Reference

Still undecided

The amendment settled the constitutional question and left a good deal of the practical one open.

What follows are questions the ratified text does not answer. They are listed because an explanation that stops at "regionalization passed" leaves a reader unable to tell what has actually been decided.

Whether jurisdictions survive

The amendment keeps jurisdictional conferences but makes them optional: ¶10 now says there may be jurisdictional conferences where it previously said there shall be. A regional conference with jurisdictions and one without are both contemplated, and several powers in ¶32 are written to work either way.

General Conference 2028 will receive a joint study from the Connectional Table and the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters addressing this directly. Until then the five United States jurisdictions continue.

What the U.S. Regional Conference will be

Nothing in the Constitution says how large it is, how often it meets, how delegates are apportioned to it, or what it costs. Those are matters for enabling legislation, which the Interim Committee on Organization is to bring to General Conference 2028. Until it convenes, General Conference continues to legislate for the United States directly.

What regions may not adapt

¶17.17 gives General Conference power "to legislate what is non-adaptable for regional conferences by a 60% majority vote." The Constitution does not list what is non-adaptable; it establishes who decides and by what margin. The substance of that list is ordinary legislation — it sits in ¶101, outside the Constitution — and will be contested at each General Conference.

As things stand the non-adaptable core is the Constitution itself, the doctrinal standards and theological task, the ministry of all Christians, and the Social Principles. But that is a statement about present legislation, not about the amendment. Any of it can move, in either direction, on a 60% vote.

This is the hinge of the whole plan, and it is the part the published explainers are quietest about. How much regionalization amounts to in practice depends less on the constitutional text than on how long that list stays.

Two asymmetries the amendment carries forward

The plan is described by its supporters as putting the regions on equal footing, and by some of its critics as entrenching United States advantage. On two specific points the text does treat regions differently — and on both, the difference is older than the amendment, which preserved it rather than created it. Both readings are therefore incomplete.

Boundaries

Under ¶17.12 General Conference may change the number and boundaries of regional conferences outright. It may change the boundaries of jurisdictional conferences only "upon the consent of a majority of the annual conferences in each jurisdictional conference involved." The consent requirement attaches to jurisdictions alone. Since the United States is the only region with jurisdictions, United States boundaries in practice carry a protection that other regions' boundaries do not.

This is not new. The old ¶39 let General Conference change central conference boundaries with no consent requirement, and the old ¶40 imposed the annual-conference consent rule on jurisdictions. Both paragraphs are struck, and their contents move into ¶29.2 and ¶17.12 respectively — unchanged.

Episcopal tenure

Under ¶51, bishops elected by jurisdictions have life tenure; bishops elected by a regional conference without jurisdictions serve whatever term that conference sets. Again the effect falls along the same line, and again it predates the amendment: the old ¶51 gave jurisdiction-elected bishops life tenure and left each central conference to determine its own.

Whether preserving an asymmetry while restructuring around parity amounts to endorsing it is a fair question, and not one the constitutional text answers.

Money

The amendment says nothing about apportionments, budgets, or whether a regional conference controls any funds of its own. General Conference retains the power "to determine and provide for raising and distributing funds necessary to carry on the work of the Church" — that sub-item of ¶17 was not amended. Everything about the financial shape of regionalization is therefore ordinary legislation, and unwritten.

Regional judicial courts

¶32 authorises a regional conference to appoint a judicial court for legal questions arising from its own adapted Discipline. How those courts relate to the Judicial Council — which retains authority over the Constitution and General Conference legislation — is stated only in outline.

The arguments, as they stand

Supporters argue that the present arrangement makes the United States the unmarked default and every other region an adaptation of it; that General Conference spends much of its time on United States matters that no one outside the United States has an interest in legislating; and that parity of standing is owed to churches that are now a large share of the membership. This is substantially the case made by the Christmas Covenant and endorsed by the Connectional Table.

Objectors argue that a United States regional conference concentrates rather than disperses authority, creating a body with the numbers to dominate the connexion from inside it; that a Discipline adapted region by region weakens what "United Methodist" names in common; and that the cost of a further conference falls on churches already reducing apportionments. Some also hold that the arrangement was pursued as a route to differing regional practice on questions General Conference had not settled, and should be judged as that rather than as structure alone.

Both are set out here as arguments that exist. This site does not adjudicate between them.

Legislation outside the Constitution

Regionalization also required changes to paragraphs the Constitution does not contain — among them ¶101 on the General Book of Discipline, ¶507 on the interim United States Regional Committee, and ¶¶543–544 on central conference organisation. Those are ordinary legislation, amendable by a simple majority at any General Conference, and are not reproduced here. This site covers the constitutional amendment only.