The promotion of the Florida Plan for structuring the Global Methodist episcopacy comes with criticisms of General Superintendency Plan. This is to be expected and appreciated. As we seek to discern which structure will be best, we need to have forthright and charitable discussions about the pros and cons of each plan. As that discussion proceeds, however, it is absolutely crucial to ensure that our critiques are accurate and fair. We should endeavor to represent the competing plans truthfully. And we should all welcome critique of our arguments for whichever plan we support. Debate done with both civility and rigor will increase the likelihood that the plan we ultimately implement is as strong as possible. In this article, I will highlight some of the ways I disagree with claims made in favor of the Florida Plan. There is at least one point made by proponents of the Florida Plan with which I agree, and I think the General Superintendency Plan should only be implemented after it's been amended to strengthen the way it handles the matter in question. I'll deal with that in a forthcoming post. Be sure to subscribe so you'll get updates when new installments in this series publish.
Dividing spiritual and temporal leadership?
One of the common critiques leveled against the General Superintendency Plan is that it separates spiritual and temporal leadership in a problematic way. The argument is that the General Superintendency Plan (for traveling bishops) delegates spiritual leadership to the bishops and temporal leadership to conference superintendents. If you're wondering what "temporal leadership" refers to, it seems to be a way of talking about administrative work (aside: it would have been clearer to have said "administrative leadership" in both plans). Here's the way the critique was put in a recent article co-authored by four proponents of the Florida Plan:
The General Superintendent Plan separates spiritual and temporal leadership. Bishops would be the primary spiritual leaders of the denomination and conference superintendents would be the primary temporal leaders.
The same claim was made during a recent interview on Plain Spoken. The problem with this criticism is that the General Superintendency Plan explicitly attributes both spiritual and temporal leadership to both bishops and Conference Superintendents. The claim of such separation does not accord with the actual text of the proposals. Multiple petitions submitted by the Transitional Leadership Council that together implement the General Superintendency Plan explicitly include spiritual and temporal leadership in the responsibilities of both bishops and conference superintendents. Consider the following quotes from legislation to implement the General Superintendency Plan (the italics in the following quotes are mine):
Petition 025: if passed, would give us this language: "When convened together, the bishops of the Global Methodist Church constitute a general superintendency that leads our church in spiritual and temporal matters..."
Petition 027: "As general superintendents of the Church, bishops are entrusted with the following responsibilities: (1) Lead and oversee the spiritual and temporal affairs of the Global Methodist Church..."
Petition 033: "Conference superintendents are elders who are appointed by the bishop...to provide spiritual and temporal leadership to each annual conference."
My question to proponents of the Florida Plan is: why say the General Superintendency separates spiritual and temporal leadership when it explicitly attributes both forms of leadership to both bishops and conference superintendents? Let me emphasize that I don't think there is any attempt to purposefully deceive or mislead. Instead, perhaps the proponents of the Florida Plan think the General Superintendency Plan functionally creates this separation between spiritual and temporal leadership despite the fact that its language attributes both forms of leadership to both offices of bishop and conference superintendent. If that's the case, the critique should be clarified to say as much. Otherwise, the criticism appears inauthentic and misleading.
To reiterate the point made above, if we're going to have a beneficial and fruitful discussion, we need to represent each plan accurately. We can disagree with what we take to be implications of the plan. We can even argue that the implications of the plan don't match the stated content or goals of the plan. What we shouldn't do is misrepresent either plan.
To the question of sharing spiritual and temporal (or administrative) leadership, I suggested in the first installment in this series that, while bishops and conference superintendents both lead spiritually and temporally/administratively, the General Superintendency Plan (1) puts the bishops in position to lean into spiritual leadership by giving them less administrative responsibility in the annual conferences and (2) positionsthe conference superintendents to lean into the administration of the annual conference while recognizing they also offer spiritual leadership, too. Check out that post for why I think that's a good strategy.
Less expensive and more flexible?
Another claim is that the Florida Plan for residential bishops will cost less and increase flexibility. In my mind, these two are related, and so we'll take them together. To begin, it's difficult for me to imagine how a plan that allows for as many as 40 bishops in two years will cost less than a plan that will likely give us less than ten bishops. Critics of the General Superintendency Plan would likely respond that it's more expensive because you have to fund both bishops and conference superintendents. But this varies conference to conference, and this is where the question of flexibility comes in. Some conferences (like North Alabama where I serve) have a part-time president pro tem and would continue to have the conference superintendent role be part-time, if the General Superintendency Plan passes. This allows us to keep local church giving at a minimum, and it also allows us to allocate a larger proportion of the conference budget to church planting, which we are doing. If the Florida Plan passes and we are required to take on the salary of a residential bishop, we'd either have to raise local church giving to the annual conference or take money away from church planting and other ministries.
If the Florida Plan passes...we'd either have to raise local church giving to the annual conference or take money away from church planting and other ministries.
The General Superintendency Plan creates more flexibility by allowing annual conferences to (1) decide whether the conference superintendent is full-time or part-time, (2) keep local church giving to the annual conference as low as possible, and (3) have more discretion in whether funding goes to conference admin or ministries in our communities.
The response will likely be made that conferences could keep costs down by sharing a bishop with another conference. First, that requires finding another (likely adjacent) conference that wants to share a bishop. Second, even taking on half or a third of a bishop's salary, housing, and travel would still be a significantly greater financial cost than providing a stipend to a part-time conference superintendent. For conferences that opt for a part-time conference superintendent, the General Superintendency Plan will be far, far less expensive and far, far more flexible.
A larger institutional footprint?
Proponents of the Florida Plan also suggest that the General Superintendency Plan creates a larger institutional footprint than their plan. If I understand correctly, this claim is that the the General Superintendency has two levels of oversight - bishops and conference superintendents - while the Florida Plan only has one level with bishops residing in each annual conference. I would argue, however, that a single level of oversight with the potential to give us forty bishops in two years would represent a far greater institutional footprint than fewer bishops combined with conference superintendents. The reason is that conference superintendents are not agents of the General Church as an institution. While they would consult with one another, especially in the case of cross-conference appointments, they would not speak or work as a singular entity of the General Church. Thus, their existence does not increase the institutional footprint.
However, if the Assembly of Bishops grew to thirty or forty in number, you'd have a significantly larger body operating as an agent of the General Church as an institution. That would represent a far larger institutional footprint than what we have in the General Superintendency Plan, which likely leaves us with fewer than ten bishops for years to come.
Unsustainable Claims and Global Methodist Bishops
In short, I don't think the major critiques of the General Superintendency Plan have all that much force. In fact, they seem unsustainable when placed under scrutiny. Perhaps I'm missing something, and I welcome dialog around each question. But as it stands, the criticisms of the General Superintendency seem to fall flat.
Dr. Matt O’Reilly (Ph.D., Gloucestershire) is Lead Pastor of Christ Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Director of Research at Wesley Biblical Seminary, and a fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians. A two-time recipient of the John Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement, he is the author of Paul and the Resurrected Body: Social Identity and Ethical Practice, The Letters to the Thessalonians, and Bless the Nations: A Devotional for Short-Term Missions. Follow @mporeilly on X and @mattoreillyauthor on Instagram.
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