JCD 1245

http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263&JDID=1367&JDMOD=VWD&SN=1201&EN=1259

ACCEPTANCE OF RESTRUCTURING

This is another case where the Council has critiqued and monitored a conference re-organization and finally was satisfied, so it can happen.  North Texas Annual Conference is the beneficiary this time.

Most Annual Conferences re-organize in such a way as to marginalize Commissions on the Status and Role of Women, Religion and Race, and Archives and History in the name of stream-lining, and establish the bishop as the head of the main steering committee directing the actions of all conference agencies, particularly Finance and Administration,

in the name of efficiency.  The result of all these re-organization efforts, and they come up every year, when they are referred to the Council for review, is that they are all thrown out and have to be revised to remove the bishop from direct control and make sure that marginalized groups are not swept away.  The grounds for keeping them is that the Discipline defines the connectionalism of the church as requiring those functions to be clearly defined at all levels.  Most bishops appear to think “connectionalism” only refers to their requirement that pastors do what the bishop says.

There is a reason the three bodies are usually targeted.  They have the job of monitoring the treatment of women, the treatment of ethnics, and the treatment of conference history, all of which offer insights into what is actually happening and may be embarrassments to conference leaders.   

Having final control over conference finances is the dream of every ambitious bishop.  The separation of powers is critical to maintain for that very reason.  Good bishops are persuasive in order to get things done.  Impatient and autocratic bishops are control freaks and need to be curbed.  It is also possible that some bishops are simply copying what they are told by other bishops is the way to re-organize and don’t realize the pitfalls inherent in such plans.  

So far, the Judicial Council has largely done its job of halting bad plans and getting conferences to work toward better structures.

This ruling relates to JCDs 1198 and 1225 where the conference plans were reviewed and found not adequate.  They will have to do the same for several other conferences because each bishop thinks s/he can use the same basic plan and get it past the Council, as if the Council’s previous rulings are meaningless.  With luck, the Council will hold firm and maybe someday, the bishops won’t think of the Council as “lower case.”

JCD 1225

http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263&JDID=1350&JDMOD=VWD&SN=1201&EN=1229

REVIEW OF REORGANIZATION OF THE NORTH TEXAS ANNUAL CONFERENCE

In light of JCD 1198, a member of the North Texas Conference shared the changes the conference believes fulfills the requirements of the Judicial Council regarding reorganization.

The Council appreciated the efforts of the officers from North Texas to meet the goals set in JCD 1198 but pointed out the new plans excluded Race and Religion, Status and Role of Women, and Archives and History. So the matter was remanded back to the conference to include those bodies.

My concern about the power accruing to the bishop stated in JCD 1198 is not mentioned either in the conference’s response or in the Council’s remanding.

JCD 1210

http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263&JDID=1331&JDMOD=VWD&SN=1201&EN=1211

OVERTURNING THE REORGANIZATION OF THE DENOMINATION

At the instigation of the Council of Bishops with little or no input from the Boards and Agencies of the denomination, a wide-ranging plan named “A Call to Action” was developed over the past quadrennium. It had many features and many critics. By the time it reached General Conference, it had been broken up into various parts, as discussed in my posting on this blog of “April 25 – Dr. Chomingwen Pond,” under which I included a section called “A Call to Action.”

Right after lunch on the day it was passed (May 2, two days before adjournment), the plenary voted with no discussion to refer this variation on reorganization called “Plan UMC” to the Judicial Council. This was such a high profile set of legislation, having taken up all the oxygen in the room at General Conference that the Judicial Council took it up immediately.

As they have done with so many reorganization plans submitted from annual conferences, they discerned the primary flaw of this one, an attempt to move decision-making from the bodies granted it by the Discipline, and placing it in other bodies.

Here again, as I’ve written before, the Council of Bishops was seeking to gain control over more and more of the organizations of the denomination. Nowhere in any version of the segments of “A Call to Action” was there an effort to look at where the bishops in their duties may have contributed to whatever malaise they were trying to resolve with their plan. The problems of the denomination were with everyone else, as the plan clearly pointed out.

But the Judicial Council stuck with examining the plan for constitutionality, not for its inherent weakness. With care, they laid out the constitutional flaws of this reorganization attempt, the same ones they have explained over and over in previous rulings dating back to JCD 364, a decision given in 1972. See also the most recent, JCD 1198, from 2011.

One special feature of this decision is that it did not restrict itself to the possible constitutional issues identified by the one making the request. Under the general rubric of determining constitutionality, the Judicial Council found its own grounds for determining that the legislation lacked constitutionality. Again with careful argument, the Council was clear about what it found. Future efforts to reorganize the Church better take these into account.

I do not expect those who cobbled together “Plan UMC” will do any better when they try to revive this kind of thing for 2016.

The immediate effect of this decision had a serious impact, though, in three ways.

First, the years spent over the past Quadrennium working on “A Call to Action” suddenly were seen by many observers to be the waste they were. And the hours spent trying to keep it alive at General Conference despite its questionable objectives were not lost on the majority of the delegates in Tampa.

Second, the impact of this effort led by the Council of Bishops further eroded the respect with which they had been held by the rest of the Church. Many episcopal leaders expressed dismay at the lack of trust they were being shown by the actions of the General Conference. See my posting of May 29 on “Trust of Bishops.”

Third, two agencies, the General Commission on Religion and Race and the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, were preserved. Under Plan UMC, they would have been merged and would have had next to no resources to continue in any serious way, if at all.

In conversations I had among bishops during General Conference, I found every one of the bishops with whom I talked stunned at what had happened to their “wonderful” ideas meant to “enliven” the denomination. We can look forward to similar efforts for 2016, though this General Conference did not fund a new study. I do not see that stopping those energetic leaders from bringing many petitions professionally packaged to sell in the next conference’s prime time. The Judicial Council better be ready for more work in Portland, OR, in 2016.

JCD 1198

http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263&JDID=1319&JDMOD=VWD&SN=1101&EN=1200

Our era has seen the rise of the bishop as CEO. In that movement, bishops have sought more authority than the Discipline actually provides. I’ve seen the officers of the conference (the administrative ones under the bishop) take over the determination of which mission projects to fund, taking it away from the annual conference (JCD 608). I’ve seen bishops press toward having the power to fire pastors without fair process (JCD 777, 784. et al). I’ve seen the Judicial Council turn back many reorganization plans which supposedly “streamlined” program and administration in various annual conferences, some of which even granted the bishop a vote in matters the Discipline does not allow (JCD 1171).

What usually occurs in these reorganization plans is that the conference cuts ties with the denominational resources outside the conference by slushing together Discipline mandated bodies into more “manageable” and less regulated groups. The result is that control of the actions within the conference is not “hindered” by obligations to entities outside the conference (JCD 1147) or even inside the conference (JCD 1150).

The Council provided guidelines for restructuring back in 1998 (JCD 835). It seems the bishops have not even wanted to let the Judicial Council interfere with their restructuring ideas. Or maybe, no one has instructed new bishops for the past 13 years about lessons to be learned from the Discipline and the Judicial Council.

This Council is amazingly patient with its explanations covering old ground again and again.

The bishops are going to have to realize there are limits to their power, that they are part of a connectional system that only works when all the parts are properly connected, and that connectionalism means more than “Obey the bishop.”

One other note about this decision. It includes the same rationale for a Council member not to have recused himself from voting on a decision that was used in JCDs 1131 and 1132. At least a reason was given for the sake of transparency.