Despite Imbalances, United Methodist Discipleship Agency Expands Globally

Enough of the pessimism about the United Methodist Church’s future!

That was the clear message of the Rev. Karen Greenwaldt, chief executive of the UMC’s General Board of Discipleship (GBOD), to the agency’s board of directors earlier this month.

Noting that “we’ve been in a downward spiral conversation for years,” she suggested that this may be a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy, and pointed out that the church is still here despite decades of predictions of its impending death.

Citing Eugene Peterson, Greenwaldt urged “invest[ing] ourselves in the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus.”

As she gets ready for her imminent retirement, the United Methodist executive can smile at a generally rosy financial picture for her agency, which recently completed a good fiscal year, has voluntary donation income (such as designated giving to support military chaplaincy) exceeding goals and/or last year’s performance in some areas, and according to its development team, “is on target to achieve 2013 projections and enjoy the best year ever in the agency’s history.”

Furthermore, at their August 1-3 meeting, directors learned that a recent review by the UMC General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits (GBoPHB) discovered a pensions-related invested fund for GBOD from the 1980s which has grown more than twelvefold to over $2.2 million, now at GBOD’s disposal. The GBOD finance committee will explore devoting part of this fund towards the Central Conference Pension Initiative.

With the meeting being held in Denver, Colorado rather than GBOD’s Nashville, Tennessee headquarters, directors were pushed to learn about United Methodist ministry in that local context through having two of their meeting sessions in area congregations, spending an afternoon volunteering with a third, and hosting a dinner in which local United Methodists were invited to share about their local ministries and learn about GBOD.

Out of proportion

However, Denver is hardly the most representative area to see United Methodist ministry “in the field.” Its annual conference is among the most theologically heterodox-dominated and is not among the few experiencing recent growth in America. The church where GBOD directors were sent to volunteer is among the one percent of UMC congregations which, in open violation of church law, formally affiliate with the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), which promotes church acceptance of varieties of sex outside of marriage (including but not limited to homosexual practice) and has become notorious for its any-means-necessary, Golden-Rule-denying tactics at General Conference.

I suppose it is possible that GBOD’s leadership will seek balance by holding a future board meeting in a more conservative region of the church and have directors volunteer with a congregation which is publicly supportive of one or more of our denomination’s evangelical renewal caucuses. Time will tell.

But GBOD’s board of directors is now fundamentally structured in a way that has become “self-selecting, self-perpetuating and unrepresentative.” In the chaotic final hours of last year’s General Conference, delegates were rushed to pass a petition from GBOD which restructured its board of directors to move away from the principle of proportional representation (more directors from more populous areas of the church) to instead treating each U.S. jurisdiction equally. Thus, thanks to GBOD, the Discipline structures its board of directors to give the same initial representation to the liberal-dominated Western Jurisdiction (where less than 350,000 United Methodists live) as to the Southeastern Jurisdiction (which is the most conservative and has over eight times as many members). Furthermore, each of the three overseas central conference continents (Europe, Africa, and the Philippines) is given a single slot on the twenty-two member board of directors (in addition to Bishop Rodolfo Juan of the Philippines who now fills the central-conference-bishop slot), with no accommodation for the differences in scale between the roughly 60,000 United Methodists in Europe, close to 150,000 in the Philippines, and 4.2 million in Africa.

In addition to the GBOD board of directors president, Bishop Elaine Stanovsky of the Mountain Sky Episcopal Area (in the Western Jurisdiction), the search committee to select Greenwaldt’s replacement is composed of one person from each U.S. jurisdiction along with one Filipino, but not one person from Africa, where over one-third of United Methodists now live.

The geographically-based slots on the GBOD’s Division on Ministries with Young People (DMYP), as well as the DMYP’s once-in-four-years United Methodist Young People’s Legislative Assembly, give equal representation to each of the five U.S. jurisdictions and seven overseas central conferences, regardless of their vast size differences.

Obviously, such systematic amplification of the voices and influences of some United Methodists in certain smaller regions at the expense of others raises questions for GBOD’s ability to be responsive to its own denominational constituency.

Going Global

That being said, GBOD is, to its credit, rapidly expanding work to provide ministry resources for United Methodists in Europe, the Philippines, and sub-Saharan Africa.

GBOD’s program, Discipleship Resources International (DRI), is dedicated to “support[ing] Central Conferences that are working to expand their publishing capacities in a sustainable way.” One African United Methodist summarizes the need: “Up until now, the Christian resources our people found to read were more likely to be Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah Witnesses, or Baptist at best, than Methodist or Wesleyan in outlook and balance.” Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the divinity of Christ, His teaching about Hell, and the validity of other Christian churches.

Much of GBOD’s work involves helping train African UMC leaders and publish print ministry resources written by these indigenous leaders for use in their respective contexts, such as a catechism for Congolese United Methodists and a handbook on “the essentials” of UMC doctrine for Ivory Coast United Methodists. GBOD staff also provide some review to ensure these resources’ conformity with UMC doctrine. There is now even talk about GBOD-supported ministry resources in Africa spreading to non-UMC pastors.

Earlier this year, GBOD and the UMC’s General Board on Higher Education and Ministry (GBHEM) launched a pilot project to provide E-readers loaded with 100 digital books for students at Gbarnga School of Theology in Liberia, where a dearth of available books forced students and professors to spend much time and money copying passages. After the success of that effort, the project is being expanded to other UMC seminaries in Africa.

As our denomination becomes more and more global, such efforts will be increasingly prominent in GBOD’s work.

Financial Accountability

The meeting also briefly addressed a couple messy situations involving alleged misappropriations of denominational funds.

On the ongoing financial accountability dispute involving Bishop Daniel Wandabula of East Africa, the GBOD directors unanimously approved a statement asking the Council of Bishops, the General Council on Finance and Administration, and GBGM to somehow avoid hurting ministries in the area that depend on U.S. funding and to “find a way forward where there seems to be no way.”

Directors also received an update on a sad situation in which a forensic audit found that GBOD’s former Director of Korean American and Asian Ministries at GBOD, Sungnam Choi, had apparently stolen tens of thousands of dollars from GBOD grants intended for Korean-American ministry projects. The GBOD executive committee took action earlier this summer to turn relevant findings over to law enforcement authorities for prosecution, while the board works to recover the church’s money. Choi has relinquished his UMC clergy credentials. In a public GBOD statement on the matter in July, Bishop Stanovsky reported that “the Board has initiated a review of grant procedures to make them even more secure going forward.”

In other business…

In the course of the three-day meeting, directors also:

• approved new policies for much of GBOD’s grant-making work to prioritize funding start-up projects (and avoid recipients seeing GBOD as an ongoing source of funds), better ensure grants will be used for their intended purpose, and make forging forms more difficult.
• spent a chunk of their time in executive session, which included discussion on the search for GBOD’s new chief executive, now that Greenwaldt is retiring. The search committee cut a pool of 34 applicants down to four finalists to be interviewed. Bishop Stanovsky reports that they hope to present one candidate to the October GBOD directors meeting to be formally elected then. She also said that she would want to keep the identity of the search committee’s nominee confidential before the October board meeting, in order to help protect the full board’s ability to reject him or her.
• were treated to an extensive overview of student scholarships provided, grants disbursed to far-flung ministry projects, and ongoing programming offered by GBOD

The meeting closed with a brief, very cross-centered message by Samuel Sim, a teenage GBOD director. My appreciation for the young rising star’s good words was mixed with sadness at this subtle reminder that in the current state of United Methodism, no one can safely assume that even the leaders of our denomination’s agency explicitly devoted to Christian discipleship all necessarily accept the foundational biblical, United Methodist doctrine that Christ was crucified “to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but for actual sins of men.”

Which makes me all the more committed to working, with God’s help, towards the day when that changes.

UPDATE: Since this article was first posted, I have learned that the GBOD directors decided earlier that over the course of the 2012-2016 quadrennium they will visit each of the five U.S. jurisdictions as well as one of the seven overseas central conferences.  I am glad to learn this, and hope that the choice of the other U.S. churches to be spotlighted outside of the Western Jurisdiction will reflect an intentional effort to at least provide some theological balance.