A Word Toward a Theology of Conference

This section is deliberately incomplete. Everything above depends on the annual conference, and the church has no worked-out theology of what an annual conference is. I can point at where one would come from. I cannot supply it here, and I would rather say so than pretend.

Principle

The annual conference is a means of grace before it is a jurisdiction: a company of ministers gathered to watch over one another in love, to discern God’s call in those presented to it, and to order the church’s mission in a region.

Background

We have no shortage of things to say about what the annual conference does. It is the basic body of the church. It is where clergy hold membership. It receives, examines, ordains, appoints, and votes. What we do not say is what it is, in terms of God’s action, and the absence shows. A body that cannot say what it is will describe itself by its functions, and a body described by its functions will be reformed for efficiency, since efficiency is the only standard functions answer to.

There is also a precedent nobody disputes and almost nobody builds on. When the question of the Gentiles threatened to split the young church, it was not settled by an apostle’s ruling. “The apostles and the elders were gathered together to see about this matter” (Acts 15:6). They argued, at length. They listened to testimony about what God had actually been doing among the Gentiles. And the decision, when it came, was issued by a body: “it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole assembly” (Acts 15:22), in a letter whose most remarkable phrase is “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us” (Acts 15:28).

That sentence is the charter of every conference Methodism has ever held. It claims that a gathered body, arguing about a contested question and reaching a judgment, can be an instrument of the Holy Spirit, and it says so without embarrassment and without claiming infallibility. It also shows the pattern our own conferences inherited: apostles and elders together, the whole assembly consenting, and evidence about what God has been doing offered as the substance of the debate. A church that reads Acts 15 as the first annual conference will find it hard to go on describing its own conferences as legislative sessions with worship attached.

Three starting points, offered as a sketch.

The first is that conferencing is a means of grace. Wesley added Christian conferencing to the means by which God conveys grace, alongside prayer, Scripture, the Supper, and fasting. This was not a metaphor and it was not an afterthought. The institution we call the annual conference descends directly from the conversations begun in 1744, and the document that has governed Methodist practice ever since is called, in so many words, Minutes of Several Conversations. Our founding genre is the conversation and our founding institution is the conversation made regular. If that is right, then an annual conference is a place where God is at work on the people gathered, and not only a place where business is done to them.

The second is that its composition was justified by its capacity to bear witness. Coke and Asbury explained in 1796 why yearly conferences exist and who belongs to them. The business that needs them is “the admission of preachers on trial and into full connection, the ordination of elders and deacons, the examination of the characters of the ministers and preachers, and the stationing of them all.” And the membership is what it is for a reason: these are the men “who have been traveling the preceding year among all the societies in those districts and circuits, respectively,” and therefore “can give the fullest, the completest information on all the subjects which come under the cognizance of the yearly conferences.”

The annual conference was constituted as a body of witnesses. Its members were qualified to sit in it because they had been out among the churches and could report what they had seen. This is Wesley’s “Inquire” turned into an institution: the three marks require someone who has watched, and the conference is the assembly of those who have watched. It also gives itineracy a justification we have entirely forgotten. Moving preachers around does not only serve the churches’ needs; it produces a body that knows the work well enough to testify about it. Mobility serves discernment.

And it explains something we now do badly. A conference that examines candidates through files and interviews has lost the very capacity for which it was composed this way. When the witnesses stopped being asked, the paperwork had to answer instead, and paperwork can only report attributes. That is how a church that once asked “have they fruit?” came to ask whether a candidate shows promise of future usefulness.

Coke and Asbury also explain why the conference is not made of delegates from the circuits: “It would utterly destroy our itinerant plan. They would be concerned chiefly, if not only, for the interests of their own constituents.” Delegates represent constituencies; itinerants represent the whole work. That is the same claim the section on the elder made from another direction, and it is the deepest thing our polity knows about connectionalism.

The third is that oversight of one another is participation in God’s own providence. Wesley’s God is not a clockmaker who set the world going and withdrew, but one whose omnipresence and omniscience mean a particular, attentive care for every creature. A church whose doctrine of God is that one will be a church in which oversight is care rather than management, and in which watching over one another is not administration but a creaturely share in the way God attends to what God has made. That single line of derivation, from the doctrine of God to the practice of mutual oversight, would organize everything the previous sections have said about elders, superintendency, and bishops.

Practice

I will not propose practices for a doctrine I have not finished. Two observations will have to do.

First, an annual conference whose sessions consist of reports, budgets, and legislation, with worship at the edges, has become the thing it was not supposed to be. Whatever a means of grace is, it is not a meeting with a devotional opening.

Second, if conferencing is a means of grace and the conference is a body of witnesses, then the parts of our common life where people actually give account of their ministry to one another are not the ceremonial parts. They are the point. We have tended to protect the legislative hours and let the examination of character become a formality, and we have it exactly backwards.

The rest of this belongs to a document I have not written.