On a first glance, polity is certainly part of what constitutes the unity of The United Methodist Church.  Historian Richard Heitzenrater (and others) argues that what it truly meant to be Methodist in the early days was to be in connection (or connexion, as the British would spell it) with John Wesley.  Similarly, to be United Methodist nowadays means to be a member, minister, or ministry of The United Methodist Church, a formal organization with its own set of laws and regulations governing how the church functions.  People can play with the boundaries of those laws or disobey those laws at times, but one isn’t United Methodist unless one buys into the organization to a certain extent.  If a church completely disregards the Book of Discipline, never sends delegates to an Annual Conference, doesn’t pay apportionments, and is in no way linked to the church hierarchy, it’s not United Methodist; it’s an independent, non-denominational church.

So polity is definitely part of what unites United Methodists.  In fact, polity is such an important uniting force that it also highlights the forces for disunity.  Methodists can argue with Presbyterians and feel that, as fellow Christians or even fellow Protestants, they have a stake in keeping those arguments going and not just walking out.  But, at the end of the day, there’s always the option that, if the argument gets too much to deal with, Methodists (or Presbyterians) can take their ball (or, rather, their pension fund) and go home.  Yes, that might be a defeat of Christian unity, but it’s not going to cause massive administrative problems in local churches.

United Methodists cannot, however, when arguing with each other, just take their pension fund and go home because it’s the same pension fund!  Because polity governs things like money and power but is also something that unites denominations in a fairly robust way, disagreements over other issues quickly get translated into disagreements over polity, and these disagreements matter because they affect things like who gets to be a minister, which ministries get money, and who can become a member of a church.  It affects the day-to-day operations of churches in real, tangible ways.  Sometimes polity is strong enough to survive these types of conflicts, and churches work through their differences; sometimes it’s not, and churches split.

This tendency for conflicts from other areas of the church to become conflicts about polity means, however, that polity cannot be the sole source of denominational unity.  If all we have in common is common pools of money and common structures of power, then all we will do is fight about money and power.  There’s already a good deal of that going on in the church (see the comment from a couple of posts ago about people fighting like weasels at General Conference), and we don’t need more of it.  Fighting about things like money and power means that the church is focused internally on itself and not focused externally and is focused on earthly things and not heavenly things.

When the church is not focused externally, then it can’t be in mission and ministry to the world, which is a good portion of the church’s reason for existence.  When the church is stuck thinking solely about earthly and not heavenly things, then it can’t be an effective worshiping community, which is most of the rest of the church’s reason for existence.  And if the church isn’t in mission and isn’t a worshiping community, then it has effectively stopped to be the church, no matter what the name on the incorporation papers say.

Therefore, to do ministry together and to worship communally, which are the reasons for the church’s existence, there must be something more holding the church together than just polity.  In the next two weeks, I’ll look at some ideas as to what else might provide that basis of unity.

As acknowledged, The United Methodist Church has some problems – problems with membership numbers, finances, structures, etc.  As the article my advisor and I wrote, these problems are not just an American phenomenon, but that’s primarily how they’re thought about.  Part of this bias toward focusing on the American problems is that mainline American Protestantism has problems that are different from the types of problems Protestantism around the world faces, and United Methodism reflects that.  Part of this bias is that the United States is still the membership and financial center for The UMC.  Part of this bias is just Americans being bad at thinking about the rest of the world.

Yet we American United Methodists do need to think about the rest of the world as we’re trying to solve the problems of the denomination here.  We must be aware that, as a globally-connected church, the actions we take in the United States have implications around the world.  Solutions we implement for problems in the United States have the potential to cause new problems elsewhere (as well as new problems here, as all solutions do).  This presents a tension for United Methodists: how do we address the critical and pressing questions of the church in America while at the same time not losing sight of how those solutions affect the church around the world?

This also raises a set of questions: What does it mean to be a globally-connected church?  What does the Methodist concept of connectionalism mean when it is extended across geographical, political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries?  What does it mean for United Methodists in Nigeria, say, to be part of the same church as United Methodists in Cambodia, Lithuania, and the Philippines, as well as the United States?

This problem seems to me to be uniquely a Methodist one, too.  Certainly, some other denominations have trans-national aspects to them.  Yet none has quite the same structural/ecclesiological relationship between different national branches as The UMC does (with the probable exception of other American Wesleyan bodies).  In large part this is because of the uniqueness of Methodist polity/ecclesiology.

On the one side of Methodism, you have churches where church is defined primarily in congregational terms.  This category includes churches coming from the Reformed tradition such as Reformed, Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, etc.  It also includes most Pentecostal churches, non-denominational megachurches, church from the American Restorationist movement (Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ), and a whole host of others.  While there are structures which connect these local churches, some of which are transnational, these transnational structures don’t raise the same issues, as what matters most is the local church.  At the end of the day, the important decisions are made in local churches, and whatever larger associations that local church may have, it is ultimately only responsible to and for itself in the decisions it makes.

Then there are churches with an episcopal polity, including Lutherans, Anglicans, and most notably the Catholics (as well as some pentecostals and AICs, interestingly enough).  Most of these churches have a diocesan understanding of the bishopric (i.e., bishops are responsible for a particular geographic area), and, while you can argue that The UMC has effectively adopted a diocesan model of bishops, in theory at least The UMC is not a diocesan church.  In churches organized on the diocese model, diocese tend to be grouped together into national churches, which tend to be geographically or perhaps ethno-linguistically based, though recent developments in the Anglican church challenge this organizational pattern.  There are often larger structures that connect the various national churches, but each national church, while connected to the church as a whole, has a degree of local autonomy.  Thus, the national church serves as a buffer between the greater structures of the church and local congregations.  This is less true for the Catholics, who have strong centralized authorities, than it is for Anglicans or Lutherans, where such centralized authorities are less well-developed or lacking.  And certainly such a system has its own problems (Anglicans, I’m looking at you again).  But in general, national churches can adopt policies and mainly worry about how those policies will affect the faithful within that nation.

In The United Methodist Church, however, the heart of the denomination is neither the local church nor the diocese nor the national church but the connection as a whole.  In Methodism, the church is the connection.  So we don’t have a sense that each local church can make its own decisions in all matters.  Nor do we allow geographic sub-units of the church to make their own standards for policy that differ from each other.  Neither Annual Conference nor Jurisdictional Conferences have the authority to really set policy in ways that differ greatly from the denomination as a whole.  Only General Conference really has the power to set policy for the denomination.  This means, however, that General Conference, a body which meets in America with mainly American delegates, needs to think about how its decisions affect the entire church, not just America.

I think with the various stresses and conflicts which General Conference 2012 is facing, that it is likely that General Conference will end up making some decisions that significantly impact United Methodist polity.  Ideally, these decisions would be part of some well-thought through vision for United Methodist polity, but I think it is more likely that we will pass revisions to our polity for the sake of trying to enable more effective ministry and will only later realize how significant the decisions we made were.  I’m okay with this approach, too, actually, because I feel like that’s often how The UMC and its predecessor bodies have operated – our approach to church organization is more practical and experimental than systematic.  I just pray that when we make whatever changes we are going to make to our polity, intentional or not, that they serve as an opportunity for us to really think about what it means to be both connectional and global and that they may be changes that release the Spirit’s power for ministry and mission not just in this country but around the world.