Jeremy Smith of Hacking Christianity has just updated a story he wrote in 2015 about how the lack of accurate membership figures and membership audits bring into question the whole General Conference process. The implications of this story are huge for the future of the denomination.
2019 Update: Lack of Membership Audits question General Conference representation
August 11, 2019 by UMJeremy
Last week, a United Methodist News article dropped about a challenge to General Conference actions in 2019, showing that there was evidence that vote tampering allegations could have changed the result of one petition which became church law. The article focuses on that topic, which is great, but one overlooked paragraph includes a bombshell to a basic tenet of United Methodism:
The commission also plans to initiate conversations on membership statistics with the Council of Bishops and the General Council on Finance and Administration, the denomination’s administrative agency. An annual conference’s number of professing members helps determine its number of General Conference delegates, but the membership data available can be out of date and unreliable.
Here’s why that matters. Read his analysis at Hacking Christianity.