Any serious renewal in the United Methodist Church will have to deal with the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM).  This is the task that faces the Call to Action Steering Committee that will be making recommendations to the Connectional Table and the Council of Bishops as the church seeks to deal with the 42-year decline in membership and the giving crisis now facing the church.

    The General Board of Global Ministries is a superboard created by the 1972 General Conference.  The board gathered into itself seven divisions including ecumenical concerns, health and welfare ministries, the National Division, the World Division and the Women’s Division.   The board was so colossally big that the 1972 Discipline required 50 pages (more space than the entire Disciplines of early Methodism) just to define how the board was structured.   One part of the structure that was carried over from the Methodist Board of Missions was an agreement made in 1964 that the Women’s Division would not operate independently but would be integrated into the Board of Missions.  However, the agreement came with a price.  The Women’s Division would be able to select their own members (instead of working with the jurisdictional nominating committees) and would have enough guaranteed positions on the divisions to dominate the entire board.   

      The board came into being at the height of radical influence in society and in the church.   This meant, among other things, that a complicated socially engineered quota system was put into place that would (supposedly) lead to inclusivism in the church and the end of racism, sexism, and ageism.  The quota system, for example, mandated that 20 percent of the board should be under 35 years of age with recommendations for numbers of each of the following: Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Indian Americans.   Slots were given to former EUBs for a certain number of years. 

      With former traditions no longer in place to contribute stability, the new board immediately took a radical turn to the political left.   Under the Board of Missions of the former Methodist Church, missionary outreach was focused on world evangelism and winning persons for Christ.   That changed quickly.    The sending of traditional missionaries, especially evangelicals, was no longer a part of the new GBGM strategy.  Traditional missions was seen as paternalistic and a part of the old colonialism.   Effective missionaries had their contracts terminated.   While the board sent some new missionaries it also turned away hundreds of would-be missionaries.   The church under the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church counted 1,587 overseas full-time career missionaries in 1960.  With the new philosophy in place, despite the addition of former EUB missionaries, by 1977 the number of overseas career missionaries had been reduced to 660.   Currently (in 2010) the number has further been reduced until today it numbers only 220.    

     Meanwhile, the Mission Society for United Methodists (now called just the Mission Society), which started by Ums for UMs as a supplemental agency in the mid-1980s to give churches in America and bishops overseas an opportunity to address requests and needs not addressed by GBGM, is currently supplying more missionaries  to Methodist work around the world than the board itself.  This is despite the fact that GBGM has used all of its institutional weight to discredit the Mission Society, including putting pressure on overseas churches who were requesting missionary help to reject Mission Society involvement.

   What replaced missionaries and the traditional way of doing missions was the new approach of involvement with and funding of groups working for political and social change.  Unfortunately, many of these groups were politically and socially on the radical left.  When David Jessup, who at the time was employed by the AFL-CIO, wrote his white paper (The Jessup Report) in 1980 he identified many of these groups: the Cuba Resource Center, the Nicaraguan Literacy Program, and the North American Congress on Latin America (with a monthly newsletter devoted to Che Guevarra).    These were groups identified and monitored by the state department of a Democratic administration as Communist-fronts or Communist-inspired revolutionary groups.  Jessup was accused of fear-mongering and being part of a right-wing political effort to discredit the board.  This was despite the fact that Jessup was a Democrat who had worked for the Jimmy Carter campaign.   The Institute of Religion and Democracy (IRD) grew out of the controversy around the Jessup Report.

    Resolutions from the board during this period supported the Ayatollah Khomeini and (from the Women’s Division) Robert Mugabe and the Patriotic Front (a revolutionary political group resorting to violence) in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).    In supporting Mugabe (the present dictator of Zimbabwe who took one of the wealthiest countries in Africa and made it into one of the poorest and most corrupt countires in Africa) the board opposed Abel Muzowera (who passed away just months ago), the Methodist bishop who was prime minister of the country and who was supporting a coalition government that was inclusive of whites.    

     The direction of the board, and particularly the Women’s Division, is certainly related to the disintegration of women’s work in the UM Church.   In 1967 the Methodist and EUB churches could report a combined total of 1.7 million members in their women’s groups in 38,000 units.  By the end of 2007 membership in United Methodist Women’s units had declined to 644,637 (a loss of 62%) in 19,770 units.  Despite these losses the Women’s Division opposes any other type of women’s ministry in churches and has pressured the General Conference each quadrennium to pass legislation mandating the existence of an official UMW unit in every local church. 

    Are there any hopeful signs in regard to the General Board of Global Ministries?  Four developments are worth mentioning.

       1) The Women’s Division has announced that it will be refiguring relationships with the GBGM.  This could be a positive step toward decentralization of the board.  The Women’s Division will more directly have oversight and responsibility for UMW-supported institutions and missionaries.  It will assume responsibility for Deaconesses and Home Missioners and projects working with women and children. At the same time it will no longer support the board with is annual 10 million dollar grant.  The question is whether this will result in a return to a form of the pre-1964 structure where the Women’s Division was a free-standing agency and the board was free to develop mission strategy apart from the dominance of self-selected Women’s Division board members.  

          2) GBGM has a new general secretary.  Thomas Kemper is a layperson from Germany who has been mission secretary for the church in Germany and a former missionary from Brazil.   The fact that he comes from outside the board’s corporate culture can only be seen as a plus. 

         3) GBGM at its April, 2020 announced a “cultural shift” in how the denomination does mission.   If the board is serious this would be the best news since merger.   For years the board has sought to control all mission activity.   The reality of the present situation is that much of the mission work presently being done by United Methodists is being done outside the oversight of the board.  Some megachurches operate practically as their own mission agencies.  Local churches, districts, and even individuals are involved in mission projects that deal directly with overseas churches.  The new “cultural shift” would mean that instead of the agency acting as an implementer of mission for the denomination, the agency would be a resource for individuals, churches, conferences and institution already in mission. 

    The implication is that instead of working against groups (like the Mission Society) the board work in cooperation with such groups.  This would indeed be a “cultural shift” of gigantic proportions.

    If the board is serious this could signal a breakthrough in mission outreach in the denomination. 

     4)  The Call to Action Committee in its April 6-8 meeting has set forth a dream where the church operates “with more grace and freedom and fewer rules—more accountability to gospel and less conformity to an outdated, bureaucratic system.” 

Did they include the Board of Global Ministries in that dream?   If there was ever a description that fit GBGM it is “outdated bureaucratic system.”  The board has never yet been accountable to any group outside itself.  It has already started its own restructuring plan including the writing of legislation for the 2012 General Conference.  Whether it will allow itself to be affected by any Call to Action recommendations is one of the next questions facing the church.