April 25 - Dr. Chomingwen Pond

I have to break my rule about names. Just as Iva Joyce Hill is a church saint likely to be left untouched by those powers that distrust me (“I’m not really paranoid. It’s the paranoids who are out to get me.” – from a 1970s’ poster), so is the Rev. Dr. Chomingwen Pond one of those kinds of saints.

Chomee entered the Wisconsin Conference the year I was ordained Elder, a status she achieved two years later as the first woman so ordained in what was then the East Wisconsin Conference. Although women had been licensed Local Pastors for many years, she was the first to be a member of the conference with the right to vote. She earned a PhD and taught theology at Payne Theological Seminary, Wilberforce, OH.

A missionary at heart, she served in the inner city of Milwaukee, a native American community in northern Wisconsin, and in Africa. Among her African assignments was teaching at the then newly formed Africa University.

It was she who asked me to befriend the two she knew through Africa University.

Her presence in Florida at the time of General Conference was unfortunate because her brother who lived just north of Tampa passed away and she came down for a memorial service for him. Despite that circumstance, she asked to have a chance to meet the former students and I gladly helped.

My GPS took me up crowded Highway 19 that Wednesday afternoon. I vowed to check maps from now on!

We got back to Tampa by a much quicker route. To accommodate for her arthritis, we found a wheel chair for her at the Convention Center. She kindly took my travel case in her lap and away we went. We avoided legislative committees because those rooms were already crowded. We spent part of the afternoon cruising the display area. She spoke at length with people working on inter-cultural ministries, particularly with Native Americans. She also was delighted to meet the son of one of her former co-workers and discussed United Methodist Development Fund and other GBGM projects with him and other staff.

By then it was time to meet her two friends down in my “office.”

One was unable to join us because of meetings he had to attend as delegation head, credentials committee, etc. The other was there and gave us the rest of his afternoon discussing with Chomee and me his life and ministry. It was obvious from his description of his conference that Africa University had a great impact.

The three of us went to supper and it was his turn to press us for information on various issues before the General Conference. He asked great, incisive questions and pushed us to document our information. Chomee was so proud and I was tremendously impressed. I added him to my list those who will be known as saints of the whole Church soon. (Both of them will be embarrassed with my opinion of them.)

We finished supper in time to head back to catch some of the presentation of “The Call to Action” that was intended to open the discussion of this major proposal coming from the Council of Bishops, the inter-board coordinating agency (the name of which changes quadrennium to quadrennium) and a third caucus, pastors of the mega-churches.

Rather than simply making a motion on the floor to consider the legislative committee report on “The Call to Action,” the gathering was turned into a professionally produced PR program with speeches, multi-media presentations, special lighting effects, and a quasi-worship atmosphere.

Chomee and I looked at each other after about ten minutes of this nonsense, feeling the mega-church pastors had been used, and knew it was time to leave before we either broke out laughing or started making snarky remarks. Chomee never makes snarky remarks.

The Call to Action

While the General Conference finally voted on issues related to The Call to Action days later, this seems to be a good spot to discuss it at length

There are some bishops who feel they are called to the ministry of reorganizing the denomination to fulfill their vision of the Church. If they were the retired ones, I could understand that impulse. And I would be tempted to take them seriously if for no other reason than they were more mature and experienced.

It appears some very bright “young bucks” caught the fever of simplification of structure that has been attempted across the United States but which the Judicial Council has invariably struck down because those plans took Disciplinary authority away from bodies and attempted to give it to others, contrary to the Discipline.

To be clear about what was involved, remember that bishops have been in charge of each board and agency since General Conference was persuaded that those groups needed monitoring to minimize turf fights, rampant expenses, and other bureaucratic problems. A bishop has been president of each and has had the pleasure of a half dozen or so episcopal colleagues on the board with them to help in the monitoring and governance of each body.

So now after all these years under their careful administration and watch, they joined with the Connectional Table (but not all the executive secretaries of the boards and agencies) and some others (successful pastors of mega-churches) to cut the expenses, the staffs, and the independence of those bodies. They called their plan, “The Call to Action.”

It was intended to revitalize local churches and make the denomination leaner but more efficient.

I don’t know whether they were covering up their ineptness for not fulfilling their responsibilities as the presidents of those bodies or whether they actually saw where changes could be made or were just wishing to continue experimenting with structure (often called “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”) or offering something else to save money rather than their own financial packages or seeking something more Calvinist in our structures so eventually it will be easier to merge with the Southern Baptists. (I’ve been warned that I sometimes say things in cutting ways. That happens when one cannot get a word in edgewise.)

Simply described, The Call to Action sought to eliminate the guaranteed appointment, reshuffle the boards and agencies to make them smaller and compacting their functions, and to gain a set-aside bishop who could help coordinate the ministries of the Church and the Council of Bishops, and to speak on behalf of the Church. It would save lots of money and “we’d all be happy and gay,” as the old camp song says.

And it would finally break the back of those darned kingdoms known as boards and agencies.

If you are following me on this, you are hearing me right if you see I am saying that the Council of Bishops is tired of having their own programming compete for authority and resources with the programming boards and agencies.

There was a challenge to The Call to Action which really was only a little different, called Plan B. It was rolled out early so that the two were the focus of presentations to the press last February.

Both plans were attacked quite widely from within the boards and agencies and from outside. An alternative that had substance needed to be developed and one was, after finally bringing to the table younger ministers and representatives of the regional (central) conferences outside the US (none of whom, it appears, knew the Discipline nor the Judicial Council decisions related to the issue).

It was finally passed . . . in pieces.

The first to be passed was the ending of the guaranteed appointment. More on that below. See May 1 – “Guaranteed Appointment Removed”

The set-aside bishop proposal was not passed. More on that below in “April 30 – The “Set-Aside Bishop” posting.

Something of a merger (Plan UMC) was passed only to be struck down by the Judicial Council on the last day of the conference.

It is a subtle thing but it is my opinion that the Council of Bishops felt it would have more influence over programming if they could influence a group they wanted to make the decisions rather than the ones to whom the Discipline gave that authority. I do not see in JCD 1210 a warning to the bishops to stop taking authority where they didn’t have it. Maybe it is only in the eye of this beholder.

At numerous times over the years, I have warned the Church about bishops wanting more authority all the time in every way they could get it. To me “The Call to Action” was the biggest such incursion I’ve seen yet. I warn you, gentle reader, wait till you see what they come up with for 2016!

In summary, then, the United Methodist Church – 2, the Council of Bishops -1* at the end of the General Conference.

*The guaranteed appointment “score” may be taken away because the Judicial Council has accepted a request to test the constitutionality of its removal and will rule on it in late October.

What They Are Ignoring?

The following post was included in the April 11, 2012 United Methodist Insight, an online weekly collection of essays and articles about the 2012 General Conference. It can be found at

http://um-insight.net/blogs/jerry-eckert/what-umc-restructure-proposals-are-ignoring

The Call to Action and Plan B ignore a pending crisis in pastors available for appointment.

Between 1970 and 1980, around 5,900 full elders were ordained and entered annual conferences in the United States. Now, 32 to 42 years later, only somewhere near 2,500 have already retired. That means that 3,700 pastors will be retiring over the next several years, according to estimates I requested from GCFA. That means that 60 fully trained experienced pastors will, on average, leave your annual conference over the next eight years.

That figure does not take into account the number of pastors who are second career that entered with maybe only ten years to serve before reaching retirement age. It does not take into account the number of pastors being told by their Cabinets that they are unappointable and being forced out of ministry without Fair Process. It does not take into account the increasing number of pastors retiring early. It does not take into account the number of retirees who stay on to serve full or part-time.

With so many factors, most of which only add to the impending crisis, I challenge the General Conference to consider this issue very seriously.

Ah but the wonderful emphasis on seeking young people to come into the ministry will surely more than fill in behind the retiring pastors to provide us with fully trained elders.

At the 2008 General Conference, students and pastors under 35 demonstrated as “Spotted Owls,” an endangered species. Statistics bear up their assertion:

“The percentage of elders and deacons younger than 35 is too low to meet current and future needs for ordained leadership. The percentage of young elders increased to 5.47% in 2010, the highest in over a decade. Clergy aged 35-54 now represent 45% of elders, down from 65% in 1985. In 2010, for the first time, over half of active elders are age 55-72. Deacons show increasing age trends but still have only 9.56% under age 35.”
(2010 Clergy Age Trends Report, Lewis Center for Church Leadership)

And what of the movement encouraged by church leaders to bring in more enthusiastic local pastors to replace the “professional” elders who are blamed for the decline in church membership?

Despite that emphasis since the 1980s, local pastors have not reversed the downward spiral. That could be because when a Superintendent is done with a local pastor, without warning, the local pastor is never again given an appointment, invariably with no explanation.

Every pastor in the denomination is watching all these short term, sometimes cruel, procedures. Morale in most conferences is lower than it’s ever been.

The crisis is further complicated by the immediate problem Cabinets face on the east and west coasts of the United States. Their churches are diminishing in size and closing at an alarming rate. Many of those conferences now have a surplus of pastors.

Unfortunately, Cabinets are taking a short range view by, as I assert above, telling older Anglo pastors in some conferences and women and ethnic pastors in others that they are unappointable, have to go part-time, or are incompetent (allegations usually from prejudiced cliques known as “clergy killers” but who have to be acceded to because “the customer is always right”).

Because of that short-range strategy of dumping Elders who have higher salaries whenever they can get away with it, Cabinets are seen more and more as toxic. And the families and friends of those pastors are often as devastated as the pastors themselves and tend to stop coming to the United Methodist Church.

I hope there have been serious discussions in annual conferences about negotiating equalizing episcopal and superintendent salaries with those of other pastors, facilitating transfers to conferences which do not have a surplus, or other imaginative solutions. I have not seen any sign of such alternatives.

And now comes The Call to Action, basically the Council of Bishops through various agencies, asking for even more freedom to remove pastors.

That will exacerbate the crisis of declining clergy numbers through retirement in the coming years. With unaccountable toxic Cabinets and clergy killer church members, we will end up with too few clergy and no one wanting to enter the awful workplace atmosphere we currently have.

And that will add to the down spiral of our demographics, meaning even more churches will close.

The Call to Action fails to address the real problems facing our Church. Among other things, it gives no heed to the coming crisis of clergy retiring and worsens the prospects of retaining competent clergy. Plan B avoids the pitfall of enhancing episcopal power over employment of pastors but also fails to realize the coming sharp decline in clergy.

Have these two major options come close to dealing with the real issues facing the Church as we meet in Tampa? Are more important issues raised in other petitions (some of mine among them) going to be ignored in the episcopal-centered rush to control the outcome?


While I do not agree with every suggestion made by the Church Systems Task Force, please note that research has supported many of my assertions about the dis-ease among clergy and their families about being between groups not held accountable by anyone, Cabinets and local church antagonists. See Cynthia Astle's article on their report in the next edition of United Methodist INSIGHT.