Annual Conference is not Congress

Mark Beeson has been stirring the United Methodist pot each week with a question about the denomination.

This week, he touches on the nature of annual conference – and more specifically on the membership of the conference. In the post, an imaginary layman asks why large churches don’t have equal representation with small churches. A church of 24 members should not have the same “vote” at annual conference as a church of 300 members, he argues. Besides, the big churches pay most of the bills. They should have more say in what the annual conference does.

I commented on Beeson’s blog, but wanted to extend my thoughts here. The imaginary lay member in Beeson’s blog shares attitudes and misconceptions I’ve heard before.

First, lay people are members of, not delegates to, annual conference. The language is important. A delegate is a creature of the organization that sends the delegate. Most lay members of annual conference come from local charges, but their mission is to make decisions that benefit the conference, not protect the parochial interests of a particular charge. That may not be how it works in practice. That is how it is meant to work.

This goes hand in hand with my second observation. The annual conference was in its origin a body of clergy who were bound together to serve the mission needs of a certain geographic area. They had no ties to a specific charge or church, and they were not supposed to make decisions based on the needs of particular congregations.

This conception of annual conference is tied closely to the notion of itinerancy. Both depend on an understanding of the annual conference as the clergy ordaining, gathering, supporting, and sending heart of United Methodism. When clergy identify with the charge they serve rather than the conference in which they are members, it teaches the laity to view them the same way and sets up many of the inward-looking impulses that we spend so much time lamenting.

Any discussion of the membership of annual conference should start from a shared notion of what the annual conference is and why it exists. Otherwise, it becomes much too tempting to import into the conversations ideas and conceptions that have nothing to do with nature of the annual conference.

It is also important to clarify this because it serves to help us understand where the annual conference is in need of reform. If the conference fails to act the way it was meant to act, then that is a call for reform and renewal.

As is probably clear, I do not favor the idea of annual conference as a representative body in which each church should be represented based on the size of its membership or the amount it contributes to the annual conference budget. It would be a big departure from the historic nature of Methodism, but more important than that, it deepens our already confused ideas about the nature of the local church.

The local church is not an autonomous and self-sustaining body that sends delegates and taxes to a distant overlord. The local church is the on-the-ground mission outreach of the annual conference. The local charge exists to carry out the mission of the conference and the denomination. It is “a strategic base from which Christians move out to the structures of society.”

I know this is not how we think about it. I know that is not how it works in practice. But that is how I read the history and purpose of annual conferences. Maybe I’m wrong. But that is how I understand it.