Where are the United Methodist Protocol Bishops Now?

After decades of increasingly bitter infighting and rising anxieties all around, United Methodist leaders from every major region and faction met over several months to meticulously negotiate a peace treaty, “The Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation.” Half of the sixteen members of the Mediation Team were bishops, the United Methodist “Protocol” Bishops. Central goals were to stop the fighting, allow United Methodist congregations and regional conferences to make their own free choices of which denomination to continue with, and especially avoid ugly church-property lawsuits as seen in other mainline denominations.

As noted, the terms of the Protocol, by any objective standard, were stacked to extract extraordinary, one-sided concessions for the exclusive benefit of the liberal side. Remember, traditionalists, by definition, are those who support the UMC’s historic and still-official doctrinal and moral standards.

And yet the United Methodist Protocol bishops and their liberal-caucus allies on the Mediation Team essentially promised traditionalists that if we made all of these very painful, unfair sacrifices, they in turn would allow traditionalist-leaning conferences and congregations to go in peace into the Global Methodist Church.

But then over the last two-and-a-half years, liberal leaders did more and more to undermine the Protocol, predictably leading to… increasingly bitter infighting, rising anxieties all around, heavy-handed attempts to prevent conferences and congregations from making their own free choices, and now ugly church-property lawsuits as seen in other denominations.

What happened?

Nothing has fundamentally changed the widely accepted fact that separation is inevitable, whether or not it is at all “amicable.”

The Protocol Agreement these United Methodist bishops, leaders, and groups signed included pledging to “use their best efforts to persuade any groups or organizations with which they are affiliated to support the legislation necessary to implement the Protocol.” But the more we moved past the first, March 2020 postponement of General Conference, it seemed that the burden of keeping promise to promote the Protocol was increasingly borne by the Mediation Team’s two traditionalist members and their allies, as other Mediation Team members (with some variation) did less and less. I am not aware of any of the Protocol bishops after 2020 promoting this peace treaty with more than a fraction of the effort several of them spent promoting an earlier proposal they genuinely supported, to liberalize sexuality standards at the 2019 General Conference.

Indeed, in contrast to the liberal caucus leaders on the Protocol Mediation Team, the United Methodist Protocol bishops did not even persuade a majority of the main “group with which they are affiliated,” the Council of Bishops (COB) to formally endorse the Protocol (and I am not aware of them ever seriously trying to do so). This fact was prominently cited in the Judicial Council’s Decision #1407 explanation for why the Judicial Council declined to rule on whether or not the Protocol proposal was constitutional. This significantly undermined the Protocol by casting a cloud of uncertainty over it. The Judicial Council might have ruled differently if the Protocol bishops had even persuaded a majority of the COB’s six officers (fully half of whom, at that time, were on the Protocol Mediation Team), or executive committee to issue a formal collective endorsement of the Protocol.

In the Protocol Agreement, these United Methodist bishops and others also “agree[d] that each of the provisions of this Protocol is integrated with and integral to the whole and shall not be severable from the remainder of the Protocol.” And yet over the last couple years, original liberal “supporters” have, both directly and through proxies, undermined key parts of the Protocol that, for traditionalists, were essential parts of the packaged deal.

When traditionalists protested liberals betraying the painstakingly negotiated deal we had, the liberal response has largely been: “We are altering the deal! Pray we do not alter it any further.” Liberal leaders keep moving the goalposts, again and again.

In various ways, multiple liberal Protocol Mediation Team members were part of the recent campaign pressuring the liberal majority of the Commission on General Conference (CoGC) into blocking General Conference from happening before 2024. That this was a thinly veiled play to derail the Protocol was made clear when we review the internal details of how that decision was made as well as how the Commission waited until one month after preventing General Conference from meeting this year to form strategy teams to address logistical challenges to holding General Conference. The Council of Bishops representative on this Commission, Thomas Bickerton, made clear his support for this politicized filibuster of General Conference, even though he was one of United Methodism’s Protocol bishops.

Relatedly, when the Council of Bishops was not interested in helping African delegates who asked for help accessing COVID-19 vaccines (which was being cited as a main pretext for not holding a 2022 General Conference), at least four of the bishops on the Protocol Mediation Team—Bickerton, Ken Carter, Cynthia Harvey, and Rudy Juan—helped manufacture a controversy of demonizing and misrepresenting the facts about efforts of traditionalist American United Methodists to respond to these African pleas for assistance.

I asked every living United Methodist Protocol bishop for on-the-record statements about how they now saw their promises they made in the Protocol. Eventually, I got responses from all of them.

I previously reported New York Bishop Thomas Bickerton’s responses on behalf of all of the United Methodist Protocol bishops, in the context of other non-traditionalist Protocol Mediation Team members now opposing the Protocol and the seven United Methodist Protocol bishops giving their own joint response that hardly shows much enthusiasm for continuing to work with traditionalists to champion the Protocol and its key terms. Perhaps the most significant part of Bickerton’s response on behalf of the group was the statement: “There should be no coercion on either side as it relates to issues of disaffiliation.” But will they honor this any more than their other Protocol-related promises?

The separate responses more directly represent each of the other United Methodist Protocol bishops.

Bishop Christian Alsted of the Nordic and Baltic Episcopal Area in Northern Europe referred me to several public statements in which he has expressed some willingness to let separation proceed amicably in his unique context, which you can read about, along with related concerns.

Bishop Rodolfo “Rudy” Juan of the Philippines (whose full responses you can read here) was the most direct in flatly declaring that he no longer supports the Protocol, and apparently has not since at least last year.

But at least Juan gave a simple “YES I AGREE” answer to my inviting him to agree “at least as a general principle, that as our denomination divides, congregations, campus ministries, and clergy should feel free to discuss relevant issues, share accurate information, and make their own fair, free, and informed decisions without any bullying, mistreatment, or punitive changes in appointment.”

Again, there are questions about whether or not he will actually live this out, especially given reports of bullying of traditionalists in the Philippines.

Though he has increasingly provoked questions about his true commitment to the Protocol, I have not seen Ken Carter of the Florida and Western North Carolina Conferences go quite as far as Juan in explicitly repudiating the Protocol.

In response to the four questions I asked each United Methodist Protocol bishop, Carter only gave this minimalist response: “I expressed my continued support for the protocol, now in the form of legislation before the next General Conference, in our annual conference sessions.  In this way I have been accountable.”

Some may perhaps argue that no more than very occasional, half-hearted lip-service about allegedly still supporting the Protocol is enough to meet the Protocol Agreement’s terms for these bishops to “use their best efforts to persuade” others to support the Protocol. But the fact is that leading up to the last General Conference, Carter did so much more to energetically promote a proposal he clearly genuinely supported, the so-called “One Church Plan.”

Note that Carter has recently focused on promoting the Protocol Agreement’s “abeyance” on enforcing church law – but now declined to answer my question about the provision with which this was directly paired, the church-closures moratorium.

And remember, the anti-traditionalist bullying and “coercion” in the Florida Conference under Carter’s leadership, combined with his repeated refusals to allow non-punitive, Protocol-esque arrangements to proceed there, have escalated to his fighting an ugly court battle against over 100 congregations—the very thing the Protocol was supposed to avoid!

Separately, in a widely shared August 12 Facebook post, Carter not only made an unsubstantiated accusation of “misinformation,” but tried shaming orthodox United Methodists from doing what he as a Protocol bishop had encouraged us to do, preparing to go with like-minded United Methodists into a new denomination. In his words, “If you were going to start an evangelical church … you would not recruit people from an existing church—this is not evangelism, but proselytizing.”

This is extraordinarily disingenuous. Of course, the Global Methodist Church will evangelize the unchurched—likely much more so than what is left of the UMC. But the Protocol that Carter helped negotiate, after extracting so many self-serving concessions, made clear that orthodox United Methodists would need to spread the word and organize among like-minded believers currently in the UMC. One could counter by asking Carter why he does not go start his own denomination, rather than trying to remake the UMC in his liberal image.

Make no mistake: whatever else he has said, Carter’s Facebook statement is almost as strong a repudiation of the essence of the Protocol as Juan’s statement.

Bishop Greg Palmer of West Ohio’s answers were a bit less minimalist:

• I have done nothing to undermine the work of The Protocol
• The Protocol is legislation now in the hands the delegates to the General Conference
• I have not acted to close any churches that have not themselves to close because they are at the end of their life cycle almost always due to lack of membership and or participation
• Clergy should always feel free to discuss relevant issues while maintaining the integrity of the office they hold
• In West Ohio there are no onerous burdens placed upon churches that wish to sever the bond with the United Methodist Church.

Sources in his conference have observed Bishop Palmer generally falling completely silent on the Protocol since early 2020. While silence is not the same as active undermining, it also amounts to not continuing to keep the Agreement to promote the Protocol. I have heard independent confirmations about what Palmer told me about honoring the moratorium on closing small congregations. His affirmation of free speech could have been stronger, but was refreshingly broad. One could debate what qualifies as an “onerous burden,” but West Ohio has been classified in a middle category of conferences that are adding additional burdens, but not as much as others.

Even without the Protocol, the United Methodist Protocol bishops have ways they could potentially move in at least their respective annual conferences to allow congregations under more Protocol-like terms, that could be less punitive than the primarily liberal-authored ¶2553 process narrowly adopted at the 2019 General Conference. But so far none have done so.

Quite the contrary: Of the five American United Methodist Protocol bishops, only one leads a conference even applying ¶2553 without imposing major additional burdens: Bickerton’s New York Conference. Nevertheless, Bickerton has broadly defended others greedily adding additional burdens. Three of these five actually lead conferences in the “worst offenders” category of conferences with the most punitive additional burdens needlessly imposed on disaffiliating congregations. Carter’s Florida Conference imposes onerous insurance requirements. Cynthia Fierro Harvey’s Louisiana Conference imposes additional and self-servingly inconsistent payments, and in an especially mean-spirited and petty touch, requires congregations to collect and surrender their own hymnals to the conference office! And on top of ¶2553’s already daunting required payments, under the leadership of Bishop Latrelle Easterling, both the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Conferences are requiring disaffiliating congregations to pay 50 percent of the value of their property—even if they have already paid for it with no help from the conference!

Despite the aforementioned lip service about supposedly wanting to see “no coercion” in disaffiliations, such burdens clearly coerce congregations against disaffiliating.

I urged Bishop Easterling particularly for a response on why she will not “in the spirit of the Protocol, promote allowing congregations in at least your own episcopal area transfer into the Global Methodist Church under terms as close as possible to those of the Protocol, without needlessly large expenses or burdens.”

Her response: “My actions as a residential bishop have always been with the express purpose of uplifting, preserving and promoting the mission and ministry of The United Methodist Church.”

This suggests what seems to be the now-dominant view of United Methodist bishops that the Global Methodist and United Methodist Churches are locked in a zero-sum battle in which any transfer into the former from the latter, even if this would result in a better fit for all involved, is a loss worth trying to prevent, even to the point of extortion and bullying. This amounts to seeing Global Methodists as enemies, and a self-centered refusal to think broad-mindedly about the Kingdom of God beyond any one denomination.

Obviously, this is very contrary to such values as “Reconciliation” or “Grace.”

Indeed, Easterling also approvingly shared Ken Carter’s essentially anti-Protocol Facebook post, declaring, “I firmly agree.”

Then of all of the U.S. annual conferences of United Methodist Protocol bishops, Cynthia Harvey’s Louisiana has had perhaps the greatest chance of voting to continue into the GMC if the Protocol was ever adopted. I asked her directly:

“Can you assure me that after you endorsed the Protocol in late 2019, it has always been your commitment that you would have allowed the Louisiana Annual Conference to vote to withdraw from the UMC and/or continue into the Global Methodist Church, if such a motion was introduced at the Louisiana Conference’s first meeting after either the General Conference or the Judicial Council said that such motions were permissible?  And does this remain your commitment today?”

Her curt reply: “Your question ‘can you assure me…’ is mute and hypothetical at best. None of us can be assured of anything.”

So there we have it.

With varying degrees of explicitness, various United Methodist Protocol bishops are not sticking with their earlier promises in the Protocol.

And even if the Protocol or anything like it ever was or ever will be adopted, at least one of the most prominent United Methodist Protocol bishops, the immediate past president of the Council of Bishops, flatly refuses to promise to not heavy-handedly block one of its central terms from being implemented.

Why should anyone hold out hope that such people would offer us a fair and reasonable separation deal in 2024?