Church court moves to broaden accessibility

Key Points:

• The United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council is launching a new online system to file documents in cases.
• The goal is making its work more efficient, transparent and readily available to church leaders around the globe.
• For now, the paper filing system is still available.

Bringing a case before The United Methodist Church’s top court has long required the time and expense of mailing multiple documents, often across oceans.

Now the Judicial Council has launched a new e-filing system that allows United Methodists to submit briefs and other documents online — shortening a process that once took days or even weeks to a matter of seconds.

The Rev. Susan Henry-Crowe, Judicial Council president, sees the new system as a better way to serve a global denomination and its court, whose nine clergy and lay members live in the Philippines, Egypt, Zimbabwe and across the United States.

“It hopefully expedites and makes a smoother system — both for the submission of briefs and reply briefs as well as for the distribution to members of the council,” Henry-Crowe said.

The Judicial Council, whose members are volunteers elected by General Conference, typically holds two sessions a year in the spring and fall. The church court adjudicates three kinds of cases:

• Appeals of a judicial or administrative decision, often regarding a clergy member.
• Requests for a declaratory decision on the interpretation, application and constitutionality of a church law or, in some cases, a proposed church law.
• Reviews of decisions of law made by bishops during annual conferences and other decision-making meetings where they preside.

Only certain United Methodist bodies and individuals have standing to bring a case before the Judicial Council. However, any interested party or other individual can file an amicus brief on a docket item.

In the past, making a submission required mailing multiple copies of documents and records by parcel post to the assistant to the Judicial Council secretary, who in turn mailed documents to the Judicial Council members around the world.

The move to an e-filing system will allow Judicial Council members to receive the submissions instantaneously and save hundreds of dollars in postage, said Bill Waddell, the Judicial Council’s vice president.

He added that the new forms for online submission are similar to previous paper forms to keep them familiar.

“The ultimate goal here is efficiency, ease of use and good stewardship,” he said.

As an attorney, Waddell has long experience with the e-filing systems used in court systems across the U.S. For example, the U.S. federal court PACER e-filing system, short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, dates to the late 1990s.

For now, Waddell acknowledges that this is still a time of transition and there may be some kinks that need straightening out. Traditional paper filing remains fully available, and no one is required to use the Judicial Council’s new online system.

The church court plans to offer training for bishops, conference secretaries and other United Methodist leaders in the coming months. The Judicial Council also plans to post a tutorial video on its website.

Waddell also hopes within the next two years to make the submission process more transparent, with the briefs for most cases before the church court visible to the public.

“To me, transparency is part of the beauty of this,” Waddell said. “We want to build not only efficiency but also trust and confidence in the Judicial Council.”

Both Henry-Crowe and Waddell credited Paul Gómez, connectional ministries lead for United Methodist Communications, with working with the full Judicial Council to bring the e-filing system to fruition. United Methodist Communications includes United Methodist News and hosts the Judicial Council’s website.

Gómez, in turn, praised the Judicial Council’s members for repeatedly testing the new system to ensure that it works.

He sees the new process as a change that is helping United Methodists live into regionalization — the newly ratified restructuring that aims to put the denomination’s different geographic regions on equal footing.

“The Judicial Council acknowledges that we’re in a rapidly changing church right now,” Gómez said, “where it’s OK to try some new things if it helps us do our work better.”

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.