Key Points:
- Bishops have named 25 United Methodist leaders from across the U.S. to organize the first session of the U.S. Regional Conference.
- The committee is responsible for getting off the ground the first United Methodist body to make decisions only affecting the U.S. church.
- The creation of the new conference means the denomination’s top lawmaking body would no longer be centered on U.S. concerns.
Planning is officially underway for the U.S. Regional Conference — a new decision-making body never seen before in The United Methodist Church.
The Council of Bishops on March 13 announced the 25 United Methodists from across the United States who now have the task of organizing the regional conference’s first meeting .
The committee also will include three advisers from the Africa, Europe and the Philippines — selected by their respective regional bodies — who will ensure a global perspective in the planning.
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“The formation of the Interim Committee on Organization marks a historic and hopeful step in the life of our church,” said Council of Bishops President Tracy S. Malone in a press statement listing the committee members.
“As we move forward with the implementation of regionalization, this committee will help ensure that the United States Regional Conference is launched with clarity, collaboration, and a deep commitment to our shared mission.”
The committee’s voting members come from all five U.S. jurisdictions, which will still be the bodies that elect U.S. bishops even with the formation of the new regional conference. The bishops had the responsibility of selecting committee members representing the U.S. church’s ethnic, racial and age diversity.
The denomination’s top lawmaking assembly has budgeted between $83,000 and $98,000 for the committee to hold two in-person, three-day meetings to plan the regional conference session.
United Methodist leaders stress that this committee is called interim for a reason. Once the first session of the U.S. Regional Conference concludes, the interim committee will no longer exist unless the U.S. Regional Conference votes to continue its work.
List of members
Here are the 25 members of the committee organizing the first U.S. Regional Conference. They are listed in alphabetical order:
- The Rev. Jenny Arneson, North Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Derrek Belase, South Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Stephen Cady, Northeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. April Casperson, North Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Sung Chung, Northeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Johnson Dodla, Northeastern Jurisdiction
- Nitza E. Dovenspike, North Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Jefferson M. Furtado, Southeastern Jurisdiction
- Paul Gomez, Western Jurisdiction*
- Anish Hermon, North Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Kim Jenne, South Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Emily Kincaid, Southeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Ramonica Malone-Wardley, South Central Jurisdiction
- Mallory Miles, Northeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Bennie Grace Nabua, Western Jurisdiction
- Priscilla Patterson, South Central Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Karli Pidgeon, South Central Jurisdiction,
- The Rev. Alice Rogers, Southeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Phil Rogers, Western Jurisdiction
- Derrick L. Scott III, Southeastern Jurisdiction
- The Rev. Amy Shanholtzer, Northeastern Jurisdiction
- Kim Simpson, South Central Jurisdiction
- LaNella Smith, Southeastern Jurisdiction
- Monalisa Tu’itahi, Western Jurisdiction
- Laura Witkowski, North Central Jurisdiction
*Paul Gomez also is on the staff of United Methodist Communications, which includes United Methodist News.
The actual voters at the U.S. Regional Conference will be the lay and clergy delegates elected by U.S. annual conferences to serve at General Conference and the jurisdictional conferences.
But that doesn’t make the task ahead for the interim committee less monumental.
Derrick Scott III, co-lay leader of the Florida Conference, is one of the people grateful to serve on the interim committee.
“My greatest hope is that we’ll shape a structure that allows the United Methodist witness in the U.S. to truly flourish — and that we’ll be intentional about creating space for the next generation of leaders,” he said.
Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi, who leads the Eastern Pennsylvania and Greater New Jersey conferences, is the interim committee’s convener.
Her role is to help the committee members understand their charge and guide them as they elect their own officers. Moore-Koikoi’s task as convener will then be done, but she also will be available as an adviser if the committee so desires.
Like Scott, she is eager to help with the big task ahead.
“There are few times in ministry that you’re able to see something develop from its initial conversations about an idea to come now to full fruition,” she said. “So, it is very exciting for this to have happened.”
A number of United Methodists across the international denomination have long considered adding a structure to allow U.S. church members to make decisions on matters that only pertain to the United States. Their hope was to make General Conference less U.S.-centric and decolonize the denomination by ensuring U.S. practices would no longer define how United Methodists operate their churches in Africa, Asia and Europe.
The idea for the just-forming U.S. Regional Conference began to germinate with conversations in 2017. Those discussions — even amid the challenges of the COVID pandemic and church disaffiliations — eventually led to the regionalization legislation that received overwhelming approval at the 2024 General Conference. That legislation included a package of amendments to the denomination’s constitution that were ratified late last year with 91.6% of annual conference votes around the globe.
“My hope is that people understand the magnitude of how quickly this happened,” Moore-Koikoi said, “and that it happened with so much universal support.”
Under regionalization, the eight already-existing central conferences in Africa, Europe and the Philippines are now being renamed regional conferences.
The big change is the creation of the new U.S. Regional Conference, which will have the same authority — long held by the former central conferences — to adapt parts of the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s policy book, to its own legal and missional requirements. The idea is to give the denomination’s different geographical regions equal decision-making authority.
In getting the new regional conference off the ground, the interim committee has the tasks of:
- Selecting the time and place for the initial gathering of the U.S. Regional Conference.
- Collaborating with the General Conference secretary and business manager to plan the first gathering.
- Recommending to the U.S. Regional Conference, in consultation with the appropriate committees of the Commission on the General Conference, the committees and officers needed to ensure the effective functioning of the new regional body.
Moore-Koikoi pointed out that the interim committee, in its organizing work, also can set the tone of the U.S. Regional Conference gathering.
What legislation the U.S. Regional Conference will vote on remains to be determined. As the interim committee is doing its work, the commission that plans General Conference has the responsibility of organizing a new General Conference legislative committee that will deal solely with U.S. matters.
The legislative committee, initially envisioned as a backup in case regionalization was not ratified, will cease to exist once the U.S. Regional Conference is functional. It is possible that at its first and only session during the 2028 General Conference, the legislative committee will mainly have the responsibility of referring legislation to the U.S. Regional Conference.
The regional conference will be the first time for U.S. United Methodists to make decisions together as one body across jurisdictional lines and outside the international context of General Conference.
“I think the experience of the whole process of regionalization has taught us that we can get to a place of dealing with legislation in a way that really feels holistic and really feels godly and holy in some ways,” Moore-Koikoi said. “So, I think a big part of what this committee is going to have to wrestle with is: How do we set the atmosphere for that first gathering to really be about holy conferencing?”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
