ee.umc.org/decisions/81526
Florida Annual Conference v. Provisional Members
In 2012, Rev. Kenneth Carter was elected to the episcopacy. He had been to jurisdictional conferences five times and was delegate to General Conference three times prior to his election. He took an active part in jurisdictional and general church matters, being on the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, among many other responsibilities. All the years paid off in gaining the recognition and making the contacts needed to be elected bishop. Such efforts are the current way to be successfully elected. He was regarded highly enough among his Council of Bishops ranks to be elected its president in 2018, a convenient turn of events for him.
The subject of this memorandum, Rev. Erik Seise, during this six year period, became a provisional member of the conferencew and began his efforts to become an ordained Elder. He had started, from scratch, Wesley Foundations on two different university campuses. Like many other Wesley Foundation directors or other pastors in non-local church appointments, he tended to be treated as an outsider not deserving of the normal collegial respect. For example, at a retreat for prospective Elders, he along with the others were encouraged to speak freely because everything was to remain confidential. He did just that only to discover someone ratted him out to a conference official. There were a number of similar events which escalated to the point where he posted something on Facebook about how things were. He was chastised about it and immediately removed his posting. One of those events had been serious enough that when one of his co-campus ministers also raised similar criticisms, she was forced out ministry.
The bishop was apprised of the Facebook posting and wrote a letter to Rev. Seise on February 15, 2018, with allegations of multiple wrong-doings. Interestingly, while each sounded terrible, none had all the specifics of time, place, and description of the actual event that occurred. Bishop Carter wrote that the letter was background for its intent to inform Rev Seise that he was not only going to be dropped from provisional membership to which he had been elected by the annual conference, he was going to be put on involuntary leave of absence upon review by the conference relations committee on March 9. The committee supported Bishop Carter’s request and the Board of Ordained Ministry did too. Bishop Carter’s letter was the only “complaint” Rev. Seise ever saw before the hearing and it was the basis of the hearing against him.
Bishop Carter appeared as a witness against him at the hearing.
Rev. Seise appealed to the administrative review committee who found nothing wrong with the procedures. Why would anyone in their right mind jeopardize their next appointment by crossing the bishop on something he obviously wanted?
To avoid just this conflict of interest, a new provision for appeal outside of the annual conference was passed into church law in 2016. Rev. Seise followed that and appealed. The chairman of the jurisdictional committee on appeals wrote a one page summary which said no church laws were broken. Rev. Seise appealed that to the Judicial Council on August 29th, 2018, who later deferred his case until February, 2019.
Regarding the late May Annual Conference session, because of the conflict of interest within the annual conference, Rev. Seise was unable to find anyone willing to raise questions of law at conference. Bishop Carter presided at the clergy session and moved this matter along with great dispatch so that it would have been hard for anyone to challenge it.
That summer, the Judicial Council had been asked by the Council of Bishops several questions about the meaning and application of the new appeal paragraphs. That was dealt with at the fall session of 2018. They had sent in their questions on July 27, just two months after Florida Annual Conference.
Bishop Carter, as president of the Council of Bishops, appeared before the Judicial Council to speak regarding the issues.
The Judicial Council ruled in JCD 1361 that all the provisions of the new appeals law were appropriate and applied to all of administrative categories, leave of absence, etc., except one, provisional members being dropped. That they left to be the province of the Board of Ordained Ministry despite the fact that the clergy session “owned” Rev. Seise, having elected him to be a provisional member in the first place.
Bishop Carter had won on his case against Rev. Seise before it even was considered by the Judicial Council.
The Council took up the Seise case the following February. In JCM 1373, the Council chastised the jurisdictional appeals committee for failing to respond to Seise’s points of appeal, having given only a blanket statement that nothing had been wrong with the processes against Rev. Seise. There was no reference to JCD 1361.
The Council required the jurisdictional committee on appeals to rectify their work with a full response to each of Seise’s points of appeal.
The committee responded by saying none of the appeal points were in violation of the Discipline, though they never showed awareness of pertinent JCDs related to Rev. Seise’s specific points of appeal.
Rev. Seise offered his response and the Council took them up on November 1, 2019. In JCD 1384, they said the appeals committee saw no vitiating or egregious errors of law and supported the jurisdiction’s committee on appeals.
What was startling about this decision was that it was made during the same session of JCD 1383 which ruled that members of the Cabinet, Board of Ordained Ministry, and the other committees who processed an administrative case should not be allowed to vote on the case when it came to the floor of the clergy session. Despite having Rev. Seise’s case and his briefs in the hands of the Council during the summer of 2018 and its information about a live example of the injustices in the administrative system over the nineteen months before the Council and the Council did not connect any of their other related work to his case.
Rev. Seise sought reconsideration on that ground. He was not granted reconsideration in JCM 1400.
In reviewing this history for you, I notice a number of flaws in my understanding as his consultant on the case as it developed and wish I had emphasized some things more, and realized the Council could not take the time to steep itself in Rev. Seise’s case because they had such a heavy load to examine during a challenge of our denomination by a recalcitrant and clever conservative caucus (my opinion).
But there are two things that I have to flag about this case.
One, the Seise case was in the hands of the Council with all its points of appeal, the name of the bishop and conference, and awareness that Rev. Seise was a Provisional Member seeking full membership when his conference forced him out. Yet it allowed a major party at interest in his case, Bishop Carter, to be involved in a hearing on the meaning and application of the appeal process under ¶2718.3-.4, the passage which gave Rev. Seise the right to appeal all the way to the Council. And it appears to have allowed Bishop Carter to carve out Provisional Members from the list of all that were covered by this new appeal.
Two, Bishop Carter’s involvement from the very beginning (he provided the only written complaint against Rev. Seise prior to the conference relations committee hearing used to run him out of the conference) all the way to the Judicial Council where he should never have argued on behalf of the Council of Bishops because of the appearance of impropriety. He should have recused himself and if he didn’t, the Council should have asked him to step down because of the obvious conflict of interest.
What can be done about this? Hopefully, members of the Council will from now on be alert to such conflicts of interest. Bishops will avoid the appearance of impropriety in their rush to get through their own agendas. And maybe General Conference can continue to change church law to prevent the conflicts of interest in our personnel systems.
Unlikely, the Council could reconsider the case and weigh the evidence brought by Rev. Seise differently than the appeals committee did. And the annual conference could offer something to try to make whole the situation that forced Rev. Seise out of ministry.
The damage done to the campus ministries by the conference actions and the damage done to the reputation of the UMC to the Seise family, their friends, and those who know their story will be one more blot that cannot be simply wiped away. Ignoring it will more deeply imbed it in the thousand similar cuts that have undermined our denomination over the past forty years.
Editor note: Many years ago, my wife’s experience with personnel management led me to write that our denominational personnel practices are not at all consistent with federal law on employment matters and I called upon human resources professionals in our Church to consult with church leaders about bringing them into line. We do have ¶334.3 as one such alignment and hope it is being used, though it was not in this case (nor other cases that have come to my attention). Apparently Cabinets were too busy (?) to use it in the cases that have crossed my desk.
The 1976 Supreme Court “Serbian Orthodox” ruling categorized personnel matters as doctrine, leaving them practically untouchable by civil suit under “separation of church and state.” The UMC unwisely has cloaked its policies behind that and gone on its merry way destroying ministries, family lives, congregational health, and conference morale at the hands of bad or inept leaders with little or no accountability.
Thanks to Erik Seise who reminded me of our denomination’s inconsistency with federal employment law.
