By the Rev. William B. Lawrence
May 6, 2019 | DALLAS (UMNS)
[Note: This article raises serious questions about the decision of the Judicial Council in its ruling 1378 (Traditionalist Plan), while praising the clarity of the 1379 (Disaffiliation) ruling. The article itself is difficult to "parse" as it shows how difficult 1378 is to "parse." The core of the "danger" in 1378 is presented here. Read the whole article to catch the full force of Lawrence's argument! This chart, mentioned on another page, may have the most complete rendering of the text as it stands after the Ruling.]
On Friday, April 26, 2019, the Judicial Council of The United Methodist Church released two important and eagerly awaited decisions about legislation enacted by the General Conference in February. One of them is clear and helpful in the controversy involving local churches that want to leave the denomination. But the other is so densely written that it may actually obscure the dangers hidden in it.
Decision 1378, addressing the constitutionality of the legislation that was drawn from the so-called Traditional Plan, is as difficult to read as it is dangerous to United Methodism....Decision 1378 is opaque. Although Decision 1379 is clarifying, Decision 1378 is confounding. Decision 1379, happily, contains the text of the church law that it addresses. Decision 1378, sadly, does not show the paragraphs in the Discipline that were amended by the General Conference; it just refers to the new legislation by petition numbers with which the lawmaking assembly processed proposals. The revised laws only appear in a concurrence to Decision 1378, in a smaller font.
In order to read Decision 1378, one must have the dexterity to track the petitions to which the Decision refers (and have a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary handy to cut through the legal jargon that appears in the decision.) A reader must decode the way that the General Conference tracking system reports what actions were taken on a petition, find the paragraphs in the Discipline to which each approved petition applies, and insert the amended language at the correct location in the Discipline. Only then can a reader of Decision 1378 know what the church law, based on the Traditional Plan, actually says! The concurrence helps, but it is not an official part of the controlling decision.
In short, the impact of Judicial Council Decision 1378 is virtually impossible to grasp without carefully parsing it. ...
The problem, to repeat, is that the motion — supported by a majority of the voting delegates — conflated words and numbers from both paragraphs in the Discipline. And apparently nobody at the General Conference realized it. Neither the delegate who made the motion, nor the bishop who was the presiding officer, nor the parliamentarian, nor the 800 delegates who cast votes on the motion, noticed this detail.
So the Judicial Council had to decide whether, and on what grounds, it had actual jurisdiction to address the matter. The Judicial Council chose to claim its jurisdiction by interpreting the motion in the least generous way possible. It ignored the full text of the motion and just used the reference to ¶2609.1, which was mentioned by the presiding officer when she called for the vote. In so doing, the Judicial Council spared itself the trouble of having to examine what the laws based on the Traditional Plan mean for the church, how they will apply to the church, and what they will effectively achieve in the church. [Emphasis added.] The Judicial Council, claiming jurisdiction in the least generous way possible, prevented itself from being helpful to the church....
[Read the whole article here. There is much more detail.]