This is a talk that I made to the Board of Laity of the Alabama West Florida Conference in Andalusia, Alabama, on December 11, 1993. Any organization that has elections must deal with politics, and the Board of Laity was apparently considering rules in an attempt to regulate elections in the Annual Conference.
Andalusia
December 11, 1993
I knew when I got the letter from Marvin Grunzke inviting me here today that this was something that I needed to do. So, I gladly accepted the invitation, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here because I realize that I am here to talk about policy rather than politics. Both those words perhaps have the same root word in the Greek word polis, and we’re all about the same mission here in protecting our Christian community and the interest of our community. I would say that the objective of the task force–the goals of the task force are the same goals ideals that I hold up for our behavior in the political matters of the Conference. However, I think that there are different approaches that can be taken and perhaps between that end goal of the behavior that we would hope for among our preachers and among our laity, there might be different philosophies and different approaches that we can talk about.
I’ll have to be a bit personal in my own experience, I think, in order to share my philosophy completely with you. Although I haven’t looked at the task force report since the Annual Conference, I think that I recall that there are essentially three issues.
First, there is the matter of preachers getting together and talking about political issues in prior to conference and what ought to govern those types of meetings. Secondly, there is the issue of endorsement of lay delegates by groups, or clergy persons. And thirdly, there was the issue of the mandatory district caucuses and how people could be elected without going through the caucuses in the districts. If I’m wrong about the precise issues before the task force, at least those are the three areas that I have become concerned about. Before the task force pursues its approach to conclusion, I wanted to be heard. I think that the difference in approach might be reflected in the title to a book that I have written and that is going to be published by Scholars Press at Emory University next year, entitled Conscience and Command. I’m thinking that the areas that we are dealing with here have more to do with conscience and less to do with command. I think that we need to find a way to pull the fiery brands out of the eternal flame and imprint it indelibly in the hearts of people as opposed to trying to find ways to regulate talk about church politics, as to which discussion seems to me to be almost inevitable.
As I mentioned, I’ll have to be a little personal. As I came down this morning turning over in my mind what I would say, I realized that I needed at least three quick hours to do this. That’s no exaggeration. I even then began to meditate on the possibility of us getting back together. Maybe we could get together and talk about philosophy of leadership for a laity group within the church. But let me use the time that you have now given me. I remember approximately forty years ago, my first turning to the church. Roy Sublette was our preacher then at Bradford’s Chapel, and I was about eleven years old and lived in a house without a bathroom in it. And the Sublettes picked us up and carried us to MYF, and even to the sub-district meetings. There was a preacher from another church at one of the sub-district meetings who didn’t think that eleven-year-olds ought to be going to sub-district meetings. We weren’t old enough. That was the rule, according to him. Roy Sublette got up and said, you know, it’s my car and my gas and this is my ministry and I’m going to bring those people here. You know, I remember that to this day. The things that mean most to us…let me apologize…I didn’t talk about this a whole lot when I was Conference Lay Leader but it has meaning to a depth that I can’t begin to express because the images are so powerful. These are the things that shape our lives.
It wasn’t too many years after that until I attended Huntingdon College, and I was President of the Student Government there and quite active in campus life. That, too, has had a tremendous impact on my life. Our Methodist Church-related College set me on a lifetime course of study, a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of ministry from a laity perspective. They gave me a Bible when I graduated from Huntingdon, and I have it with me today. While I was Conference Lay Leader, I still carried this Bible; and you notice that it’s a little worse for wear. I have a new Bible now, and I carry it most places; but I pulled this one out for a particular purpose this morning because, you see, it says “presented by Huntingdon College ….” I got that in 1964 when I graduated, so it’s been almost thirty years.
I drifted on through law school and entered law practice in 1967, and was elected Circuit Judge in 1982. In 1985 I got a letter from Hughie Emfinger that said, “you are among the people who are being considered for Conference Lay Leader…would you please send a little more information about yourself.” This was a total surprise to me. My first reaction to that was to call my Brother, Wade, who had been District Lay Leader in the Montgomery District and say, “Wade I think they have made a mistake here…you know…I think they have sent this letter to the wrong person…are you expecting to be nominated for Conference Lay Leader or anything?” And he said, “No, it’s not mine.”
And so Betty and I prayed about it and I got my resume’ together and sent it in, thinking that that would be the end of it. But I was elected. I was elected to the office that Dwayne now holds in this Conference. Now, of course, the first thing I did was to come down to see Roy Sublette, the Council Director. He was occupying the chair that Bill now holds, and so I thought it appropriate for me to come down and find out the state of the Board of Laity. I got here, and I noticed that he had some difficulty in finding who the members of the Board of Laity were. And I also learned at about the same time that we hadn’t found it necessary in the Board of Laity to request a new budget for three years. And basically, what I’m telling you was that I found that we weren’t doing anything…that we were inactive. And I set about doing some things to activate the Board of Laity.
There’s another piece of background that you need to know. It wasn’t too long before that that we had a church trial in our Conference involving one of our leading members of the clergy, and that trial and the controversies surrounding it had torn our Conference right down the middle; and we were in need of a healing ministry at that point in time. The laity and clergy alike were divided along theological lines, along….I don’t know what all lines.
As I set about the work of being Conference Lay Leader, what I am about to describe are the underlying policies that governed every action and every decision that I made. Number one, get the laity involved…not in a retreat, but in an advance. Get the laity involved in significant ministry. Get the laity involved in participating in the boards and agencies that make the decisions in this Church. Schedule meetings where the laity can attend. Look for the people in the Conference who can provide leadership, and then through sound structure in our church organization make sure that the most capable people are included. Then make sure that they get the recognition and all of the motivational factors that they need in order to do the work that is necessary. I was blessed with a Bishop that felt like that was the right thing to do and regardless how any of the clergy may have felt, he gave me every opportunity that I could possibly ask for as a Lay Leader to implement those policies that I am describing.
An undergirding policy that I adopted and followed was to avoid preacher politics like the plague. Don’t let the laity get drawn into whatever it is that preacher politics involve. That includes avoiding theological controversies. Liberal vs. Evangelical—any of those types of divisions.
The reason that I was willing to be Conference Lay Leader is because of what I saw parading before my bench—moral meltdown in the world in which we live. I saw the tremendous need for the church to be involved in the world—in a world of real ministry—in a world that is broken and hurting and bleeding, I saw the need for structural leadership of laity in the church. We need to be doing–not talking.
But what do you do to implement those kinds of policies? I engaged in five years of the most intensive traveling and speaking that you would ever expect any Lay Leader to do. I was in every District in this Conference at least once a year, and most of them several times a year. And if the District Superintendent, for whatever reason, failed to recognize the District Lay Leader, the District President of the United Methodist Men, the District President of the United Methodist Women, Bishop Knox always saw to it that I had a place on the podium, and I recognized those people. I saw to it that the kinds of motivational forces and commitment that arise from recognition were given full support. These actions were needed to cause things to happen. We defined the jobs. We had educational events, and we emphasized stewardship.
One of the first things that Reverend Sublette told me was that we didn’t have a good stewardship program in this Conference, and we set about creating one. I thought for five years that we were a failure. I know that Marvin was working like a Trojan and so were other people, but we just, you know, seemed to be keeping our heads above water. But then I looked around the rest of Methodism, I found that others weren’t keeping their heads above water and that our stewardship program had been extremely important and meaningful to the life of this Conference. It was significant at that point in time just to keep our heads above water.
Then came the 1988 elections, and I was elected to the General and Jurisdictional Conferences. I was the first person elected. I was the first Lay Leader in this Conference ever to be elected, as far as I know, and especially the first one to ever be elected on the first ballot and to lead the lay portion of the delegation. And that brings us to where we are now in terms of talking about how people get elected. Of course, I was nominated in the Montgomery District, and so forth. I remember the pain and chagrin that I felt when I learned that the Pensacola District Lay Leader was unable to attend the meeting in his District, and for some strange reason, the Pensacola District did not nominate their own District Lay Leader to General Conference. I felt the pain of his being slipped over. You know, I had been there and I had recognized him. Other people who have made tremendous contributions to the life of the Church have failed to get through the nomination process, and it can be a painful experience. However, today that former District Lay Leader sits before you as the lay leader of this Conference. And he was elected to General Conference on the first ballot in 1992, as I recall it. He received the second highest vote tally on that ballot, I think.
Of course, all of you are familiar with the process that takes place. Five people are nominated from each District; and then those names together with a picture and biographical information are published in the Brochure of Reports. There is no other special recognition during the sessions of the Annual Conference. Any qualified local church member in the Annual Conference can be elected, and sometimes persons who are not nominated are in fact, elected. The proposal that comes from the task force would have involved people who hadn’t been nominated in their districts receiving special recognition at the orientation session of lay people during the Annual Conference. Physically, that would require an inordinate amount of time because it would be totally unfair to recognize people who hadn’t been nominated in their District and not recognize the people who had been nominated from their District. It would give an unfair advantage to those people who didn’t receive the nomination.
So, the system is imperfect but perfecting it is more than just a notion. If we have a laity program that puts the most effective lay leadership before the members of the district and conference most of the time, then most of the time the right people are going to get nominated. And we are not likely to encounter serious problems. There is wisdom in the nomination process.
In the 1992 election, I was elected again after some other people had been elected. I went to the district caucus where people were to be nominated. There were six people nominated. One of those was a Edna Williams, a black lady who had served as the chairperson of the Council on Ministries in this Conference. When the voting was through, everybody but Edna had been nominated from our district. I had already been to conferences before, so I stood up and I said, “I choose not to go at this point in time. We have to nominate Edna. We have talked for years about being inclusive and here is a black person who has served in a high position of leadership and yet we have not nominated her. So y’all nominate Edna, and I’ll stay home.” Some people thought that was a wonderful thing, but it really was not. I really didn’t care whether I went or not. I had been to the church meetings before, and legislating is not my biggest thing. The strangest thing in the world, though…a couple of days later a preacher called me and said that one of the persons who had been nominated was not qualified because she hadn’t been a member of the United Methodist Church long enough. And asked would I go. They had made some arrangements to that effect at the caucus so that if anybody else couldn’t go that I would receive the nomination. I said, “Well, I suppose so.”
I was beginning to wonder just exactly what the Lord had in mind for me. And I tell you I went all the way through the General Conference still wondering that. But when I got to the Jurisdictional Conference, Bishop Morris, I realized what my role in life serving on the Episcopacy Committee was and why the Lord wanted me to be there. I was sent to bring you home with us.
The hand of the Lord is in this stuff that we do. There are those who have said to me “campaigning is fine, because, you know, you didn’t need to campaign. I have never asked anybody to vote for me for anything in the United Methodist Church. Not one time. Yet I have been elected to the highest offices in this Conference and been elected to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. I think that the hand of the Lord was in it. Some say, well, your name was already known. My name wasn’t known to hardly anybody in this Conference, except God, as far as I know when I got elected Conference Lay Leader. Hughie Emfinger got it from somewhere, and I never have understood how I got elected Conference Lay Leader. But I can see the plan unfolding throughout all of those years. And it’s an awesome experience to feel the hand of Almighty God on your shoulder and to know that you have a job to do.
In the course of being a Conference Lay Leader, I spoke in a lot of churches in this Conference. I have probably spoken in 150 or 200 of them by now. I have had the experience of speaking in a small church and having the preacher’s wife prepare dinner for me and then, after eating, the lady had to get up and go to work in a mill so that the preacher and his wife could make ends meet and feed their family. I understand some of the pressures that go along with ministry, and I’m going to tell you about preacher politics. As long as people are in the position that our clergy folks are in, we are not going to keep preachers from talking to each other about appointments and about places in the Church. It’s totally unrealistic to think like that.
And when I begin to look at it that way, the theological differences begin to melt away, and you see things in their raw form. These clergy persons are children of God, too, and they’ve got to make it in the world, and they are going to band together in whatever groups they can, and they are going to talk about the things like appointments that so vitally affect them and their families. And when we come to the point where preachers are not talking to each other about politics of the church, we are going to have a church that is deader than a doornail and people who are moving out of it worse than they are now.
Now, our conference has grown in membership. Our Conference has grown in the last ten years. I hope it’s still growing. It was growing the last time that I knew anything about it, and the reason that I’ve given you these intense personal experiences is because I think that the policies that I described for you at the outset have something to do with what we ought to do about the matters that the task force is considering.
I never dreamed when they gave me this bright, beautiful, shiny Bible on the day that I graduated, that 30 years later, it would look like it does today. But there are some words of God inside. This whole book will physically disintegrate and become dust, but that Word will keep right on going. What we have got to have in the Church are people who are committed to intensely follow the words that are there. “Whoever would be great among you must be servant of all.” “Don’t seek the head of the table…get moved up later on.” And then there’s that magnificent passage found in two different places about the Body of Christ and how each member has a function and a role to serve.
On the three points that we are talking about, I say that we ought not to have any legislation coming from the Board of Laity attempting to define the standards for preachers. If we’ve got preachers who have an education, who have devoted themselves to a life of service to the church, but who can’t find the ethical norms by which they ought to live, then the process that we ought to be following is closing the church rather than trying to ask them to find those norms.
There’s a way to do what we are trying to do that doesn’t involve legislation. If we participate as I suggested in the decision-making process, if we hold up for the preachers a mirror of their personal existence so that they see themselves reflected in our eyes, if they know that we are there and that we see the foolishness as well as the wisdom of the things that they do sometimes, that’s self-correcting. And the same is true of the laity.
Let me give an example of what I am talking about. A leading lay person in our conference made a tremendous campaign in 1991, and was elected first. He was endorsed by his minister, who is very influential, and that probably carried him about three-fourths of the way toward getting elected. He was also, perhaps unofficially, endorsed by a couple of the working agencies. I don’t try to categorize that, but I don’t like that approach. I wouldn’t have done that; I don’t approve that; I don’t disapprove of the person who did; I love him very much; but that resulted in him getting elected on the very first ballot. Otherwise, the Conference Lay Leader probably would have been elected first. The results may be troubling. But is legislation the way to deal with that issue? I don’t think so. My response as a lay person is to say, no, let’s don’t do that. Let’s live with the results. I don’t think we’ll see that same thing happening again because of the internal forces that regulate such matters if there is any regulation to be done. I think that the existential reality of that situation is self-correcting. Regulation is not necessary. Sure, we don’t have a perfect system.
But to try to anticipate those kinds of problems with legislation as opposed to Christian love and Christian morality is probably a great mistake. So, I would say let’s leave preacher politics alone. I would say we can’t really improve on the system of nominating five people from the district. The system that we have is as well calculated as anything to get that job done fairly. And let’s let the moral force of the conference regulate the matter of endorsement. Let’s let the people within those boards and agencies say, you know, we really ought not to be doing this. Let’s leave some realm for morality and ethics to do what they ought to do. Let’s have a morality and ethics.
You know, we had a dog-track issue up in my area several years ago, and I’ve never been in that place, but a lot of people who voted against it have since gone in there. It makes me wonder if they were wanting something other than a conscience to regulate themselves to start with.
Well, I tell you. I hope I get elected to General Conference next quadrennium. I may even write a few letters asking for votes, because I’ve been involved in educational work and I want to get involved in the higher education business of our great United Methodist Church. I’m interested in that. But I’m not going to engage in any underhanded politics, and if I don’t get it, the hand of the Lord is going to be in on that too.
Let me say this. I know that the Task Force spent a great deal of time and effort working on this project, and I know that they did some serious thinking about it, and I know that the problems that we are dealing with are serious enough to warrant that consideration. I just appreciate the opportunity to present my views on the issues.
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