by Lonnie Brooks

With the General Conference of 2020, held in 2024, in Charlotte NC I thought that I was beyond being surprised about what our brave new United Methodist Church might do, and I just knew I was beyond being shocked. Well, that turned out to be a false impression, if I’ve ever had one.

The United Methodist Council of Bishops found a way both to surprise and shock me all at the same time. Today it announced that it will call together what it is calling “a Leadership Gathering for 2026 that will advance the positive momentum of the 2020/24 General Conference and prepare the denomination for the 2028 General Conference.”

The COB President, Tracy Malone, said, “The Council of Bishops determined that a Leadership Gathering is the best arena for building on the good work and progress made at the General Conference and it allows for greater collaboration with leaders across the denomination as we move forward together.”

One of the things that’s startling about this is that it is a complete reversal of the decision the COB announced less than ten months ago when it said it will call a special session of the General Conference to convene in 2026.

Now, mind you, I had some pretty grievous concerns about the previous call for a GC special session, primarily to do with the lack of specificity about what the Church was being called to do as well as with the enormous expense that the people in the pews of UM churches would be asked to bear in the holding of such a GC. But I’ve got even more concerns about what I’m seeing in today’s announcement for a “Leadership Gathering.”

Mind you, I expect that at least part of the motivation for the COB was to find some way to mitigate the concern about the expense of bringing together all the delegates for a General Conference. And that’s a worthy goal. The COB ought to be applauded for making this effort.

But it has to be observed that there is no existing structure in the Church that is being called to convene in this call. There is no standing churchwide Leadership Team that can be called into service to do what it is the COB has in mind needs to be done.

The articulated purpose of the Leadership Gathering is as follows:

A. To maintain momentum regarding implementation of the various components of the regionalization legislation. This could include developing adaptive strategies to respond to ratification results as they become known.

B. To gather hope, vision, and imagination for the future of the UMC from across the connectional landscape.

C. To initiate preparations for the 2028 General Conference by identifying programmatic, financial and structural adaptations that may need to be considered in order to maintain momentum. This should include consultation/collaboration with the Commission on General Conference regarding the design of the General Conference.

There is a real problem with purpose A. You see, the regionalization legislation adopted by GC20/24 is not yet in effect, and unless it can garner a 2/3rds positive vote among all the members of all the annual conferences in the ratification vote, it won’t ever be in effect.

The second problem with purpose A is that “developing adaptive strategies” to whatever end looks a lot like making decisions for the Church that only the General Conference has authority to make. The same is true for purpose C which calls on the Leadership Gathering “To initiate preparations for the 2028 General Conference by identifying programmatic, financial and structural adaptation that may need to be considered in order to maintain momentum.”

So, when we’re ready to invest this kind of decision making responsibility in a body, it’s important to look at how its members are selected. And here’s what the COB says about that:

The Leadership Gathering participants will include all active bishops and COB officers; three leaders from each Episcopal Area selected by the bishop in consultation with the lay and clergy leadership of the Episcopal Area; and the general secretaries. Approximately 50 additional leaders from across the denomination will be invited by the COB. This group will include emerging young leaders, theologians, innovative leaders, missional champions and retired bishops with particular experience or expertise.

As I stated in a recent brief I submitted to the UM Judicial Council, “The bedrock of any representative form of government is free and fair elections. The government of the UMC is arguably democratic in nature, despite the fact that 50% of the membership of its conferences (General, jurisdictional, central, and annual) are elected by less than 1% of the membership of the Church, its clergy.”

Whatever else our bishops are, they are all clergy. Where is the lay voice meaningfully in all this when the members of the Leadership Gathering will all be selected to serve by members of the clergy?

I need for somebody to explain to me how this proposed Leadership Gathering, all the members of which will either be bishops of the Church, appointed to membership by those bishops, or serving by virtue of their office as a General Secretary of one of the UM general agencies, can be even a semblance of part of a democratic process.

Are we this ready to give up on representative government and decision making in our Church?

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Lonnie Brooks has served as a lay delegate or reserve delegate to most UM General Conferences since 2000. He is a member of St. John United Methodist Church of Anchorage and has served on four general church agencies and committees.