(RNS) — Karen Prudente was listening to a sermon by a United Methodist minister in a town south of Manila when she had an “Aha!” moment.The minister was talking about how the church needed to turn the world upside down. It then dawned on Prudente, a lifelong Methodist, that it was time for the church in the Global South to have a bigger say in how things are run. A Filipino American who runs a nonprofit social-service organization in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, Prudente gathered a group of like-minded United Methodists abroad and got to work.
The group she gathered, called the Christmas Covenant, drafted a series of documents that would restructure the United Methodist Church worldwide to give overseas conferences greater equity and allow them to tailor church life to their own customs and traditions.
Karen Prudente. (Courtesy photo)
“Right now the United States is considered the mother church and all the central conferences are its babies,” said Prudente, speaking of the seven overseas conferences known as central conferences. “By shifting it, the U.S. would be part of the table as an equal. But the U.S. would not be overseeing it. We would all be in it together.”
This radical realignment of the estimated 11.5 million-member worldwide denomination is one of the major pieces of legislation coming before the General Conference, the quadrennial meeting of the United Methodist Church, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in April.
After a bruising five years, in which some 7,600 U.S.-based churches voted to split off from the denomination and go their own way — a loss accounting for 25% of all U.S. congregations — Methodists are meeting again and they have a packed agenda.
RELATED: The UMC lost a quarter of its churches — most in the South
Regionalization tops the list. Eight pieces of legislation under the regionalization plan would reshape the denomination, creating four conferences — Africa, Europe, the Philippines and the United States — each equal in stature and able to customize part of the denomination’s rulebook, the Book of Discipline, to fit local needs.
The plan is in some ways a concession to the success of the Protestant denomination’s global missio …
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The group she gathered, called the Christmas Covenant, drafted a series of documents that would restructure the United Methodist Church worldwide to give overseas conferences greater equity and allow them to tailor church life to their own customs and traditions.
Karen Prudente. (Courtesy photo)
“Right now the United States is considered the mother church and all the central conferences are its babies,” said Prudente, speaking of the seven overseas conferences known as central conferences. “By shifting it, the U.S. would be part of the table as an equal. But the U.S. would not be overseeing it. We would all be in it together.”
This radical realignment of the estimated 11.5 million-member worldwide denomination is one of the major pieces of legislation coming before the General Conference, the quadrennial meeting of the United Methodist Church, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in April.
After a bruising five years, in which some 7,600 U.S.-based churches voted to split off from the denomination and go their own way — a loss accounting for 25% of all U.S. congregations — Methodists are meeting again and they have a packed agenda.
RELATED: The UMC lost a quarter of its churches — most in the South
Regionalization tops the list. Eight pieces of legislation under the regionalization plan would reshape the denomination, creating four conferences — Africa, Europe, the Philippines and the United States — each equal in stature and able to customize part of the denomination’s rulebook, the Book of Discipline, to fit local needs.
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