SEJ Day 1: What happened?
By Jessica Brodie
LAKE JUNALUSKA, North Carolina—South Carolina United Methodists are among the more than 400 delegates gathered this week for The United Methodist Church’s Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference, a three-day gathering held to do the business of the denomination in this region.
South Carolina’s 16 lay and clergy delegates joined their counterparts from 13 other annual conferences in the Southeast, all there to approve the budget for the next four years, assign episcopal leaders and explore the impact of racial bias in the jurisdiction’s elections.
While no new bishops are being elected at this year’s SEJ Conference, bishops are expected to be assigned or reassigned. South Carolina’s resident bishop, L. Jonathan Holston, is expected to be reassigned, as he has served this annual conference 12 years because of the pandemic. Normally, bishops serve a conference for eight years.
Some bishops will serve a single conference, while others will be asked to lead more than one because of funding reductions.
Announcements about bishop assignments are slated for release Thursday evening.
Same call today
The conference kicked off Wednesday, July 10, with a powerful opening worship service led by Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, resident bishop of the North Alabama and Holston conferences.
Drawing from John 21, Wallace-Padgett shared how Jesus offered Peter a recommissioning, the same offer he makes for every one of us today. Despite trauma and grief we might have experience during the pandemic and season of disaffiliation in the UMC, Wallace-Padgett said, our call remains the same: Feed my lambs. Feed and tend to my sheep
“Today he calls us to do the same, both within the church and outside the church,” she said. “The best way to move forward as a jurisdiction is to follow Jesus wherever he leads us.”
Realigning episcopal areas
Next, South Carolina’s Bishop Holston officially opened the business session around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday as the body joined voices for “And Are We Yet Alive?”
Holston lifted up those on the dais with him: Julie Hager Love, conference secretary, and South Carolina’s the Rev. Kathy James, SEJ secretary-designate. Then he called upon retired Bishop Ken Carder, who offered an opening prayer encouraging the church to be a living and visible sign of our new creation in Jesus Christ.
After a host of organizational motions—centering time, elections to jurisdictional conference leadership, adoption of the agenda, a welcome from Lake Junaluska Executive Director Ken Howle, ballot testing and the presentation of the conference’s organizational plan—delegates heard from the Jurisdictional Committee on Episcopacy on the main business of this year’s gathering: a realignment of annual conferences within SEJ episcopal areas.
The new structural plan for episcopal leadership shifts annual conferences within SEJ episcopal areas and reduces the number of episcopal areas from 13 to 10, including sharing a bishop with another jurisdiction.
COE Chair the Rev. Kim Ingram, joined by Vice Chair Christine Dodson and Secretary Alex Shanks, shared their committee’s recommendation on the new boundaries for episcopal areas and the number of bishops available for assignment within the SEJ.
In January, the COE had recommended reducing the number of episcopal areas within the jurisdiction to 10 from the current 13. This would involve several formerly separate episcopal areas joining to become episcopal areas containing more than one annual conference.
However, given the funding decrease in the wake of disaffiliations, the recent General Conference reduced the number of bishops serving across all five United States jurisdictions to 32 from the current 39. The Southeastern Jurisdiction will get nine bishops, Northeastern six, North Central six, South Central six, and Western Jurisdiction five.
The COE’s revised plan for the Southeastern Jurisdiction, approved Wednesday by the body, includes nine episcopal areas plus a 10th whose bishop will be shared between the SEJ and the NEJ.
The breakdown of the 10 episcopal areas for 2024-2028 is as follows:
Alabama-West Florida and North Alabama
North Georgia and South Georgia
Kentucky, Central Appalachian Missionary, and Tennessee-Western Kentucky
Virginia
North Carolina
Western North Carolina
South Carolina
Mississippi
Florida
Holston (sharing a bishop with NEJ)
Because of the change, no new episcopal elections will be held at this year’s conference. With the retirement of Bishop Bill McAlilly from the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference, that leaves 10 bishops to be assigned this year—three to in-jurisdiction multi-conference episcopal areas, six to single conference areas and one to be shared between two jurisdictions.
The dual-jurisdiction sharing means the SEJ will get some help toward its reduced budget.
As the COE told the body, delegates will consider a 2025-2028 budget that reflects a decrease of $359,000 (24.7 percent) from the last quadrennium, but sharing a bishop with NEJ means the SEJ will split expenses, receiving $194,186 to cover half of the bishop’s office expenses.
The body approved these changes, and now the COE will focus its work on the assignment and discernment process, which Ingram said will incorporate data and missional needs from each area to accommodate both shared and unique circumstances.
“Praise to the amazing spirit and discernment that happens with the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” Ingram said.
State of the church
Bishop Kenneth Carter of the Western North Carolina Conference closed the morning session with a hope-filled, Christ-centered reflection on the state of the church amid the harsh realities of a changing denomination.
As Carter shared, the SEJ embodies a paradox, but one that offers an opportunity for God’s church to live into a bold, vital, and hopeful future.
“We’re in the midst of profound change,” Carter said, noting how the SEJ has the strongest core of local churches in the United States yet the most severe human problems, many impacting society’s most vulnerable people.
“We have the highest rate of infant mortality, the greatest degree of anger, the highest amount of domestic violence, the most severe poverty, the lowest access to medical care, and the shortest life span of people,” Carter noted, ticking off what he called a “humbling” list that also includes the largest percentage of losses in the denomination to disaffiliation at 42 percent.
As God’s people consider the state of the church amid these realities and a changing denomination, Carter reflected on both the challenges and opportunities facing The United Methodist Church in this jurisdiction.
While some of the news seems dire, it’s important to understand the SEJ has an opportunity to become stronger.
“We have tremendous assets, strong churches, strong institutions, and deep long-term relationships,” Carter said. “Even with losses, we have much to build upon.”
He lifted up four key marks unique to the SEJ, urging delegates to contemplate these as they work to move forward to the next phase of what God calls us to do in God’s church.
First, he noted that the SEJ is blessed with vital congregations. We must acknowledge this and truly begin to see these churches, name them, invest in them, and multiply them so real growth can occur.
Second, he said the SEJ is marked by a commitment to racial justice, discipleship, and justification, important work that we must continue no matter what.
“This is our language to reckon with,” Carter said, calling it “a lifelong journey” that must endure.
“There cannot be a crisis followed by a catharsis followed by the status quo,” Carter said, urging United Methodists to learn from the civil rights museums scattered across the region. “We can pay attention to the racism within us and among us by working on three things—metrics, public witness, and the beloved community—and doing it from the ground up.”
Third, Carter acknowledged the importance of considering the well-being of our spiritual leaders, both lay and clergy.
“We’re asking more of people at a time when they’re telling us they have no time left to give,” he said, noting our people are exhausted, demoralized, and traumatized.
Finally, he lifted up the core United Methodist identity we share, which is marked by grace, connection, and holiness.
We have come to model a flawed definition of holiness, often seeming to believe we can function as heroic solo leaders.
“But holiness is the love of God and neighbor,” Carter said.
Exploring the possibility of racial bias
After lunch, business resumed Wednesday with a report from the Racial Bias Task Force on their findings and recommendations since the last SEJ.
The Racial Bias Task Force was created in 2022 by the COE after a formal request from the SEJ to study the impact of racial bias in the process of selecting episcopal candidates and recommend potential reforms that might reduce harmful racial bias.
South Carolina’s the Rev. Ken Nelson started the report by sharing the long history of racism within Methodism.
“Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it,” Nelson said, noting the UMC’s jurisdictional systems are born in sin and shaped in inequity.
“Too often we have been on the wrong side of history,” he said, and it was not until 1988 that the UMC even acknowledged racism as a sin in the Book of Discipline.
He shared a video that lifted up voices from the past—people who were part of the UMC’s United States Central Jurisdiction, which was created in 1939 to separate and divide the church, formalizing the segregation of the church more strictly. It has since dissolved.
Next, the Racial Bias Task Force offered several poll questions designed to help assess the scope of their work, while also assessing episcopal nominations and the voting process while also assessing whether any biases exist in the SEJ.
The task force offered a number of its findings. They also offered recommendations, including the following:
Assess and align how episcopal candidates are named across annual conferences.
Assess the spoken and unspoken requirements for episcopal candidacy in the SEJ.
Further standardize the process by which candidates make themselves available to be elected.
Offer mental, emotional and spiritual support for episcopal nominees following conferences.
Deploy a task force to assess the implicit bias and racism inherent in the jurisdictional model as a whole.
Offer resources for delegation heads and caucus groups about best practices for the discernment of episcopal nominees that would include qualities necessary to fulfill the requirements of the episcopal office stated in the Book of Discipline.
Offer resources for training on implicit bias for delegations and caucus groups, including hiring a diversity, equity and inclusion specialists to help.
Claire Bowen, senior consultant at the Candler Center for Christian Leadership, along with the Rev. Nathan Malone shared about two small group “circle gatherings” to be held during SEJ, each to dialogue about racism using processes outlined in “3 Practices for Crossing the Difference Divide,” by Jim Henderson and Jim Hancock.
“We live in a polarized culture and our churches are not immune,” Malone said, noting the practices help all learn how to listen to and from each other.
The practices are as follows:
I’ll be unusually interested in others
I’ll stay in the room with difference
I’ll stop comparing my best with your worst
As Malone and Bowen explained, don’t expect agreement in the groups. Expect clarity. Clarity and understanding equal informed action.
After their report, delegates broke into the first of what will be two of these circle discussions, dividing into small groups around the conference and retreat center led by dialogue referees.
The second circle discussion is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
Day’s wrap-up
Wednesday concluded with a reception for retiring Bishop McAlilly, followed by Jazz at Junaluska in Memorial Chapel.
Business resumes Thursday morning, with reports from SEJ agencies, the report of the Committee on Coordination and Accountability and the report of the Committee on Finance and Administration first on the agenda for the day.
