As many of you know, I was ordained
as an elder in the United Methodist Church about two and a half months
ago. When I told people I was getting
ordained, some of them were kind of confused.
After all, I’d been appointed to as a pastor in United Methodist
churches for four years, and I’d been an interim pastor in the United Church of
Christ for two years before that. How
could I only now be getting ordained?
Well, the thing is that each
denomination has its own set of rules, not just for ordination, but for a lot
of things. As we continue our sermon
series, “United Methodism 101”, looking at what it is that makes us United
Methodists, we need to look at how our denomination is organized and why.
United Methodists look at
themselves as connectional people. In
other words, this United Methodist Churches does not just exist in
isolation. It is connected to and are
part of a much larger organization.
Part of how we’re organized comes
from our history. As we talked about
last week, what is now the United Methodist Church was founded by John
Wesley. And, as we talked about last
week, Wesley had been a priest in the Church of England, which pretty much had
a top-down structure to it. Also, while
Wesley was alive, he was very much in charge of his “Methodists”, which gave
his organization a top-down structure, too.
Wesley could not control
everything, of course. Also, he needed
a good way to communicate with the pastors who were working under him. So, every year, he called all of them
together in what he referred to as a “conference.” The purpose of these conferences was to determine doctrine,
discipline, and practice. In other
words, they decided what to preach and teach, how to preach and teach it, and
what to do. That’s still kind of how
United Methodist conferences work.
Because they started out this way,
the word “conference” has a double meaning in United Methodism. We use it to mean a meeting, but we also use
it to refer to geographical areas. For
example, when I was ordained in June, it happened at a yearly meeting called an
annual conference. On the other hand,
that meeting was a meeting of representatives of all the churches in the
Dakotas Conference. So, you could say
that the churches of the Dakotas Conference got together and had a
conference. The word can be used in
both ways.
The highest level of conference is
the General Conference. That’s made up
of representatives of the entire world-wide United Methodist Church. The General Conference meets every four
years—it met this year, in fact. Below
that is the Jurisdictional Conference.
We’re part of the North-Central Jurisdictional Conference. Among other things, these Jurisdictional
Conferences elect bishops. Our new
bishop, Bruce Ough, was elected at a Jurisdictional Conference.
Below that is the Annual
Conference. We’re part of the Dakotas
Conference which, as you probably guessed, is made up of South Dakota and North
Dakota. We share a bishop with the
Minnesota conference—Bishop Ough is the bishop for both the Minnesota
Conference and the Dakotas Conference—but the Dakotas are still a separate
conference. We have four districts in
the Dakotas conference, and each district is supervised by a District
Superintendent. We’re part of the
Prairie Hills District.
All of those conferences have
expenses that have to be paid for, of course, which brings us to the always fun
subject of apportionments.
Apportionments are the amounts that each local church pays to the annual
conference. The annual conference, in
turn, pays an apportionment to the general conference. A church’s apportionment is based on a
variety of things, including its membership, its attendance, and its budget.
Nobody really likes apportionments,
but the money goes to a lot of good things.
Some of it goes to administration, of course, just like in any
organization, but some of it goes to fund mission projects. Some of it goes to support campus
ministry. Some of it is used to sponsor
youth events. Some of it is used to
support the camping program. Without
that apportionment money, the United Methodist Church would not be able to do a
lot of the good things it does.
A denomination would not have to be
organized, with a top-down structure, and some are not. In some denominations, the local
congregation has a lot more say than it does in the United Methodist
Church. There’s good and bad to both
systems, just as there is to any system that’s created by human beings.
One obvious example of the
difference is the way a pastor for the local church is selected. I am here because I was appointed by the
bishop in consultation with the District Superintendents. We had a meeting with the Staff-Parish
Relations Committee, and they were asked what they thought, but they did not
know me from anybody at that time. This
is pretty much how it works in the United Methodist Church. The bishop and the District Superintendents
decide what pastor serves where. They
try to take the wishes of the congregation into account, and they try to take
the wishes of the pastor into account, but ultimately, it’s their decision.
As I said, there’s good and bad to
that. On the one had, local churches
often do not like having little to no say when a pastor is moved. On the other hand, when a pastor leaves, you
know someone will be coming to replace him or her. There will not be a period where the church does not have a
regular pastor, like the Lutheran/Grace Bible church had/has.
That’s not a put-down of the system
those churches use, it’s just a fact.
And the United Methodist system has a lot of advantages for small
towns. I got my start preaching in the
United Church of Christ in Wessington Springs, because their pastor left and
they had to go out and find someone themselves. It’s not easy finding pastors who want to come to small towns,
especially to multi-point charges.
Wanda and I love it here, and we hope to stay for a long time, but a lot
of people would not. It took the Springs
U. C. C. church over two years to find a full-time pastor, and then it was someone
whose spouse had grown up there and wanted to come back. In the United Methodist system, you don’t
have to go out and look for a pastor yourself, nor are you going to have a
period of months or years without a pastor.
That brings me to what really is
the point of all this. It’s good to
know how your church is organized, of course, but the important point goes back
to a word I used near the start of this message. United Methodist people look at themselves as connectional. When you join this United Methodist Church,
you’re not just getting connected to this United Methodist Church. You’re getting connected to a denomination
that has churches in countries all over the world.
It can be really easy for us to feel
isolated sometimes. That’s true both as
individuals and as a church. Sometimes,
when we look at the world around us, we wonder just how many people there
really are who believe the way we do.
We wonder if there’s anyone out there to help us, to encourage us, to
guide us. We start to feel like the
Lone Ranger, the only one out there who’s doing what we’re doing. We don’t even have Tonto to help us.
It’s not true. We’re not out here by ourselves. As individuals, we’re connected to a church
that wants to support us. As a church,
we’re connected to a district and an annual conference to support us. As an annual conference, we’re connected to
an entire denomination of people to support us.
Remember that special
offering we took up for the Minot church last month? That’s an example of how
this works. There have been lots of
people who’ve gone up to Minot and who’ve donated money and supplies to help
that church and that community. I’d
bet, when the flood hit last year and their church was destroyed, the people in
that Minot church felt like they were all alone. But they were not. They
were connected to an annual conference that helped them. All the churches of this conference were
there and did something to help that Minot church when it was in trouble. And if anything ever should happen to this
church, all the churches of this conference would be there to help us, too.
That’s why it’s so important that
we remember that we are United Methodists. Because we are not alone.
We are connected of something that’s far bigger than we are. And we worship a God who’s bigger
still. When we stay connected to each
other and to God, there is nothing we cannot do. We are one people, the United Methodist people. We are never alone. We are always connected.
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