BUMS: Bishops United Methodist Style

Three strikingly similar episodes within the space of a week conspired to prime the well for these reflections. Two involve United Methodist Ordained Pastors (Elders) who took early retirement; the third has to do with an exceptionally gifted pastor of a “tall-steepled” congregation who in his fifties is considering retiring early. The latter in a brief conversation said, “If the ineptness of our current Conference leadership doesn’t begin to show signs of understanding the realities of serving congregations today, I’m through with The United Methodist Church!” The other two conveyed feelings of delight to be out from under what in their perception is an oppressive system and discovering a new lease on life, renewed energy and zest, and in the words of both, “a freedom to be and do” that they had long ago forgotten was possible. Having also retired early, I am finding myself resonating with the aforementioned colleagues, even though some pathos is implicit in having reached this breakthrough so late in life.

Just as congregants are apt to hold pastors responsible for everything they perceive is wrong in the local church, from declining attendance to the correct liturgical color of the choir stoles, and the refrigerator on its last leg in the church kitchen, it may be that a major flaw of these reflections will end up smacking of the same kind of projection onto Bishops. Indeed, it seems that modern day Methodism might be described in triangular terms, with each of the three points of an equilateral triangle representing congregants, pastors and bishops respectively. When two points of the triangle act together, the third is often the target of the machinations of the other two. Pastors have been known to side with parishioners against an “unreasonable Bishop” or the “Conference” in order to win congregational approval. Congregants, likewise, have sought out bishops, usually through their District Superintendents, to apply pressure on pastors to fall in line. Not too long ago, I sat in a gathering where a bishop was, in effect, blaming pastors for everything from how their lack of exercise and proper diet is causing severe deficits in hospitalization insurance funding to how their pastoral ineffectiveness and laziness accounts for the failure of congregations “to grow.” The number of lay persons present at that same assembly who responded to the bishop’s thrashing of the pastors with sardonic glee was legion. (Perhaps that helps to explain the finding that five years after seminary graduation and ordination 50% of pastors leave parish ministry to pursue other vocations.) There was a time when Bishops and pastors would stand together to call into question wayward congregations, but such instances seem rare these days. Given my own admittedly biased perspective, these reflections may deteriorate into the same process of harsh triangulation that too often has typified both civil and church discourse. Allowing that my opinions may fail to measure up to some standard of objectivity, I will leave it to the reader to determine how much of what is claimed here carries implications for the future of the episcopacy in The United Methodist Church.

Something needs to be said about the origin of the episcopal (from the Greek episkopas, meaning overseer or bishop) office. Scant references to bishops in the Christian Scriptures suggest that those so designated were regarded as sufficiently trustworthy to “oversee” certain administrative functions, especially the collection of monetary gifts to be distributed to widows and other impoverished persons within the early church communities. Unlike today, the offering in early church worship was not money donated by the affluent for the welfare of the less fortunate; rather the offering was the gathering of the gifts of bread and wine made by the loving hands of congregants, gifts that would become Christ’s body and blood in the community’s celebration of the Eucharist. No great fanfare attached to the money donations of those able to contribute, no singing of a Doxology drawing attention to those who were parting themselves from some of their wealth in a show of largess. Rather, monetary gifts were inconspicuously “slipped” into the bishop’s hands or purse either before or after the Eucharistic gathering. No wonder these first century CFOs had to be above reproach. There were no counting committees or finance officers or auditing firms to ensure accountability. No wonder the first bishops, entrusted with such unquestioned authority, very quickly rose in the estimate of the early Christians as deserving of the wider administrative responsibility of CEOs.

Consequently, as the early church became more “institutionalized,” gaining greater recognition and status, the “earned” authority that originally qualified those selected to serve as bishops quickly became “ascribed” authority. As those in military service today are enjoined to respect the office even if they do not respect the officer, so a similar ascribed quirky quality quickly became attached to the “office of the bishop.” As early as circa 117 CE, a bishop by the name of Ignatius insisted that “we should regard the bishop as the Lord himself.”[i] Such is the tendency of movements as they gain strength and take on the characteristics of institutionalization. Consequently, what began as a needed function to be carried out by those who earned the right to the responsibility has become through the years a frequently fought-over prize with all the trappings of ascribed status, power and wealth, at least as it is practiced in the Methodist tradition.

The use of the phrase “fought-over” is deliberate. Even though I have never attended a Jurisdictional Conference, at which bishops are elected, I along with many others have heard from those who not only attended but were a part of the delegations of these electoral conclaves. Their reports about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, political intrigue, and formation of strange bedfellow coalitions seem on a par with underhanded tactics that often typify political processes elsewhere. Ken Follett’s novel World Without End, a compelling story about the descent into depravity that occurred in a Medieval English church when power-mongering and its consequent sleaze seized control, hints that such infamy in the world is without end, even in the church. The Apostles, sometimes regarded as the predecessors of bishops, may have had it right when they prayed for God’s leading and then “cast lots” to determine who should be elected.[ii] Whether or not such a procedure provided more space for the leading of God’s spirit, it at least aborted the machinations of those motivated by greed for power and its consequent accoutrements.

A couple years ago Dr. Tex Sample made an outlandish proposal. He suggested a radical revision of the office of the episcopacy. Consideration of his views might lead to an honest appraisal of the merits of this office as it is now practiced. Dr. Sample brought to the forefront the kinds of impressions that I believe many within our connection have found intriguing.

A quick call to INFOSERV yielded the information that the salary of each U. S. bishop last year was $120,942.00, not including the travel, housing, separate pension and hospitalization plans, renewal leave, office expense and other allowances they receive. Three subsequent calls to INFOSERV over a year ago requesting information about the total of these other costs, and eliciting promises that the information would be forthcoming, have, as yet, gone unanswered. Given that there are 50 bishops in this country alone, the total last year, excluding bishops outside the U. S. and the other expenses and benefits of the office, amounts to over six million dollars in 2008.

According to Dr. Sample’s proposal, each district (smaller geographical regions within an Annual Conference) would have a bishop, providing greater local leadership and, at the same time, a much larger pool of bishops to help administer the world mission of the UMC. The bishops would be elected by their respective Annual Conferences, that is, by those who know them best, those whose collective wisdom would recognize the candidates particularly gifted and graced for this office. The bishops would receive roughly the same compensation that District Superintendents now receive, and they would take up residence in the present district parsonages. Such a bold move would eliminate the enormous expense of maintaining our present College of Bishops, its separate pension and hospitalization programs, the cost of episcopal residences, as well as the need for Jurisdictional Conferences. And it would make bishops more accessible and accountable.

Since suggesting his proposal (which was largely ignored and probably will continue to receive benign but massive disregard), I have found myself reflecting more and more about the eight bishops with whom I have had encounters (close or otherwise) over the course of my 47 years in ministry. Even though tempted to relate all of the experiences of those years, the import of which would lend credibility to Dr. Sample’s idea, I realize that doing so would run the risk of leading the reader to discount these reflections as overly anecdotal or motivated by some hidden agenda. That, in turn, would defeat the reason for my writing this: to question whether or not our present episcopal structure makes for effective leadership. So, I will confine my recall to two episodes that occurred just prior to my retirement; the third happened shortly thereafter. All three point to the possibility that our episcopal leaders are too overburdened to handle the responsibilities of their office.The first evolved when a local congregation was planning to relocate within a stone’s throw of another UMC congregation. The dream as presented by the would-be transplanted congregation was to become a regional mega-church that would in no way undermine the already exceptional programs and ministry of the congregation situated in that neighborhood. Twice I wrote to our bishop then about the complexities of such a proposal. There was no response to either of my letters. The congregation did succeed in purchasing a 15 acre tract of undeveloped land at a price of one million dollars (circumventing, by the way, the mandated channel for such acquisition through the District Committee on Location and Building), and then later had to abandon the entire proposal because only two acres of the tract could be developed. The downtown struggling church still owes $700,000 on land they will not be able to use, nor can they find anyone else gullible enough to take it off their hands. To add insult to injury, I learned later from a friend and colleague that the bishop to whom I had written indicated that he had received my letters and said (according to this third party), “I think Jim Norton is probably right.” Had the bishop intervened in some way, or at least, asked some pertinent questions, this mess might have been averted.

Another attempt to correspond with a bishop had to do with a recent change in our Annual Conference’s self-insured hospitalization program. Certainly medical costs are creating stress and strain throughout the Church, to say nothing about our country, but the action of the Annual Conference overturned a precedent that had been established in the Sixties. And there is some question as to the procedure that was followed. Four weeks passed since I wrote my letter with no response. Since the District Superintendent received a copy of the letter, I called him to be sure that he had received it. He had, so I expressed consternation about not receiving a response from anyone to whom the letter had been sent (the Bishop, Conference Treasurer, and District Superintendent). The explanation offered in terms of no response from the Bishop was that he had been to Africa University for the prior two weeks. A few days later I did receive the Bishop’s reply which seemed to misunderstand the point of my inquiry.

The third episode made me aware of how much my trust in the episcopal system has waned. I traveled to the campus of a Presbyterian seminary in a nearby state to hear three lectures from one of our newer UM bishops, elected at the 2004 round of Jurisdictional Conferences. Prior to that he held a prestigious position on a university campus. The Bishop devoted his three lectures to misrepresenting and derisively tearing down theological and biblical scholarship contrary to his own Barthian leanings. As an academician he certainly is entitled to do that, and I have heard him in other settings do precisely that. But is that a legitimate role of an active Bishop? He probably received a generous stipend to do that lecture series, and perhaps had his travel and other expenses paid by the host seminary. Since he was visiting a seminary where there are some United Methodist students, did he also receive travel reimbursement from GCFA, thereby double-dipping? Following Dr. Sample’s suggestion, if this particular bishop were the bishop in my district, I could directly inquire of him or her about the appropriateness of taking time to go on lecture jaunts and the financing that was involved. But given the inordinate power and aloofness of bishops in today’s UMC ecclesiology, to do so would be to invite heavy-handed reprisals.

These are three examples seeming to substantiate Dr. Sample’s assertion that bishops are running hither and yon with very little time to attend to the ordering or “shepherding” of their respective pastures. In one sense, it’s good to be retired and out from under a system where selected individuals have been elevated so as to make it impossible for their feet to touch the ground. In another sense, I regret deeply that the “Church” which has been in very significant ways my “Mother” (sic) has come to such a state of pomposity.

I have come to the opinion that highly hierarchical ecclesia comes at a heavy cost, and I don’t mean just financially. Dr. Sample’s evocative suggestions seem to me to be exactly what is needed if the unique message and contribution of Methodism is to survive. Such a church might then be able to rise above the ways of political cleverness and maneuvering that seem to characterize our present selection process, often mirroring so much of what goes on around us in the world everyday. Perhaps John Wesley’s outrage when he learned that Francis Asbury had allowed himself to be elected as a bishop at the first Methodist General Conference in the U. S. in 1784 was not without reason.

[i] Petry, Ray C. A History of Christianity: Readings in the History of the Early and Medieval Church, Duke University, Durham, NC, Copyright © 1962, p. 9.
[ii] Acts 1:26