Momentous News for United Methodism

The once controversial General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) is leaving New York for Atlanta, with some of its staff relocating to overseas regional offices. Here’s the United Methodist News Service report.

One of America’s largest missions agencies, and United Methodism’s largest agency, GBGM was also long the denomination’s most controversial agency. Under the influence of Liberation Theology in the 1970s and 1980s, GBGM withdrew from missions evangelism in favor of radical politics. GBGM staff and grants often backed Marxist revolution and regimes overseas, and far-left advocacy in the U.S.

AFL-CIO official David Jessup, a United Methodist layman, researched GBGM’s grants to pro-Marxist groups and distributed his report at the 1980 United Methodist General Conference. Jessup’s report led to the founding of IRD in 1981, and media exposes of Mainline Protestant support for Marxist causes, including a Sixty Minutes broadcast.

In the 1980s Good News magazine published a further expose, “Missions Derailed,” of GBGM grants to radical groups, the decline of career missionaries, and the bloated New York bureaucracy of 500 persons, which outnumbered the career missionary force. In the late 1980s I became my congregation’s missions chair and discovered GBGM’s radical theology and politics, disseminating my own report throughout Virginia United Methodism, and forming a group to reform GBGM. We met with GBGM executives in 1989, where we were told that GBGM staff well knew most church members wouldn’t approve their policies, but the staff would follow their own consciences.

GBGM routinely made political pronouncements. In 1989 GBGM immediately condemned the U.S. invasion of Panama, prompting the Virginia Annual Conference to pass a resolution I wrote admonishing GBGM. A prominent GBGM director, theologian James Logan, voted for the reproof. He was also part of a two year dialogue on GBGM between my group and Virginia Bishop Thomas Stockton, which agreed on resolutions for the 1992 General Conference limiting GBGM’s grants to non-church groups and prioritizing support for missionaries. I attended the a General Conference and watched GBGM staff successfully defeat nearly all reform legislation.

Meanwhile evangelical United Methodists, despairing that GBGM would return to missions evangelism, had formed their own Mission Society for United Methodists. I began attending GBGM directors meetings, which included a board of 180 members, each meeting costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only a few evangelicals were on the board, and liberal themes reigned supreme. But over the years, several formidable evangelical directors, including the Rev. Bill Hinson, Maxie Dunnam, and especially Georgia layman Joe Whittemore, diligently worked for reform. Their exertions eventually bore fruit.

With the Cold War’s end, GBGM’s penchant for Marxist causes, especially their support for Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, became passé. The radical grants dwindled, and political declarations less frequent. The bureaucracy was trimmed and became a little more accountable. Overseas United Methodists became more influential. GBGM successfully nurtured new United Methodist churches in places like Cambodia and Vietnam. Old radical executives retired, often replaced by pragmatists more interested in transitioning to United Methodism’s new global reality. A chief radical influence on GBGM was the United Methodist Women’s Division, which was part of GBGM and provided much of its funding. In 2012 it became formally autonomous from GBGM.

Remarkably, over the last several years GBGM has partnered with the evangelical Missions Society, its old nemesis. Once competitors and adversaries, they are now sometime partners. Except for GBGM’s ongoing unfortunate political stance against Israel, a last vestige of Liberation Theology, GBGM is now mostly non-political in its missions work, a vast change since 25 years ago.

For many years many evangelical United Methodists fought to relocate GBGM from New York, in the infamous “God Box,” co-located with the National Council of Churches and other liberal church groups. In 1992 the General Conference approved studying GBGM’s relocation, but a stacked committee shrewdly picked a Washington, DC suburb, claiming an absurd cost of $72 million, which of course the 1996 General Conference rejected. GBGM had outsmarted its critics again.

Now a very different GBGM is quitting New York on its own. Twenty years ago, when GBGM was radical and seemingly invincible, I never would have believed it. GBGM’s rejection of missions evangelism motivated my call to United Methodist reform. The changes since then are almost miraculous.

It’s tempting to think that United Methodism is always getting worse. But in many ways, United Methodism is friendlier to evangelical concerns than several decades ago. We can safely give God the credit.