Thoughts on a Global United Methodist Church that We Have Never Dared to Become

Transcription

1 1 Thoughts on a Global United Methodist Church that We Have Never Dared to Become This is an edited text of an address given on April 5 at The United Methodist Church after Tampa: Where Do We Go from Here, a United Methodist faculty consultation, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta. By Thomas Kemper Introduction Thank you to the planners of this event for inviting me to speak on the issue of the church s global nature. To me, the setting is notable because my first visit to the Candler School of Theology was in the early 1990s when Thomas Thangaraj began his work here. I had met Thomas while he was teaching at Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary in Madurai, India, and was impressed when I came here to find that Candler had added a professor who represented the theological witness of the Global South. The topic before us tonight has great relevance for me; first, because I am the first general secretary of any United Methodist general agency from a central conference that is, from outside the United States. This fact heightens my awareness that we are not just a U.S. church. Second, I see my selection, in part, as a mandate to move forward the discussion about and the awareness of our worldwide nature. I often describe our goal at the General Board of Global Ministries as that of becoming a global agency for a global church, although this phrase in this context is not limited to United Methodist church structures. As I prepared my paper, I often thought of the farewell party given me by the United Methodist Church in Germany as I took up my Global Ministries duties. I especially recalled a gift from retired Bishop Walter Klaiber, a friend and mentor with whom I had served most of my dozen years as the Germany Central Conference mission executive. Bishop Klaiber produced many theological books, even during his episcopal service, and at the time of my farewell, he

2 2 had just completed a commentary on Romans. He presented me with a copy of the commentary, and then, with a couple of sheets of paper, saying, jokingly, that he was giving me a summary of the commentary since general secretaries have no time to read books. If only I had known then how true his joke would be! I have found very limited opportunities for research and writing, and I struggled to find adequate time to prepare my remarks for tonight. Therefore, I recognize Dr. John Nuessle and Dr. Elliott Wright, two very esteemed, appreciated colleagues who have done a good deal of the research for this paper, especially on the historic dimension of the question. I recognize their contributions while taking full responsibility for the conclusions and suggestions, or any errors of fact or interpretation. I. The Issues I begin with the 2012 General Conference in Tampa because of the title of this conference, and it also happens that Tampa is notable for not having had before it legislative proposals for the structuring, or restructuring, of what has come to be variously called the global or worldwide church. The absence of structure proposals resulted from complications encountered in recent chapters of a structure-shaping process begun in 1992, with even older roots, and entertained by every quadrennial General Conference for 28 years. 1 For decades, we have discussed something we have never dared to become. Even without a global structure plan, the global question hovered like a specter over the Tampa Convention Center in April and May The prolonged, eventually dead-ended, debate on general church and agency reorganization spotlighted geographical representation issues. Delegates took a theological and liturgical step in adopting in principle a Covenant for a Worldwide Church, 1 My awareness of the history of structural proposal failures began by reading the work of Bruce W. Robbins, A World Parish? Hopes and Challenges of the United Methodist Church in a Global Setting. Nashville: Abingdon, 2004.

3 3 with accompanying litany. It came quite close to doctrinal matters in referring to a number of committees a Global Book of Discipline. With no global restructure plan to consider and the judicial defeat of the general agencies overhaul, Tampa placed a semicolon in a long-running debate and called a momentary halt in a progression of failed organizational proposals about our international structure. I hope we will take advantage of the semicolon, treating it as a pause for reasoned conversation and soul searching on a number of interrelated questions, including: What do we mean when we say global or worldwide nature of The United Methodist Church? Is this nature something we think we have, or something we want to obtain? Is a global nature a geographical or a spiritual entity? Is it structural, missional or both? As far as structure is concerned, do we speak only of relations among those geographical regions and churches covered by our U.S. jurisdictions and central conferences? That is, are we limited only to Methodists with united as an adjective? How about the rest of the Methodists in independent or autonomous denominations, many of which the mission activities of United Methodist predecessors initiated? How does and how should our global nature relate to the ecumenical church, the universal church with which we share the biblical mission mandate of Matthew 28? My objective here is primarily that of organizing and fleshing out such questions. I begin with a survey of our global nature pilgrimage, a survey that clearly indicates a deep United

4 4 Methodist uneasiness with how we have, or have not, understood this issue. We need a deep breath of fresh air. I hope that the semicolon of Tampa will provide for a chance to take a breath, which is what we call our midweek prayer service at Global Ministries, and frame a vision of the church that is neither romantic nor pessimistic. I am emboldened in this quest by the fact that whatever we mean by global church and whatever we want to achieve on the worldwide level relates dramatically to mission, to the work of generations of missionaries beginning in the first half of the 19 th century and continuing up to this very day. Questions of the global nature of The United Methodist Church are before me every day in my role at Global Ministries. The shift of Christian gravity from Europe and North America to the Global South is not a demographic chart on my office wall; it is real in the aspirations and frustrations of those from both the Global South and the Global North, who pass through my door, call my number or send an . The multinational, if not the worldwide, nature of our mission is not a paragraph in a press release. It is real in the diversity of our staff and the missionary community. Missionaries today are truly from everywhere to everywhere, with 50 percent of our current standard missionaries from countries outside the United States. It is a reality when we say we have personnel, projects and partners in more than 125 countries and staff from more than 30 countries. It may be that experiences and perceptions of the arena of mission can contribute to our present and future consideration of the church s global nature. I deeply expect that the theology and practice of mission broadly understood as the work of the church, not the portfolio of one agency would determine our global reality in the future. II Historical Background

5 5 I will highlight what I consider several turning points in this persistent discussion. I want to see our deliberations against a backdrop larger than either a structural or a United Methodist framework. I suspect I want to hypothesize that we have often attempted to apply strictly structural answers to nonstructural issues and have taken, essentially, an introspective perspective in so doing. 1. Methodism Organizes One could argue that global nature questions have been around since John Wesley sent Francis Asbury and other young lay evangelists to Britain s American colonies in the 1760s. Methodism was spread through a mission impulse. Structure questions with geographical implications were raised at the 1784 founding Christmas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, with Asbury and Wesley before and after sometimes at odds on polity and structure. This was the start of an organizational parting of the ways, although Wesley insisted right up to the end of his life that all Methodists are one people, a phrase he used in his last letter to an American. Writing to Ezekiel Cooper of Philadelphia in 1771, he pleaded for the American church never to lose touch with the European Methodists. Lose no opportunity, he said, of declaring to all men that the Methodists are one people in all the world; and that it is their full determination so to continue, though mountains rise, and oceans roll, to sever us in vain. 2 As we know, mountains rose, oceans rolled and British and American Methodists grew to look and sound differently. On another occasion, we might trace the different mission histories and how they affect our particular global challenge today. The early American Methodists had their mission eyes on the western frontier, where they were remarkably successful. After a halting start north of the border, the U.S. Methodists left Canada to the British to evangelize. The 2 Letter to Ezekiel Cooper, February 1, 1791

6 6 Methodist Episcopal Church never noticed Thomas Coke s missionary interest in the Caribbean, a region where the British Methodist policy and culture remain prevalent. Despite Wesley s poetry of one Methodism, British and American churches actively competed in some mission areas, notably Africa, and today there are both Methodists and United Methodists in such countries as Nigeria and Zimbabwe, often in sharp competition with one another. The greatest period of mission expansion for the churches in our United Methodist denomination was from the 1840s into the second decade of the 20 th century. The ecumenical enthusiasm for global evangelism shared by Methodists at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh was punctured by World War I, deflated by the Great Depression and transformed and, I suggest, shattered by World War II. Little new mission work was attempted in that 30-year period, and theology itself was set on its ear by the Holocaust. Little could ever be quite the same after Auschwitz, as theologians, Christian and Jewish, have reminded us. In that volatile period of the late 1930s and early1940s, both The Methodist and the Evangelical United Brethren churches took the shapes they would have when they merged in 1968 to form The United Methodist Church. 3 To relate to numerous units outside the United States, The Methodist Church in 1939 adopted the Methodist Episcopal Church s arrangement of regional units, called central conferences, changing the term to jurisdictions in the United States but keeping central conferences for dozens of regional units in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Of course, the toughest issue for theology, ethics and structure arising from Pre union concerns included questions of how the new church would relate to what were then clearly considered satellites. The Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Protestant churches related only through their boards of mission. The overseas churches sent delegates to General Conferences, where their bishops, always Americans, were elected. Meanwhile, the Methodist Episcopal Church established intermediaries Central Conferences between the annual conferences and the General Conference. See R. Lawrence Turnipseed, A Brief History of the Discussion of The United Methodist Church as a World Church. The Ecumenical Implications of the Discussions of the Global Nature of The United Methodist Church. New York: General Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, 1999, p. 22.

7 7 was the creation of the non-geographical Central Jurisdiction in the United States, a segregated unit for the African-American members, congregations and annual conferences, a move that blighted our character well into the 1960s. By 1939, at least four U.S. mission-founded Methodist churches had become autonomous in Japan, Korea, Mexico and Brazil. In 1949, the Methodist annual conferences in China were actually gone. I will summarize the global nature across the last 60 years around three turning points. 2. Turning Point 1: 1948 A year before Mao Tse-tung prevailed in China, the 1948 General Conference authorized a Commission on the Structure of Methodism Overseas (COSMOS), proposed four years earlier, as a replacement for the Commission on the Central Conference set up in 1939 and gave it an expanded agenda. COSMOS was intended to take broad responsibility for relations with Methodist churches outside the United States, both the central conferences and the autonomous and united churches with which there were historical links. And, COSMOS was to clearly establish a channel apart from the mission board for relating to churches in other parts of the world. 4 But as Robert Harman, one of our great historians of mission, has observed, COSMOS lacked energy in its early years. Harman precisely wrote that the COSMOS process was fairly domesticated with discussion focused on a purely institutional agenda, adding that conversations about the global nature needed to be more frank 5 COSMOS had great promise but ended up as an introspective exercise lacking even structural application. 4 Ibid. p Robert J. Harman, From Missions to Mission: The History of Mission of the United Methodist Church, New York: General Board of Global Ministries, 2005, p. 455.

8 8 The Methodist Church, through neither COSMOS nor the mission board, did much to keep pace with ecumenical thinking on relations between the mission-sending and missionreceiving churches, as they were known at the time, at least from Edinburgh 1910 forward. COSMOS, organized in 1948, did not even have regular representation from the central conferences until 1964! 6 The dominant ecumenical handwriting about future sending/receiving church relations was on the wall by Many mission-founded churches were not only strong in faith but also developing the capacity to forge their own structures, becoming contributors to the worldwide Christian mission, to the Missio Dei, God s mission. In terms of the issue of global Protestantism and global Methodism, I have found it particularly helpful to study and to listen to the first world missionary conference held World War II. It convened in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, under the sponsorship of the International Missionary Council. Whitby was not a well-known world mission gathering, but I consider it one of the most important, especially in terms of relationships between what by 1947 were called older and younger churches, an issue still with United Methodism today. 7 The theme was The Christian Witness in a Revolutionary World, and the conference s final statement was called, Our Supreme Loyalty The Supernationality of Mission, a not surprising name given the behavior of Christian nations during World War II. 8 6 Turnipseed, op.cit. p Methodist participation from the United States, Great Britain and younger churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific was notable. Methodist Bishop James Chamberlain Baker, the resident bishop of the California Area, chaired the IMC at the time and later wrote a small booklet about Whitby, titled The Church in a World of Ferment, published by the Southern California Arizona Annual Conference. John R. Mott attended Whitby for several days. He was 82 at the time. 8 Printed in Baker, Ibid. and C.W. Ranson, ed. Renewal and Advance: Christian Witness in a Revolutionary World. London: Edinburg House, Many younger church delegates, and some of the older, had suffered deprivation and imprisonment during World War II. The mission founded churches had seen the supposedly Christian nations of the North tear one another apart in that conflict. Whitby had many speeches but relatively little structure. It was part confessional, part platform of hope.

9 9 Representatives from the older and younger churches spent some time meeting separately to lay out post-war situations and aspirations. When compared, the two lists bore great similarity, and only a single meeting-of-the-minds paper came from those sessions. The paper heading was, Partnership of the Younger and Older Churches in Obedience to our Lord s Commission. Whitby was an early introduction of the partnership concept in mission. It was envisioned as a partnership of equality in respect and of obedience to a third party God. This is a remarkable document for its time, or any time, dealing with both policy and practice in relationships between younger and older households in a family of faith. 9 Further, the partnership paper acknowledged that some younger churches have reached an advanced stage of development. Whitby hoped that they put away once for all every thwarting sense of dependence on the older churches, and that they will take their stand firmly on the true ground of absolute spiritual equality and of their right to manage their own affairs, to frame their own policies, and, under the guidance of God the Holy Spirit, to bear their own distinctive witness in the world, as the instrument by which God wills to bring to Christ the whole population of the lands in which they dwell Turning Point 2: 1964 While well represented at Whitby, the 1947 missionary conference apparently had little impact on U.S. Methodists. From 1948 until 1964, The Methodist Church paid relatively little formal attention to its overseas components. 11 The General Conference of 1964 was a turning 9 While positing the need for missionary workers in the younger church, it makes totally clear in a section on partnership in personnel that the younger church must have a voice in the selection and oversight of missionaries. It states that younger churches should have the right to issue, or to withhold, an invitation for the missionary to return to its service after the first period of leave in his home country. Renewal and Advance, p Ibid. p Relations with central conferences continued to pass through the Board of Missions. Polity and structure for the overseas missions assumed an American nature. During the late 1940s and the decade of the 1950s, the church was preoccupied with the Crusade for Christ, which was primarily, not entirely, focused on domestic evangelism.

10 10 point in our global nature story in a more significant way than COSMOS creation was in That year, acting on a request made four years earlier, COSMOS was asked to conduct a study of the Methodist overseas structures and bring recommendations on the future in This process was energetically launched, including a series of listening sessions within the central conferences, data collection that served as prelude to two quadrenniums of reports, consultations and proposals, culminating in Within its broad mandate, COSMOS set out several admirable guidelines for its work, points worth our time because much of what it found and proposed has revisited us. One provision was that structural decisions should meet missional needs and that mission was incumbent on the church in all places. Another stipulated, and here I am following Lawrence Turnipseed, the freedom and identity of each church in its own context while preserving ties of fellowship and partnership in common tasks. All church structures were described in the guidelines as interim and open-ended in order to foster unity with other churches for the sake of mission. 12 This has significant global and ecumenical implications. COSMOS developed four alternative scenarios, namely: Leave things as they are, making room for slightly increased freedom of the central conferences. Move central conferences toward affiliated autonomous status, granting autonomy without question if requested. Turn the United States into a central conference, whereupon a new global body would, in effect, set up an International Methodist Church. Crusade energy would give rise to both The Advance for Christ and His Church and what is today the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), two important entities for truly world encompassing mission and discipleship. 12 Turnipseed, op. cit., p. 21.

11 11 Establish a World Conference of Methodist Churches composed of nationally constituted autonomous churches, periodically in a non-legislative assembly for global fellowship. 13 Friends, these options were set forth almost 60 years ago. Has much changed since? Yes, one thing: all but the central conferences have been dropped from the picture. COSMOS held impressive, inclusive consultations, including a 1966 meeting in Green Lake, Wis., notable for its inclusion of missiologists from the Evangelical United Brethren Church, a presence adding impetus to what was at least a substratum of support for the alternative of autonomy. The EUB mindset on the mission tilted, and here I am leaning on the insights of Robert Harman, toward setting up cooperative or independent national churches indigenously led and indigenously accountable. 14 The movement toward a global church of semi-autonomous regional bodies faltered on the issue of funding. The process stopped at the dollar mark. Who would pay for this structure? The question was especially sharp in a world of economic disparities and inequalities. The younger churches believed they could not carry the cost of a regionalized operations based on U.S. economic benchmarks. The warp and weave of the tapestry would change before COSMOS made its final report to the General Conference of Four years earlier, more than two dozen central conferences in Asia and Latin America requested and received autonomous affiliated status, with the church 13 Ibid. p Robert Harman, Reflections on World Mission in EUB, Methodist and United Methodist Traditions. Telescope Messenger: Dayton, Ohio: Center for the Evangelical United Brethren Heritage, United Theological Seminary, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2012, p., 2. Harman and others have developed the thesis that COSMOS was never able to project a positive, useful, equitable and adoptable set of recommendations on United States overseas relationships. It seemed unable satisfactorily to deal with the issues of how more closely to integrate the central conferences into the church as a whole or how to help them transition into autonomous bodies. Both the 1968 Uniting General Conference and its adjourned sessions in 1970 were too preoccupied with U.S. domestic Methodist EUB merger issues to consider a COSMOS report.

12 12 giving little practical attention to ways The United Methodist Church might continue to relate to these major parts of our mission heritage. 15 COSMOS took little to the 1972 General Conference, having abandoned the idea of the United States becoming a central conference and having cooled to the ideas of both regional bodies and a new international church. The conference left things as they were, making provisions for a bit more flexibility for the central conference structure and governance. The World Methodist Council was asked to reshape itself into a forum for global Methodist fellowship, but nothing happened because no plans were made for funding the transformation. Harman holds that funding short-circuited the vision of COSMOS. There was the disparity between the economic resources of the U.S. jurisdictions and those of both central conferences; a problem so big that, as Harman says, the central conferences were left as vestiges of a missionary history that is tinged with the marks of dependence. 16 COSMOS was laid to rest in The committee asked the General Conference that year to terminate its mandate in favor of a commission to relate to what was left of the central conferences. 17 The inherent contradictions of central conference status versus autonomous 15 Eugene Lau. The Evolution of The Methodist Church in Singapore and Malaysia: Singapore: Genesis Press, It contains an excellent evaluation of COSMOS and why it failed. Lau notes that in some parts of Asia, the achievement of the status of a central conference was interpreted as a step toward autonomy, not as a goal in itself. Such did not seem to be the judgment in India, which did not seek autonomy until 1981; and the Philippines have so far remained as a central conference, although the EUB branch in that country had helped to form the United Christ of Christ in the Philippines during World War II, something the local Methodists refused to join. Autonomy for the Latin American churches may also have been less welcomed than in parts of Asia. For years, I have heard reports, none of which I have been able to document, that the Latin American churches prior to 1968 were encouraged by mission board staff to seek autonomy. In fact, I have heard it said that our Latin American mission founded churches were pushed out. 16 Harman, Reflections on World Mission op.cit., p Feeling cut adrift, the autonomous churches of Latin and Central America, along with their British founded cousins on the islands and the mainland, responded by organizing the Council of Evangelical Methodist Churches in Latin America and the Caribbean. Both The United Methodist Church, through Global Ministries, and the British Church encouraged this venture and continue to relate to it. Several concordats and covenant relations were established with autonomous churches after 1968, mostly quiet developments, and while not unimportant, requiring little theological or structural reflection.

13 13 dramatized in COSMOS remains unresolved. The issue does come up in relation to some of Global Ministries mission initiatives of the last two decades. Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Central Asia are already in the central conference structure. Cambodia has set a course toward autonomy. Three in Africa are potential annual conferences. Questions remain about Laos, Vietnam and Mongolia. 4. Turning Point 3: 1992 The General Conference of 1992 was another turning point, the opening of more than two decades of focus on global or worldwide nature issues. The phrase the global nature comes from the title of a 1988 initiative of the Council of Bishops. From that time, our emphasis in this dialogue has been on U.S. relations with the central conferences left after 1968 and 1981, with an occasional nod to the autonomous churches. I found it telling in Tampa that the representatives of concordat, covenant and affiliated autonomous churches were introduced as guests on ecumenical night. It was very telling on the wideness, or the narrowness, of our worldwide view. The international epiphany in the 1980s seems to have received momentum from multiple sources. One, and this was very new, was grassroots energy. Congregations and annual conferences in the United States discovered through travel, Volunteer in Mission experiences and mission studies that The United Methodist Church was not just American. You could go to Monrovia, or Manila, or Berlin, or Kinshasa and find a United Methodist church, and many pastors, laity and youth groups were doing just that. Also, the discovery of an uber-american church came in tandem with distressing trends in U.S. membership statistics. Membership had been declining since The United Methodist Church was formed in 1968, but in 1980, the United Methodist percentage of the population,

14 14 combining Methodist and EUB totals across the decades, dropped below 5 percent for the first time since This was alarming news. Could it be that growth potential in the central conferences represented a kind of numerical global balm to wounded domestic statistics? Both General Conferences of the 1980s had central conference and global nature issues before them, and built toward 1992; in 1984 came a directive that all agencies include central conference delegates on their boards and, in 1988, the bishops initial global nature report. A fuller report was requested in 1992, and the General Council on Ministries (GCOM) was given several tasks related to global issues. Unhappy with the ensuing GCOM report, the 1996 General Conference set up a Connectional Process Team to carry forth, folding into its portfolio the work done by the bishops. The Connectional Process Team came back in Cleveland in 2000 with a plan, advancing four regional bodies but projecting a quadrennial Global Conference of 500 delegates to confirm regional election of bishops, legislate on doctrine and constitution, address global social issues, and celebrate mission and ministry. This plan was defeated General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Membership as Compared to the United States Population Census, website: 19 The 1984 General Conference recommended the inclusion of central conference members on the board of all general agencies, although I am not sure all followed through, and all of those agencies, not just Global Ministries, were urged to work with central conferences. A preliminary report of the Council of Bishops global nature initiative was endorsed in 1992 and the General Conference requested a fuller report in 1996 and instructed the General Council on Ministries to form a plan to achieve the full effective participation of central conference representatives in the church s full range of ministries and governance. GCOM was further told to lead the church in a period of discernment, reflection and study of its mission and structure as it moves into the 21st century. The latter resulted in another round of listening events throughout the connection. The GCOM brought an incomplete report in 1996, whereupon the General Conference created a Connectional Process Team to finish the job and guide the transformational direction of the church. The Connectional Process Team inherited the ongoing work of the global nature study process of the bishops. The episcopal report submitted in 1996 was far reaching and in several respects revived recommendations from the 1968 COSMOS document never formally considered; although, unlike COSMOS, it limited itself to the United States and the existing central conferences. It recommended four geographical regions, each with authority over finance, structure and regional issues. The General Conference would have been replaced by a Global Conference meeting every four, five or eight years, composed of one lay and one clergy delegate from each annual conference. Global leadership would be vested in the Council of Bishops. A Global Mission Council would serve as a consultative forum for focus, vision, initiation and coordination.

15 15 In 2004, the Connectional Table came into being in part, to provide a forum for the understanding and implementation of the vision, mission and ministries of the global church. The Connectional Table would face challenges not unlike that of the former General Council on Ministries; namely, the necessity of applying a legislative and structural fix to every issue. This is nowhere better evident than in the saga of a group of constitutional amendments set forth in 2004 as a means toward a structural redesign. 20 The 2008 General Conference approved a group of 23 constitutional amendments, which, if approved, were intended as legal prelude to a new structure retaining the U.S. jurisdictions but renaming central conferences as regional conferences with authority to set up jurisdictions. The job of drafting a plan to effect this expected change was entrusted to a 20-member Study Committee on the Nature of a Worldwide United Methodist Church. Uncertainty prevailed in annual conferences on just what the name changing meant in real terms down the road and how it could eventually affect the U.S. church. The structure measures went down to defeat at the annual conferences in 2009, having failed to obtain the two-thirds majority of the 134 annual conferences of U.S. jurisdictions and central conferences. Based on the early summer votes of the U.S. conferences, the measures were defeated before the central conferences annual conferences even met later in the year. It would have been instructive to know how the central conferences would have voted on the idea of regionalization had the voting process not been manipulated by political considerations. Betty Spiwe Katiyo of Harare, Zimbabwe, one of the co-presenters of the Laity Address in Tampa, has publicly stated that the contents of the amendments were not clearly explained, and were in fact, deliberately 20 In personal correspondence reacting to an early draft of this paper, Bishop R. Minor has noted the difficulty we experience in our policy by requiring the General Conference to legislate on all matters large and small. In respect to the amendments, he noted that the intention was to give expression to a non centralist and non hierarchical expression of catholicity rather than national participation in mutual responsibility and freedom. He says that neither the General Conference nor the annual conferences understood the intention.

16 16 misinterpreted in the Africa annual conferences. If people in Africa had read and understood the amendments, they would not have voted no, she said in a January 2013 presentation to the Connectional Table. Some of our people in Africa had been approached and were convinced to vote no by groups with a hidden agenda. That agenda, she also stated, was that an affirmative vote would be a vote for homosexuality. It is a pity that whilst the denomination is trying to come up with ways to be a worldwide church, she said, some groups take advantage by not giving enough information. As long as we practice that, we will not have a true worldwide church. 21 The study committee was left with less than half a loaf, a major part of its mandate having been erased. This panel made a conscientious effort to refocus its task, soliciting the view on the worldwide nature from every general agency, ethnic caucus and theological affinity group in the denomination. It also had central conference listening sessions in the manner of those of 1964 and Committee agreement was reached on the proposal for a worldwide covenant and a partial Global Discipline. I have often wondered why there was no collaboration between the worldwide nature study team and the drafters of the general church and general agency restructure proposals, the Interim Operations Team (IOT) of the Connectional Table and the Council of Bishops. It would have seemed such a natural a way to incorporate the central conference perspectives; as it was, the IOT report was totally U.S.-focused and had it been approved, would have primarily affected only the U.S. church. Conversation with central conference leaders were tacked on at the end of the virtually completed process. So, we are back to Tampa. Now, what? III. Now What? 21 Betty Spiwe Katiyo in a presentation to the organizational meeting of the Connectional Table for the quadrennium, Nashville, Tenn., January 16, 2013.

17 17 I have so far said three primary things: 1) We have, over the decades, attempted to give structural answers to non-structural questions. 2) We have been introspective rather than missional. 3) We have failed to deal effectively with global church financial stewardship, ownership and transparency. No, I am not going to roll out a new structure proposal. Remember, we are at a semicolon, a pause, in our long history of global nature considerations. I want to suggest four overlapping topics for our global nature dialogue and conversation during this pause, issues to be explored together out of a commitment to the Wesleyan presence in the world. We need to do this work in humility. 1. Frame a new, or renewed, mission vision for our global agenda. To underscore a point passed over quickly in my introduction, we have global nature questions only because of the overwhelming missional passion of Methodists and United Methodists in the past. In the imagery of Acts 1:8 we have been witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to many, perhaps not all, ends of the earth. How, then, in the early 21st century, do we continue our mission in concert with the mission relationships we have formed along the way? Our global concerns need a missional vision. We need to step back from preoccupation with structure, to take a fresh look at what is consistent across our history, and that is mission. We may have been more successful than we realize in retaining our nature as the mission movement Wesley triggered in England, which Asbury and others expanded into America, and countless missionaries have taken to the uttermost. We need to ask how an institutional, structural vision of global nature has created patterns of dependency that not only reflect colonial governance styles in some of our relationships but also keep us from looking at missional issues.

18 18 Yes, Wesley realized before his death that the movement he initiated was becoming a church, but in no place have we lost two qualities of the initial Wesleyan mission movement. One, the desire to share the love of God in Jesus Christ with others and, two, the conviction that the gospel is both personal and social. Therein is our heart, the very reason we care about connections, about relations with others beyond our immediate space. A mission perspective will hold in proper balance the interaction between local and global in our spiritual and institutional lives. Mission is the main thing. The interplay of local and global has been much discussed in our global nature deliberation of the past, and I do not intend to enter that territory. However, it is essential to realize local and global, or, as we might say, autonomous and connectional, are expressions of the unity of God s people. I like the vision of the church as the whole of the Christian fellowship present in every congregation expressed in the phrase all in each place from the 1961 unity statement of the World Council of Churches. The phrase slightly modified appears as in each place and all places in the statement issued by the 2005 United Methodist-Roman Catholic Dialogue USA. So in mission, all local communities are part of the whole; the whole is present in each place. Here are some pragmatic missional questions I wish we would attend with a missional vision: A. What can we learn from other denominations that are multinational in composition? At Global Ministries, we have done tip-of-the-iceberg exploration about how the Church of the Nazarene and the Moravian Church understand and operate globally. Let me underline how preliminary this work is. However, we have become aware that the global nature experiences of those two highly missional denominations are similar to our own. They struggle with patterns of dependency within their mission-founded units. We also heard indications of an

19 19 unwillingness to forfeit American control in one of these groups that actually has a non- American majority in its legislating assembly. B. What are the missional implications of affiliation with a global church versus autonomous national status within a confessional family, such as you have within the Lutheran World Federation and the World Communion of Reformed Churches? Let me note that both of these bodies have a stronger emphasis on joint reflection and action than has historically been the case with the World Methodist Council. A look at this issue would require conversations with ecumenical partners, which, I think, would be an excellent exercise. I also hope for a more active role of the World Methodist Council in world Methodism, a resource on behalf of each of us as partners in obedience to God. We have a notable potential case study of autonomy verses global in the decision by the former Methodist Protestant Church of Côte d Ivoire, a British-founded church, to enter our church as an annual conference, a request granted by the General Conference in Part of the reasoning behind the request was a desire to be part of a global denomination. It might enlighten us to inquire a decade later as to how the move has affected the mission and ministry of what was, and still is, a strong and economically self-sustained church. C. What are the missional situations and hopes of the central conferences and their annual conferences, a question that is also relevant to the U.S. jurisdictions and their conferences? We commonly say, the central conferences are growing as U.S. membership declined, but this assertion requires clarification and refers primarily to parts of Africa as the gravity of Christianity is shifting toward the Global South. Also, growing may be a relative matter. A preliminary study by Professor Dana Robert and David Scott in 2011 indicates the greatest

20 20 numerical growth within Christianity is among Roman Catholics and Pentecostals. 22 In fact, The United Methodist Church in central conferences in Africa does not compare well in percentages to other groups, including both our mother Anglican Church and our daughter, the Church of the Nazarene. Why is that? Robert and Scott suggest some possible causes, positing them as possible topics for future research. Several of those questions relate to structure and polity, such as: Is something about United Methodist culture retarding growth? [W]e might ask whether bureaucratic, unwieldy or outdated structures may be hindering the type of flexibility and indigenous initiative necessary for strong growth. And here the study raises an issue essential in consideration of global church concerns: Are structural problems sociological or cultural in nature, or a bit of both? What about the efficacy of one size fits all theories and practices, in which North American middle-class culture is a normative value imposed on United Methodists outside the United States? Is it possible that a culture of dependency creates over-reliance on American resources by some branches of United Methodism, and neo-colonial attitudes on the part of others? I would like answers to other questions. For example, what cultural, theological and liturgical factors cause a congregation to flourish in Kinshasa and what factors retard growth in a large U.S. city? What about the differences in understandings of church membership from culture to culture? 2. Grapple with the impact of the unjust and divided world. Just as in former times, we 22 Dana L. Robert and David W. Scott, World Growth of The United Methodist Church in Comparative Perspective: A Brief Statistical Analysis. Methodist Review: A Journal of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies. Vol. 3 (2011): Online at All references here to the Robert Scott research are from this article.

21 21 minister today in an unjust world, and inequities affect our thinking about mission and church structure, although this reality is little mentioned in most recent rounds of worldwide church debates and dialogues. We cannot ignore gross economic inequities between North and South. One example will suffice: energy use. According to the World Bank in January of this year, per-capita energy use measures in kegs of oil was around 6,500 kegs per annum in the United States, compared to some 450 for the Philippines, a central conference; fractionally higher for Zimbabwe, another central conference area; and 300 for Senegal, one of our new mission initiatives. 23 That is disparity that the church dare not ignore. At the same time, one sees signs of significant improvement in economic outlooks for many Global South countries, and we neither can ignore this potential. Obviously, contexts and capacities differ significantly. Africa is not one place. We cannot speak of the Africa central conferences as though all are subject to the same generalizations. Here we need to remind ourselves that the church is as local, and as global, in Africa as it is in United States; it is as local, and as global, in Taraba State, Nigeria, as in Georgia, USA. The church needs to consider economic and social matters more when we think about structure and mission. There are emerging indications that many nations where we have central conferences have economic bases that would sustain considerably more of the financial needs of churches than we have so far acknowledged. Please hear that I have said emerging indications, which is not to say that all central conferences are at the point of self-support. 23 Comparative data from World Bank, World Development Indicators. &ifdim=country&tdim=true&hl=en_us&dl=en_us&ind=false

22 22 The British Journal, The Economist, in March 2013 printed an extensive journalistic report on the signs of emerging Africa in the 55 countries visited by author/editor Oliver August. Based on evidence from urban areas, August reports significant increases in the last decade in school enrollment; the reduction of malaria and HIV infection, and child mortality rates, and an increase in overall life expectancy. The variables across Africa are significant. The World Bank, using 2010 statistics, reported the Gross Domestic Product per person of Namibia at 14.5 percent of the U.S. GDP. Angola is cited at 12 percent of the U.S. GDP; Sierra Leone, 2 percent; Liberia, 1 percent; and the Democratic Republic of Congo at a miniscule 0.70 percent of the U.S. GDP. 24 Yet, we must also take into account the thriving independent African churches that have no significant support base outside of the continent. These churches support prophets and build cathedrals. Indigenous Nigerian churches are today among those most active in sending missionaries into all the world. My point here is that if we are going to talk about having a worldwide Church, we must include economic factors, inequalities and potentials in the discussions. Theo Sundermeier, the German theologian of mission, said in an essay on international church partnerships that a partnership between a mouse and an elephant is not possible. COSMOS could not deal successfully with financial questions and failed in its mandate. And I have heard very little about this very real issue in the last two decades of worldwide study committees exploration. 3. Implications of migration/immigration on our vision and mission. The movement of people from one place to another is a major example of the impact of the world upon the church, and it is of such importance that it merits separate mention. 24 August Oliver, A Hopeful Continent, The Economist, March 2, A 14 page special report, page 4.

23 23 Immigration has always exerted an influence on the self-understanding and shaping of the church. If we are to believe the traditions, St. Mark became a migrant to Egypt, St. Thomas to India, and St. Peter relocated from Jerusalem to Rome. St. Paul, of course, was a bit of a vagabond. Dana Robert reminds us in her book, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion, that many early evangelists were multi-cultural and bi-national, a factor contributing to the richness of our mission origins. 25 For a range of reasons, millions of people are on the move today. Figures from the International Agency for Migration indicate that in 2012, more than 215 million people lived in countries other than those of their birth. That is 3 percent of the earth s population. Some are political and religious refugees; more are economic migrants; some move voluntarily; others are forced to relocate by wars, natural disasters and famine. A significant number are Methodists, United Methodists or people whose mobility has implications for our church. Here are some random facts about how migration affects our consideration of global mission and global church: A. Documented and undocumented Hispanic/Latino immigration to the United States is affecting congregations, annual conferences and general agencies. We currently have missionaries from countries such as Brazil and Mexico working in the United States. B. One potential life-stream for Methodism in Western Europe is the flow of Methodist immigrants from Africa into Germany, Italy, England and other countries. The central conferences serving Germany and central and southern Europe are deeply engaged in ministries with migrants, with some assistance from Global Ministries missionaries. 25 Dana Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009, pp

24 24 C. There is a constant outflow of people from our churches in the Philippines seeking work in other parts of Asia and the Middle East. This weakens families and congregations; at the same time, it makes possible Filipino-led house churches and Bible study groups in areas where Christians are a tiny minority or the faith is prohibited. Chances are the Filipino United Methodist community is growing more outside than inside the country. D. Immigrants to the United States returning to their homelands as missionaries are greatly responsible for the planting and nourishing of our exciting faith communities in Southeast Asia, notably, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. E. Voluntary and forced refugee movements are changing the contour of Methodism across Africa and, indeed, other parts of the world. For example, we have a new district of the Liberia Annual Conference in Guinea established by refugees, though now fully indigenous in composition. We have refugee-founded churches in South Sudan, Kenya and South Africa. Immigrant congregations claiming allegiance to United Methodist annual conferences in Zimbabwe have sprung up in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. This has positive implications but can also raise problems, especially where our presence becomes competitive with long-established mission-partner Methodist or united churches with Methodist heritages. We need to recruit the United Methodist Task Force on Immigration, which has strong ties to the Council of Bishops, as a player in our future consideration of the church s global nature. Immigration is missional in nature and is a whole-church challenge. 4. Dare to ask new questions and do new things for the sake of the gospel. Here I will limit myself to four somewhat separate but illustrative points.