UM court to decide size of Ivory Coast delegation

Southwest Texas could
lose votes at 2008
General Conference

United Methodist News Service
The top United Methodist court is to determine in October the effect of the new Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Conference upon General Conference representation.
That issue is one of 20 on the Judicial Council’s docket for Oct. 25-28. The nine justices are to meet in Cincinnati.
The 2004 General Conference accepted the Cote d’Ivoire Conference into the denomination. The legislation approving that addition said Cote d’Ivoire would have just two voting members at the 2008 General Conference in Fort Worth.
The General Commission on the General Conference is asking the Judicial Council whether that provision runs contrary to the church’s Constitution and Paragraph 502 of the 2004 Book of Discipline.
Those documents set out a formula for representation according to the number of clergy and laity members in an annual conference.
If the Discipline formula is used, the Cote d’Ivoire Conference—with more than a million members—would be entitled to as many as 70 delegates. Ivory Coast would have the largest voting delegation at General Conference.
If the General Conference sticks to its ceiling of 1,000 delegates, the size of other conference delegations would have to be reduced.
The Southwest Texas Conference, for example, would likely lose at least two—and possibly four—delegates. Southwest Texas had 12 delegates in 2004.
More than half the 20 docket items involve bishops’ decisions of law, which the Judicial Council must automatically review.
Two cases are directly related to the Council’s Decision 1032, which was handed down in the fall of 2005 and upheld on appeal in April.
Decision 1032 said the pastor in charge of a local church has the power to determine who may be taken into membership of that congregation.
Kansas Area Bishop Scott J. Jones was asked to rule on the legality of a nondiscrimination petition passed by the Kansas East Conference.
That petition prohibits the denial of membership solely based on a person being a self-avowed practicing homosexual.
In the Baltimore-Washington Conference, Bishop John R. Schol was asked to rule whether a resolution adopted by the conference to “prohibit discrimination in receiving members into United Methodist congregations” was contrary to the Book of Discipline.
The resolution says in part that the conference “believes that Judicial Council Decision 1032 is inconsistent with Christian teachings and contrary to The United Methodist Church Constitution.”
Other issues raised by bishops’ decisions of law range from whether local pastors are eligible to vote on clergy delegates to General and jurisdictional conferences, to whether a bishop can “insist” that a full-time pastor live in a parsonage.