presently crippling the United Methodist Church. It would necessitate constitutional amendments, basically changing the character of United Methodism.

The church has suffered because of the unintended consequences of General Conference actions that were well-intentioned and looked good on paper, but which simply did not work. Is past experience not enough to urge caution on this very controversial proposal of a segregated American Central Conference?

Riley B. Case is a retired member of the North Indiana Conference, assistant executive director of the Confessing Movement, and a member of the Good News Board of Directors. He is also the author of Evangelical and Methodist: A Popular History (Abingdon).



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