Last week, Nebraska, Kansas East, and Kansas West all voted to become one conference, the Great Plains Annual Conference. One of the big reasons cited to why we should join together is a sharing of resources. Why should we have three separate boards, offices, and committees that do the same work? Why not join them together and let them share resources? That got me thinking; what if we did that for more annual conferences? Right now there are around 55 or so Annual Conferences. Here is a map of them:
http://lenwilson.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/UMC-Conferences.jpg
So, after sitting down and taking the figures I found here:
http://lenwilson.us/the-top-25-united-methodist-annual-conferences/
I sat down and redrew the conference lines. Yes, I am aware that this probably proves that I have no life, and, no, I don't expect this to go any further than, "what if's?" but I thought it'd be kind of fun/ interesting. When I started out, I made a couple of rules for myself:
1) Do not split a state into two different conferences. (this was more a "for-fun" rule than anything, and kept me away from the temptation to make some of states with bigger membership in the UMC into more annual conferences)
2)Every Annual Conference has to above 100,000 members
3) No annual conference should go above 525,000 members
4)No unrealistic size (aka: you can't have an annual conference stretch from California to Kentucky or from North Dakota to Texas)
So here it is folks: The NEW conference boundaries (as made up by one Bryce Bowers)
(Edit: I made an error on the map. The Bay Area AC is nonexistent. It was an Annual Conference that exsisted in the early part of my research that was made up of New York and New Jersey, but I combined it to help New England with membership according to rules)
Like I said, proves I have no life. I also made a chart of what the membership would look like in all the annual conferences. Obviously, these numbers aren't perfect, and I'm willing to admit that I may have made a mistake but, here it is:
Obviously I had to break one rule in favor for another. North Carolina and Texas as states have more than 525,000 United Methodists in them. I elected to keep those states in tact. At the beginning of the process, I had different annual conferences. I had New Mexico and Texas as an Annual Conference, I had an entire Annual Conference made up of Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois before it had to go to the way side so I could make the membership of some annual conferences greater. I even had the Carolinas as one conference and Georgia/Florida as one conference. I thought that was a good idea until I saw that those conferences topped out at almost 800,000 members! (I figured that was too big).
After I redrew the conference areas, I went a little further and thought some more about how this plan would look, and came up with a few things:
1) All Missionary Conferences would remain the same.
2) Jurisdictions would be eliminated. The United States would become one Central Conference and would have a meeting every four years the week after General Conference, and in the same city as General Conference. Also, we would shrink General Conference to one week.
3) There would be an excess of bishops currently. We could solve this problem in one of two ways 1) More than one bishop serves a conference and 2) (my preference) We would have one conference where all bishops would be up for appointment. A committee would work out which conference wants what bishop, and the bishops left over could go back to being elders in their home annual conference. Once the US Central Conference came around again, those bishops could run for election, as well as anyone else who wanted to run for bishop.
I'm sure there would be a lot of other complications, and this system would not work out perfectly and has a couple of flaws. But, could you image what COULD happen? Could you imagine the Gulf Coast Conference coming together and forming one large clean up day of the Gulf? Or Methodists from Portland, helping a park chaplaincy program in Wyoming? Or Red Sox fans getting together with Yankee fans and helping build a new campus ministry center in Maine? Or Methodists coming together from Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, to collaborate and decide how to reach people that might need the love of Christ, together? I think it could be awesome.
But again, this is just a dream. An experiment. And a bored 21 year-old Methodist geek wanting to brainstorm a different way.
(If you actually read through all this, feel free to leave questions or feedback)
