Reference
Rights
What is quoted, on what basis, and what is and is not claimed.
The texts quoted here are not ours
The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church is © The United Methodist Publishing House. The text of Petition 21039 is the work of the General Conference. Wroot Labs claims no copyright in either, and nothing on this site should be read as asserting one.
This site quotes 28 paragraphs of the Constitution — roughly 1% of the Discipline — alongside the amendment that changes them, for the purpose of commentary and explanation. The quotation is what makes the commentary checkable: an explanation of a legal change that will not show the text cannot be verified against anything, which is the specific failing this site was built to answer. It is offered free, carries no advertising, and is not sold. We consider that fair use. It is not a substitute for the Discipline, and anyone who needs the book should buy it from Cokesbury.
If the Publishing House would prefer any of it removed or presented differently, write to wilson@wrootlabs.com and it will be done.
What is ours
The editorial work is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. That covers:
- the plain-English summaries and the "what changed" notes;
- the narrative pages — the timeline, the account of what is still undecided, the glossary;
- the generated word-level comparisons, and the segmentation and alignment they run on;
- the mapping between ballot paragraph numbers and Discipline paragraph numbers, and the reasoning that established it.
That last one is worth naming plainly, because it is the part that took the work. The ballot papers and the Discipline number the same provisions differently, and reconciling them meant matching every paragraph by content and checking the result against the article numbering. Quoting the constitutional text is free. The concordance is the contribution.
Corrections
Where this site and the Book of Discipline differ, the Discipline governs. This is not an official publication of The United Methodist Church, the General Conference, the Council of Bishops, or any annual conference. If you find an error — a misquotation, a wrong paragraph number, a summary that misstates what a provision does — say so and it will be fixed and the change noted.