Do United Methodist General Agencies Really Represent Church Members?

The United Methodist Church has an extraordinarily, large, costly bureaucracy of numerous general agencies. Eleven of these are funded by apportionments taken from local congregations. But with all of this investment and structure, how well does this leadership really represent most United Methodists in the pews?

Aside any specific stance, there are fundamental structural questions of how well the general-agency bureaucracy is truly set up to represent and be agencies of, by, and for the church members it is supposed to serve. 

I have long protested geographically disproportionate representation in the UMC bureaucracy.  Specifically, the Western Jurisdiction, by far the most liberal region, accounts for only about two percent of all United Methodists, but has long been proportionally very over-represented in boards of directors of general agencies. Meanwhile, African members of our global denomination, who have now become the majority of the UMC, have been severely under-represented.

Having attended numerous meetings of denominational agencies over the years, I have directly encountered how some of these leaders and stewards of the whole denomination’s resources sometimes display barely disguised contempt for conservative church members who pay their bills.

Of course, this is not monolithic. But nearly a decade ago, seeing repeated overlaps between leadership of apportionment-funded general agencies and unofficial liberal activist caucuses prompted me to ask if there was some sort of revolving door between the two. Since then, we have gained additional reasons to ask such questions.  Meanwhile, we have not seen any remotely similar level of overlaps between general-agency staff and evangelical renewal group personnel. 

The very factional, liberal perspective of a few influential staffers of certain agencies is especially noteworthy. For the record, I do not recall having ever had any negative direct interactions with any of the individuals named here. Of course, God has lovingly created each of them in His image and given them each unique gifts. In observing these matters of public record, I am simply pointing out that when apportionment-funded agency employees are empowered to promote such perspectives in our church, no one should be surprised when many more moderate and conservative church members feel alienated from the bureaucracy.

Connectional Table (CT)

This group’s top staffer, Chief Connectional Ministries Officer Kennetha Bigham-Tsai, has used her authority in other denominational roles to advance very leftist views on abortion, help kill a proposal for the North Central Jurisdiction to “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,” and be listed as a lead signer of a letter demonizing the Wesleyan Covenant Association and pressuring the Commission on General Conference “to postpone the General Conference until 2024.” I and others have written about the cynical politics behind this unnecessary delay of General Conference.

Now Bigham-Tsai’s prominent role in the CT is bolstering her campaign to get elected bishop. Since her North Central Jurisdiction has previously elected a bishop who denied the actual, physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, one of my fellow delegates asked Bigham-Tsai, in a delegation interview during her first campaign in 2016, what she believed about this. Her answer was extraordinarily evasive. 

Now there is widespread rhetoric of the UMC being a theological “big tent.” In a delegation interview last month, this top CT staffer was asked if it was important for United Methodists to at least agree on who Jesus is. In response, Bigham-Tsai confidently declared, “No, it is not important that we agree on who Christ is.” She went on to raise questions of if she really believes in basic orthodox doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming flesh in a particular human body in a particular time and particular place. In Bigham-Tsai’s words: “God became flesh, but not particular flesh. There’s no particularity around that. God became incarnate in a culture, but not one culture.” 

You can play a video of the relevant part of the recorded interview here:

But very basic, biblical Christian doctrine is that God indeed uniquely became flesh in one particular person, Jesus Christ!

Under Bigham-Tsai, the CT’s Assistant Connectional Ministries Officer is the Rev. Rachel Birkhahn-Rommelfanger, a self-decribed “radical” former officer of the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN) board of directors who uses “they” as well as “she” pronouns. Birkhahn-Rommelfanger has publicly promoted the so-called “Equality Act” (which has been accused of threatening to severely restrict the freedom of conscience of dissenters from leftist LGBTQ ideology). She has also tweeted about how RMN’s student-outreach program “talks about polyamory” and been a public promoter of advancing an extensive liberal agenda in the UMC on issues from other religions to LGBTQ inclusion to abortion to assisted suicide.

In endorsing a 2017 open letter promoting liberalized sexual-morality standards, Birkhahn-Rommelfanger identified herself as part of “the community of queer clergy” in our denomination. Her church bio shares, “She lives on the South Side with her partner, Will.”

General Commission on Religion and Race (GCoRR)

From the prominence afforded by being this agency’s CEO, the Rev. Giovanni Arroyo of the Baltimore-Washington Conference is currently running for bishop in the Northeastern Jurisdiction as an openly gay candidate, stating his desire to bring “my whole identity (Latino, gay, Christian, pastor, etc.) to lead the church in this time….” He would be the UMC’s second gay bishop.

In his sermon preached at his installation service earlier this month, he echoed the UMC’s first gay bishop, Karen Oliveto, in her blasphemous critiques of Jesus Christ himself in his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. While Arroyo’s rhetoric on the same Scriptural passage did not quite go as far as Oliveto’s, he similarly spoke of Jesus Christ “developing more profound compassion for those not part of Jesus’s tribe” (as if the Lord’s compassion was previously lacking). As noted, John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, part of the UMC’s official but widely ignored Doctrinal Standards, comment that Christ’s initial rebuffing of the woman is a model of testing her faith. But Arroyo countered such traditional interpretations, saying “I would contend that Jesus is engaging in some self-examination,” and suggesting that the woman taught Jesus a lesson. 

Arroyo was also listed as an endorser of the aforementioned letter lobbying to filibuster General Conference until 2024. Note that one major, under-appreciated impact of delaying General Conference is that this blocked possibilities for given marginalized Africans fairer representation in denominational leadership, now that they have become the majority. Thus, our denomination’s apportionment-funded anti-racism agency is complicit in a very systemic racism, for the sake of unrelated agendas favored by GCoRR’s CEO!

General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM)

Until recently, George Howard was a longtime senior staffer of this agency, and at the same time part of the leadership team of an unofficial caucus focused on liberalizing the UMC’s sexuality standards. At that time, Howard was joined in the leadership of this liberal “Uniting Methodists” caucus by another top general agency staffer, Brian Milford (President and CEO of the United Methodist Publishing House). UMPH is not among the United Methodist general agencies receiving major, direct general-church apportionment funding, but it is still supposed to be an agency of the whole church, not just a liberal American faction.  

Staff executive David Wildman has a long history of anti-Israel activism, as documented in this 2008 profile, including at a caucus event last year when he promoted singling out the Jewish state for Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

General Board of Church and Society (GBCS)

The Senior Coordinator of Administration and Programming for the United Nations and International Affairs efforts of this agency is Quinn Wonderling, a self-described “angry dyke” who through her Twitter feed has released a flood of strident, hyper-partisan, left-wing rhetoric. For example, this apportionment-salaried public leader of United Methodism’s social witness has tweeted about two Trump administration officials that she “really can’t decide who’s a swampier piece of shit.”

Don’t look to the GBCS to model an elevated, Christian politics that honors the image of God in even political opponents.

The resumé that apparently impressed the GBCS into hiring her included Wonderling’s previous stints as a journalist for left-wing MSNBC as well as working for “the nation’s most widely read lesbian publication.”

If United Methodist leaders want to be taken seriously in their rhetoric about being a “big tent” (let alone be successful with that), they will need to become much more intentional in structuring general agency leadership and staffing to be more respectful and inclusive of conservative church members, and less offensive to traditionalists’ high views of Jesus Christ.