Itineracy and Appointment

Principle

Itineracy follows from the elder’s covenant with the whole conference: ordered to the whole, and therefore sendable to any part of it. Appointment is the church’s act of sending, and is to be governed by the mission rather than by the management of careers.

Background

Itineracy is usually presented to candidates as a requirement and defended as a sacrifice. Neither is a theological account, and the absence of one has left the practice looking like an employment condition dressed in noble language.

It does have a theological account, and this document has already laid the ground for it. An elder is not ordained to a congregation. An elder is received into an order and into an annual conference, and belongs to the whole of it. From that, sendability follows: a minister who belongs to the whole may be sent to any part. Itineracy is not what makes an elder; it is what an elder’s covenant looks like when the conference needs someone somewhere. And appointment, on this account, is not the assignment of personnel. It is the church acting on the conviction that God “asserted his right to send by whom he would send,” and trusting that the sending is God’s before it is the cabinet’s.

Sending is, in the first place, something Jesus does. He “appointed seventy others, and sent them two by two ahead of him into every city and place, where he was about to come,” telling them that “the harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few,” and that they should pray “to the Lord of the harvest, that he may send out laborers into his harvest” (Luke 10:1–3). They are sent in pairs, sent ahead of him, sent to places he intends to come himself. Paul makes the same point as a chain that ends in sending: “How will they hear without a preacher? And how will they preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:14–15). Our commissioning rite quotes the harvest saying, and our ordinal has the candidates answer in the words of Isaiah, “Here I am; send me.” Sending is not a Methodist eccentricity. It is the ordinary New Testament shape of ministry, and itineracy is one church’s attempt to keep doing it on purpose.

There is a second justification, older than the first and almost entirely forgotten. Coke and Asbury explained that the yearly conference is composed of those “who have been traveling the preceding year among all the societies,” because they “can give the fullest, the completest information” on the matters the conference must decide: admissions, ordinations, the examination of character, and stationing. A traveling ministry produces a body that knows the work well enough to testify about it. Mobility serves discernment. When the church asks whether a candidate has borne fruit, it needs people in the room who have been out where the fruit is.

And there is Wesley’s own reason, which was frankly about the preaching. Writing to Asbury in 1785 he was alarmed to hear of preachers staying three years in one place: “I startle at this… this is quite contrary to the whole economy of Methodism: God has always wrought among us by a constant change of preachers.” Whether or not one finds that persuasive now, notice the form of the argument. It is about what God does through a moving ministry, not about the orderly management of clergy.

So itineracy can be derived, and this document derives it. Three honest difficulties follow immediately.

The first is that itineracy does not sort ordained from unordained. Full-time local pastors are appointed by the bishop and moved by the cabinet; they itinerate in every practical sense. Associate members are, by the Discipline’s own words, “in the itinerant ministry of the Church” and “offer themselves without reserve.” Deacons are ordained and do not itinerate in the elder’s sense at all. Whatever line itineracy draws, it is not the line between those the church has ordained and those it has not.

The second is that the protections attach to the wrong end. Elders in full connection have security of appointment (¶ 334), and associate members are granted “the same security of appointment as provisional members and members in full connection” (¶ 321). Licensed local pastors have none. Guaranteed appointment is usually defended, rightly, as protection for clergy against congregations that would push out a woman, a person of color, or a prophetic voice. But a protection only protects those who have it, and the people most exposed to a congregation’s displeasure are the ones the church has left outside it. That is worth naming as a fact about our arrangements rather than as an accusation against anyone.

The third is the one the church finds hardest to say aloud, and our own liturgy says it for us. In the order for admission of candidates, the bishop tells those coming into full membership: “You have indicated that you are so situated in life that you can accept the obligations of the itinerant ministry.” And provisional candidates are asked whether they are “in debt so as to interfere with your work, or have obligations to others that will make it difficult for you to live on the salary you are to receive.”

Being “so situated in life” is doing real work in those sentences. It is not a test of willingness; it is a test of circumstance. Who is so situated? People without dependents who cannot be moved, without aging parents nearby, without a spouse whose career is fixed, without a community they are needed in. When availability for relocation on the cabinet’s timeline becomes the load-bearing condition for full clergy rights, the church has adopted a criterion that falls unevenly along lines of caregiving, class, and rootedness, and it has done so in language that makes the resulting exclusion look like a vocational choice the person made.

None of this is an argument that itineracy is unjust and should be abolished. It is an argument that a practice with a genuine theological ground has also been doing sorting work that nobody chose and few have examined. Both things are true, and a church that says only the first has not been honest with the people the second has cost.

Practice

Teach itineracy from the covenant, not from the requirement. A candidate who understands that they are being ordained to a whole conference and are therefore sendable within it has been given a reason. A candidate who has been told that itineracy is the price of ordination has been given a bill.

Appoint for the mission. Every appointment the church makes teaches the connection what appointment is for, and appointments made to manage careers, to reward, or to park a difficulty teach that it is a personnel system. The elders who are moved will believe what the pattern tells them, not what the ordinal said.

Ask what “so situated in life” is actually screening for, and whether the church means to screen for it. If the answer is that the church needs ministers who can be sent, that is a real need and can be stated. If the answer is that we have been quietly selecting for a particular kind of household, the church should say so and decide whether it wants to.

And where the church protects clergy, ask who is left outside the protection. Security of appointment exists because congregations can be unjust. Congregations are not less unjust toward the ministers who lack it.