“Watch For the Approach of the Big Friendly Giant”

Our daughter Maddie was asked a couple of years ago, as chair of the Conference Council on Youth Ministries, to serve on the Boundaries Task Force -- a group convened at the ’06 Annual Conference to consider a challenge that’s been put before us by the wider UM connection.

I don’t know you well enough to gauge your grasp of UM polity so I’ll just forge ahead here, hoping you’ll bear with me and that I’m not insulting your intelligence!  I’m sure that most of you know that the basic unit of United Methodism is not the local church, but the Annual Conference. In the late eighteenth century, when founder John Wesley gathered his preachers in conferences, it was for the purpose of prayer, accountability, and planning for the mission they held in common.  We continue to gather as clergy and laity in conferences even today, to recommit ourselves to that common mission:  as articulated by the 1996 General Conference: “To make disciples for Jesus Christ” (General Conference ’08 added the words, “for the transformation of the world”). We gather to remind each other that we are a worldwide church, not just a collection of congregations.  In fact the only body that can speak for The United Methodist Church is the General Conference, which is made up of lay and clergy delegates elected from that worldwide church, meeting every four years. (I was honored to be elected as first clergy reserve of that body, which met in Fort Worth , TX April 26-May 3.)  Within the General Conference, there are Jurisdictional and Central Conferences, which are regional bodies administering the mission of the General Conference within a certain geographical area.  Here in the North Central New York Conference (NCNY), we belong to the Northeast Jurisdiction (NEJ), thirteen conferences from Maine to West Virginia .  I’ll be on the team representing our conference in Harrisburg , PA at the quadrennial meeting of the NEJ, July 14 – 18.

To be good stewards of our shared worldwide ministry, each congregation contributes into a common fund that supports our worldwide ministries as well as many local missions: disaster relief, missionaries, seminaries and UM colleges, pensions for our retired pastors, and much, much more.  We in NCNY were so proud to pay 100% of our mission funds to the general church this year, for the first time in fifty years!  But as good stewards of these funds, our general church has come up with a formula for how many parishioners each pastor ought to be able to serve, and how many churches / members each bishop ought to be able to serve.  Here in North Central New York, we’ve been way under the floor of that formula for many years. By this formula we have too few members to have our own Bishop, even sharing a Bishop with Western New York in an Episcopal “two-point charge” as we have for many years.

Aware of that fact, and anticipating its implications, our NCNY Conference responded proactively in ’06 by forming the Boundaries Task Force, to be in conversation first with the Holy Spirit of God, and then with the three other conferences in upstate New York which have similar challenges:  Troy (Albany, the eastern Adirondacks, and Vermont); Wyoming (Binghamton, the northern Catskills, Scranton/Wilkes Barre); and Western New York (Buffalo, Rochester and the Southern Tier.)  

Maddie affectionately called this committee “the BTF”.  Whenever she said that, what came to mind for me was a series of books she read when she was much younger by Roald Dahl about the BFG, the “Big Friendly Giant”.  The main characters of this series were a girl named Sophie and her friend, a giant who seemed scary at first but was really very gentle and friendly.  You had to get over your fright at his first appearance, but once you got used to his size of the BFG, he was a great and loyal friend.  

I think it may be much the same with the BTF.  Change is never easy:  they say the only one who likes it is the baby with the dirty diaper.  If we at NEJ vote next month to combine all four upstate New York conferences, the change probably won’t affect the average pewsitter much, at least not at first. Life in the local church will go on just about as before.  Pastors and parsonage families may be affected most of all, as they may be called upon to move within a much larger geographic area than now.  If this proposal is enacted by Jurisdictional Conference, clergy in our conference could be appointed in the Albany area, or in Buffalo , or Binghamton , rather than only in Syracuse or Watertown or Elmira or Ithaca .  Our conference would be the biggest by far in the northeast, a quarter of a million members.  

Making friends with the Big Friendly Giant will take time.  Some will not even try.  I think my good friend the Rev. Bill Mudge (pastoral director of New Creation Ministries in the Boonville area) has it right:  “This will bring out the best and the worst in us. Those of us who were connectional to begin with, will become more so, embracing the change and reaching out to get to know our new colleagues in the new conference. Those who have a tendency to hide from involvement in the wider connection will be able to do so even more effectively,” (spoken at an open discernment meeting of the BTF, April 25, 2007 , here in Fayetteville .)   As with all change, embracing the BTF will bring both grief and relief.  We’ll grieve the loss of the intimacy of the smaller conference and the separation from the good friends that may go along with a wider deployment. And some of us will be relieved, even exhilarated by the excitement and creativity promised by the much larger pool of Spirit-given talents and gifts available to the connection from this wider area.  

Think of it!  Vermont and Albany , with its long tradition of social justice ministries! Buffalo and Rochester with its rainbow diversity of churches, ethnicities, languages! The many colleges and natural resources available in the northern Catskills!  What’s not to like? Some have bitter memories of the last conference merger; Dana and I arrived a few years after that, so we were spared.  Change is never easy, and there still may need to be attention paid to leftover wounds that have never healed from that last experience before we head into this next one.  But having served in five annual conferences, I’ve always said that the biggest structural weakness of Methodism as a denomination is its provincialism.  We call ourselves a worldwide connection, but in actual practice it’s largely a myth.  In my humble opinion, a national deployment of clergy (as our brothers and sisters in the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches have) would go a long way toward breaking down the regional barriers and tensions that cripple us as a denomination.  Creation of a new conference spanning the width of upstate New York is a step in the right direction, I think.  I only wish the talks had included my home conference, New York , increasing cultural and ethnic diversity many times over.  

So watch and pray for the approach of the Big Friendly Giant.  The Rev. Steve Deckard and my husband, the Rev. Dana Horrell are working on the “New ACT” (New Area Conference Team, the successor team to the BTF) so we’ll await news from them as well as from the NEJ.  I think that once we get to know the BFG, we’ll be pleasantly surprised.  “Behold, I am doing a new thing:  now it takes place, do you not perceive it?” –Isaiah43:19 NRSV  

Rev. Marti Swords-Horrell, pastor

Notes of Interest

Last updated on 6/25/08