- Analysis by Jeremy Smith below and here.
- Council modifies decision; Bishops take office Jan. 1, 2023
By Heather Hahn May 20, 2022 | UM News
Key Points:
- The United Methodist Church’s top court says that the Council of Bishops can call jurisdictional conferences to elect and assign new U.S. bishops.
- However, the Judicial Council also says that the bishops cannot change the established date of Sept. 1 when church law mandates that newly elected U.S. bishops take office.
- The church court also said the number of bishops approved by the 2016 General Conference for each U.S. jurisdiction remains legally binding.
The United Methodist Council of Bishops has the authority to call jurisdictional conferences this year to elect and assign new episcopal leaders in the U.S.
However, that authority does not extend to changing the Sept. 1 date when church law says newly elected U.S. bishops officially take office, the denomination’s top court ruled in Decision 1445.
Usually jurisdictional conferences meet to elect bishops in mid-July every four years following General Conference, the denomination’s top lawmaking assembly.
But amid General Conference’s continued pandemic-caused delay, the Judicial Council said the bishops can call jurisdictional conferences “for the limited purpose of effectuating the continuance of an episcopacy in The United Methodist Church” as required by the denomination’s constitution.
Put another way, the Judicial Council says new bishop elections can occur off their usual schedule to fulfill the United Methodist constitutional mandate that bishops provide continuing supervision.
The Council of Bishops tentatively had set Nov. 2-5 for jurisdictional conferences if the Judicial Council ruled in favor of holding the regional meetings.
To comply with the requirement that new bishops take office on Sept. 1, the Judicial Council decision said the Council of Bishops must either reschedule the jurisdictional conferences so they occur before Sept. 1 this year or assign the newly elected bishops on an interim basis until they officially begin their assignments on Sept. 1, 2023. Read the rest of the story here. See modified decision 1446 here.
Judicial Council single-handedly pivots The United Methodist Church: Hacking Christianity
Recent Judicial Council rulings have single-handedly hampered the WCA’s planned exiting of people, property, and resources from The United Methodist Church AND opened the pathway to revolutionizing The UMC. Here’s what can happen next.
What these rulings mean
Two recent rulings in May 2022 will have a significant impact.
The first ruling is about annual conferences: basically, any annual conference that was considering leaving the United Methodist Church for the Global Methodist Church cannot do that, and the only people that can give that permission is the General Conference when it next meets in 2024. Details here.
The second ruling is about bishops: basically, even though bishops are supposed to be elected following General Conference, the JC has given permission for them to be elected this year, with a slight technicality that if a bishop is elected after September, they are “interim” status until September 2023. Details here.
One final note is the episcopal elections ruling states that the number of bishops to be elected stays the same as 2016’s calculations, a final shutting-down of the Council of Bishops’ attempts to reduce the number of bishops by fiat.
A Looming Shift
Combined with the postponement of the General Conference to 2024, these two rulings cause significant shifts in the balance of power in The United Methodist Church.
The denial of exit ramps for annual conferences means that the Global Methodist Church starts with a bust not a bang with churches needing to individually disaffiliate through our established protocols passed at the 2019 General Conference by Traditionalists themselves. Now the rank and file of the Wesleyan Covenant Association can call on their leaders to focus their attention on local churches rather than manipulating conference rules and resolution shenanigans. Stop wasting your constituent’s money!
The episcopal elections ruling means that the regions of United Methodism in the United States can go ahead and elect new bishops this year without waiting for General Conference 2024. It also means with all likelihood, the electors of those bishops will be members of the 2019 progressive and centrist wave that rejected the actions of the hugely anti-gay 2019 General Conference. Given a two-year delay has caught several more bishops into forced retirement after Jurisdictional Conferences, there are significant percentages of bishops to be elected, by my calculations, 21 new elections, nearly a third of the active 66 bishops.
But more broadly, this new class of bishops would be shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic on the ground in ways that the current class of bishops experienced but didn’t have to pastor at the local church level. I would hope more local church pastors are elected to the episcopacy than conference staff–but that’s not likely to happen as, historically, conference staff are elected more often than local pastors.
A Warning Bell
There is a highly problematic issue in the ruling of the episcopal elections. Buried in there, it says if the jurisdictional elections are held after September 1st of this year, then those bishops elected will have to serve on an “interim” basis until the following September 2023.
While this seems like a distinction without a difference, there’s an important element to the interim appointments: according to ¶407, those appointments are made by the College of Bishops in that jurisdiction. So instead of a duly elected representative Jurisdictional Committee on the Episcopacy making those appointments, it would be the bishops themselves (current and new) choosing where those newly elected bishops serve.
Read the full article here, including a reason this could potentially undercut the ministry of the Western Jurisdiction.
Judicial Council Modifies Decision 1445; Allows Assignments to begin January 1, 2023: UMNews
The United Methodist Church’s top court has set Jan. 1, 2023, as the date when U.S. bishops facing mandatory retirement must step down and their newly elected successors take office.
That means new bishops will be able to begin their assignments in the usual timespan of nearly two months after U.S. jurisdictional conferences. The Council of Bishops has scheduled the regional meetings that elect bishops for Nov. 2-5 this year.
The Judicial Council spelled out its reasons for setting Jan. 1 as the changeover date in Memorandum 1446, which modifies an earlier decision that allows U.S. jurisdictional conferences to go forward this year.
In the memorandum released June 1, the church court reiterated its ruling that the Council of Bishops has the authority to call the regional meetings “for the limited purpose” of continuing “episcopacy in The United Methodist Church” as required by the denomination’s constitution. Read the whole article here.