The 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference: Ten Takeaways

The November 10-11, 2021 specially called North Central Jurisdictional Conference was rather clarifying about the mood of liberal American United Methodists, across – and probably far beyond – the Midwest.

Here are ten key takeaways:

1. No More Mr. and Mrs. Compatibilist

In 2019, most liberal leaders claimed to be “progressive compatibilists. Very few admitted to being “progressive incompatibilists” who would not want to accommodate a traditionalist minority after they got their denomination to approve same-sex unions. Liberal leaders are not using similarly misleading in trying to woo conservative United Methodists to choose the liberalized post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC)—instead of the orthodox Global Methodist Church—after our denomination’s impending split.

But as I outlined here, with the aggressively liberal Covenant it adopted, the 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference embraced a clearly progressive incompatibilist ethos. Liberal delegates characterized biblically-based values of theological traditionalists as “evil,” call for creating an utterly hostile and unwelcoming environment for traditionalist delegates, and pointedly make clear their unwillingness to meaningfully include theological traditionalists in shaping the future of the psUMC, even in minor, symbolic ways.

It is especially striking how the liberal faction now dominating the North Central Jurisdiction (NCJ) radically re-interpret the words of our denomination’s baptismal covenant, with which liberal United Methodists are supposedly united with others outside their faction, to be used as a weapon against more moderate and conservative United Methodists. Their Covenant essentially redefines the baptismal covenant to “renounce” the UMC’s historic, biblical moral values as well as, by extension, relevant parts of the UMC’s official core doctrine and the writings of John Wesley. It also identifies the faith of less liberal United Methodists with “evil powers”! The numbers indicate that almost every last NCJ delegate who was not elected with support of their conference Wesleyan Covenant Association (WCA) chapter voted for this.

2. Silver Linings: Support for Amicable Separation

It was very major how the 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference acknowledged the inevitability of denominational separation. I did not hear anyone there still promoting myths about there being any way for us all to stay together.

Compiled results from our first-day small-group discussions showed NCJ delegates across the theological spectrum naming “amicable separation” as a top priority for our jurisdiction, trailing behind only anti-racism and LGBTQ+ inclusion.

The all-liberal writing team hurt trust by not saying as much about especially wanting amicable separation.

But even their statement explicitly acknowledges that some congregations will “feel called to a different future in the faith” and will separate. Such language would have faced fierce resistance just a few years ago. Now it faced none.

Another sentence calls on conferences in our jurisdiction to use current church law “to accommodate local congregations and clergy seeking disaffiliation.” Like many conference resolutions, this is open to a range of interpretations. It could at least encourage letting the new “gracious exits” provision (currently useless outside the United States) be implemented fairly, in contrast to the heavy-handed barriers imposed on disaffiliating congregations in Wisconsin, New England, North Georgia, and elsewhere.

Furthermore, in spite of the writing team, 93 percent of delegates voted to amend this Covenant, as proposed by a prominent liberal delegate, to affirm the principles of respecting those who will continue into the Global Methodist Church, “do[ing] no harm” in the separation, and preserving goodwill.

(The NCJ Covenant says nothing explicitly about the widely supported Protocol on Reconciliation and Grace through Separation proposal. No one pushed for this, and the focus was supposed to be on what the jurisdiction, rather than General Conference, could do.)

3. Evangelism is NOT a top priority

The deeper divide in our denomination was made clear when the 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference delegates were asked to select the top five priorities for our jurisdiction of the church, with evangelism listed as one of many options. It did not even make the list of top-five priorities!

Traditionalist United Methodists generally see making disciples of Jesus Christ as the most important priority at every level for any truly Christian church. The pastor of my former United Methodist congregation had a sign on his desk asking anyone who brought an idea: “How will this make disciples?”

But a United Methodist Communications survey found that among self-described “progressive-liberal” American United Methodists, nearly half believe that “there are ways to salvation that do not involve Jesus,” and more than two-thirds believe that the denomination’s primary focus should be social justice rather than evangelism. So many (though not all) liberal United Methodists do not believe that people truly need Jesus. 

4. Fewer leaders and people

The 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference basically admitted that years of unabated membership decline are forcing us to reduce our number of bishops by one.

2018 is the last year for which official membership statistics are conveniently available at this “Statistical Resources” webpage. That year, the NCJ’s congregations had a total of 1,082,764 professing members, and average weekly worship attendance of 479,193. In 2008, the jurisdiction had 1,381,468 church members and average worship attendance of 658,133.

So in just one decade, the region’s membership dropped by 21.2 percent, while church attendance plummeted by 27.2 percent, before Covid-19.

So even without a split, our jurisdiction is looking at a shrunken future. To oversimplify, liberals have blamed the UMC’s official traditionalist standards for turning people off, evangelicals have blamed our leaders’ liberalism (including what was seen in #3 above), and both have blamed our energy-sapping infighting.

The coming separation will set both wings free to pursue our respective visions, without being held back by each other any longer.

5.  Hypocrisy over white supremacy and nationalism

Another part of the Covenant adopted by the 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference professes concern over “the impact of white supremacy and Christian nationalism/white nationalism within The United Methodist Church” and requested “an exercise” to address this at the next jurisdictional conference. 

But these liberal American delegates offering such sanctimonious virtue-signaling involves a great deal of hypocrisy, as I have outlined.

While our denomination’s U.S. membership is 90 percent white, the NCJ is by far the least diverse of our denomination’s five U.S. jurisdictions, at 95 percent white. Under years of liberal leadership, we have failed to reflect the growing ethnic diversity of American society. While greater percentages of non-Anglos were elected as delegates, by my count the listed full jurisdictional delegates to the recent meeting (not counting alternates) were roughly three-quarters white non-Hispanic. All of us NCJ delegates were elected from overwhelmingly white annual conferences. There are just objective, official facts.

Most of United Methodism’s non-white members are found in the non-U.S. central conferences, which now probably account for the majority of the UMC.

It bears repeating that the majority faction of NCJ delegates displayed an ugly, fundamentally nationalist attitude of asserting the supremacy of their 95-percent-white portion of the church over most of our denomination’s members of color.

6.  Coming after local churches?

The 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference’s Covenant also demands that funds “must” be designated for a top-down “racial analysis of” several things, including “local church’s total budgets.” This is apparently supposed to be done by annual conference officials devoted to anti-racism work.

Any racism sins against the God in whose image all people are created. 

But as noted, liberal United Methodists, in the name of “intersectionality,” have sometimes tried to use the moral high ground of anti-racism to promote less worthy causes. 

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist has been recently promoted by liberal United Methodists around the country, and takes the strong position (in chapter 15) that “we cannot be anti-racist” unless we are also committed to LGBTQ liberationist ideology. The anti-racism portion of the recent NCJ event included a video speaker urging the church to oppose “heteronormativity.”

All of this, combined with the myriad other ways in which liberal United Methodist leaders have earned mistrust, raises questions of how exactly a heavy-handed, top-down “racial analysis” of something as local as individual congregations’ budget may be used. How might liberal officials use this as a pretext to bully congregations over disagreements that are really about something entirely different from race?

7. Practice for a virtual special session of General Conference?

For all of my dislike of much of the content of this conference, I have to hand it to the organizers: the connectional technology worked remarkably smoothly.

As explained here, this event and other recent all-virtual jurisdictional conferences could serve as a scaled-down trial run of a virtual General Conference. United Methodist delegates have now proven that we indeed have some capability to have a large, legislative conference for geographically dispersed delegates.

Perhaps the part of the 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference that most surprised me was when the event’s liberal organizers introduced the idea of having a limited-agenda, virtual session of General Conference. Small group discussions found broad support across the theological spectrum for going this route, if need be. 

8. Same Delegates, Different Days

It seems American liberal delegates’ attitudes can shift very rapidly. 

I and several other traditionalists appreciated the remarkably civil, respectful tone in the first day’s small groups. The moderators deserve much credit. 

And yet I and others sensed a rather dramatic shift to a more combative, hostile mood on the second day of the two-day session. But it was primarily the same delegates participating on both days.

Part of this appears to be driven by the extreme deference liberal American delegates often have for those they see as their leaders. They largely accepted the lefty “Covenant,” with only minor tweaking, after seeing it was written entirely by leaders from their faction. Speeches against Pastor Andy Adams’s proposed amendment to try to make that statement a bit more gracious about separation often made little sense. But because Adams is a known evangelical and those speaking against it included prominent liberal leaders Kennetha Bigham-Tsai and David Nuckols, that was apparently all that most liberal delegates (with some exceptions) needed to oppose it.

The full text of Adams’s proposed amendment that Bigham-Tsai and Nuckols found so objectionable was: “We honor the expressed desire of some churches and church leaders to leave the United Methodist Church to participate in other denominations. We call bishops and NCJ annual conferences to handle any separation in as gracious and amicable way as possible, avoiding property lawsuits and other forms of bitter fighting. We further call bishops and NCJ annual conferences to assist local churches by developing strategies and resources on how to have difficult conversations in ways that reduce harm and ensure the open and accurate sharing of information about options as they discern their future.”

Relatedly, the hasty vote to endorse the recent Council of Bishops “Narrative” for the post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC) should not be seen as moderating the “progressive incompatibilist” tone of the NCJ Covenant. That “Narrative” is rather vacuous, and demonstrates how the United Methodist Council of Bishops has less honesty and clarity about its theological center or boundaries than the Unitarian Universalist Association.

In any case, it is not clear how many delegates ever read this “Narrative.” Bigham-Tsai suddenly introduced it as a floor motion. There were no other speeches on either side, and the whole process took less than five minutes. She urged delegates to “stand in solidarity with our bishops” by “adopting it without amendment.” It was widely known that this statement was endorsed in a divided vote of the Council of Bishops, and that American liberals are the Council’s majority faction. So of course four-fifths of delegates voted for this stand-with-liberal-bishops motion. 

This rushed process was similar to the quickly adopted floor motion to endorse liberal activists’ rather ungracious, so-called “Call to Grace” (some of whose problems we noted here).

9. “It’s going to be contentious”—but must it really?

Amazingly, another liberal delegate speaking against the Adams amendment specifically objected to that proposal’s expressed desire to avoid “property lawsuits” and “bitter fighting.”

This West Ohio Conference pastor—a pastor!—made clear (beginning at the 1:57:30 mark) that he did not want to discourage liberal bishops and conference officials from choosing to use the weapons of church-property lawsuits (in blatant violation of Scripture) in the separation he acknowledged is coming. In a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy, he definitively declared of the impending split, “it’s going to be contentious.” He warned against “act[ing] like we can just part our ways in love” because “let’s just be honest, divorces get messy.” 

I am not sure how representative this gentleman is. But the degree to which the split gets nasty primarily depends upon how nasty liberal bishops, delegates, and others want to make it. Traditionalist United Methodists, in marked contrast, have already offered rather extraordinary concessions.

If a majority of a central conference, annual conference, or congregation want to continue into the Global Methodist Church, or if traditionalists offer to let opponents of United Methodist doctrine take over the majority of our denomination’s assets if we keep only a tiny minority share, then what’s there to fight about? There is no reason for liberals to fight to prevent this, let alone pursue unbiblical lawsuits, other than pure mean-spiritedness and unprincipled greed.

10. Remember, traditionalists, this is still our church

We traditionalist United Methodists are, by definition, those who adhere to the United Methodist Church’s official, historic doctrinal and moral standards.

The 2021 North Central Jurisdictional Conference showed how we can force an official ruling that bishops, boards of ordained ministry, and others are obligated to “fully comply with” certain traditional biblical standards on marriage and sex. Even in an 80-percent liberal conference. Such are the realities of our still-unified denomination.

Unless and until we get an acceptable separation enacted, this remains our church. Liberals cannot expect us to ever “just accept” clergy in our church violating the Discipline’s moral standards after we have made clear that this is unfaithful and harmful.

While enforcement may be uneven, these standards are still enforced in much of the church. And even in some of our most liberal annual conferences, some gay clergy not committed to celibacy have recently felt pressured into leaving United Methodist ministry.

If liberals derail the “Protocol” separation treaty, then at the next General Conference, do they really expect us to not fall back to adopt the Traditional Plan 2.0, closing remaining loopholes and more strongly forcing accountability? 

After all, it appears that liberals do not have the votes to just liberalize the UMC like other mainline denominations.

Western Jurisdiction liberal and prolific blogger Jeremy Smith has misrepresented many things. But even he has recently acknowledged, “Traditionalists are expected to have a majority at the next General Conference” since much-touted liberal gains in 2019 delegate elections (which were actually narrowly limited to American clergy) are still “expected to be unable to reach a majority at the next General Conference.” In other words, this prominent liberal strategist publicly admits that, in his words, liberals “won’t have a majority to change the polity” of the UMC at the next General Conference. On this, Smith, myself, and Good News’s Tom Lambrecht all agree.

While these take-aways come immediately from just one jurisdiction, the attitudes of NCJ liberals are not terribly different from other liberal American United Methodists. So each of these takeaways is worth considering throughout our troubled denomination.