3. Becoming a Non-Denominational Church
If we chose to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church, we could potentially join another denomination or create our own sets of beliefs and practices, also known as becoming non-denominational. None of them are easy or perfect solutions, and some of them have a cost or loss of freedom. This has led many to consider becoming a non-denominational church. This has some very attractive qualities to it, however it is also the most complicated option available to us.
We’ll start out with some of the good parts about being our own nondenominational church. The first is that we will no longer have apportionments to pay to a larger governing body. As a United Methodist church, we give a portion of our tithes and offerings to our annual conference. This money covers administrative costs, helps developing churches, and goes towards various missions and ministries that are not part of any single local church. After doing some calculations based on attendance, giving, etc. Navarre UMC pays roughly $45,000 in apportionments. Along similar lines, the property that is owned by the church would be completely owned by us, meaning we could buy, sell, or otherwise manage our property without having to get approval from a larger governing body.
There are a few marked negatives of not being part of a larger denomination. Most of these come in times of crisis or emergencies. There is a layer of protection from the conference when it comes to legal issues. They have lawyers and legal advisors who have created certain policies and will step in if needed. There are also organizations such as UMCOR that would help if our church was seriously damaged in a natural disaster. We also lose connections with other like-minded churches and it can create isolated clergy.
One of the first things we would have to do as a nondenom is create our own doctrines and discipline (to borrow the phrase from the GMC). This is going to be an enormous undertaking. We would either have to start from scratch on entire systems and beliefs or take an existing document (such as the Book of Discipline) and edit it for our own needs. Just for a reference on the scale of his task, the Book of Discipline is almost 1,000 pages and there’s a companion book called the Book of Resolutions that is another 900 pages.
This presents us with the first dilemma. How and when will we decide what goes into the first edition of this document? Do we create this document before we disaffiliate so that our congregation knows what they are getting into or do we disaffiliate first and create this document afterwards? There is no set process for how this is supposed to work, and whatever method we choose will have a major impact on the type of church we become. I’m assuming there would be a small group of people who would have to do the brute force work of going through the discipline and selecting which bits they would like to keep, which bits they would like to change, and which bits would no longer apply to an autonomous church. Even this initial sorting process will be heavily influenced by people’s current personal convictions. Furthermore, the selection process for who is in this group is influenced by personal opinions because they lean towards selecting people who they think will behave a certain way.
After these portions are identified, who will be responsible for the rewriting of these paragraphs? In the UMC, there’s typically a lawyer of some sort who crafts the initial language, and even then there are entire sessions spent on word-smithing individual words or sentences. We would be asking a dozen or so people to do all of that in a very short amount of time, none of whom have that type of training. Eventually, we would need to actually adopt this document. Would this be the sole decision of the pastor, of a church council type group, or would we take it to the entire congregation (which could also be restricted or not to the members of our church, depending on if we’ve already decided how membership would work). Furthermore, we would have to decide if it was an all or nothing adoption of the entire document or if individual clauses would be up for discussion (and if so what the revision process would be). Would we require a majority vote or a two-thirds vote? At this point, I’m bringing up a little too many issues intentionally, but it’s because each of these will actually need to be discussed and it’s just the surface of the scope this will entail. We also have to determine how often and who will have the authority to change the wording of this document. In the UMC, it’s every four years and by the majority vote of delegates sent to General Conference (some issues require a two thirds majority).
One issue that will immediately come to the forefront is how our church will fill the role of lead pastor. As a non-denom, there will be no itineracy. If Pastor Alan leaves the UMC, we would have to decide if we ask him to stay as our pastor (and if it requires a vote of some kind). He would then have to also decide if he wants to stay at our church, because at this point he has the ability to leave if he wants regardless of what a bishop or DS says. Even if he is the first pastor of our new church, eventually the position will need to be filled. Who offers the oversight of the pastor, do we attempt to do year contracts similar to the appointment system, and other issues are all things that have to be decided. Yet in the search for the eventual new pastor, non denominational churches have a big disadvantage. First, there is no pool of automatic candidates who are of the same denomination. There is no overseeing group who gives us a pastor or even recommends one. We’d have to find our own pastor. Not only would we not likely be able to pull from a known denomination (those pastors would have to give up their own pensions and benefits) but we would have to have extremely theologically competent people on the search committee who knew our beliefs in and out since there is no guarantee that there is another nondenominational pastor who would share our beliefs. (This is also the reason why we would have to have the procedure for changing doctrines and beliefs firmly established, because any new pastor with a different theology could potentially try to change them to match their own).
My largest concern with a nondenominational church is that it is far too common for these churches to develop dangerous and heretical believes, or to cover up scandals. Far too much is decided by a small group of people, and without proper oversight there is the ability to get “yes men” in all the right places to lead to a corrupt environment. Of course, the most ironic part of choosing a nondenominational church is that it takes far less to change doctrines and policies than it does in a larger denomination. So even though we have complete control over the creation of our denomination, a few bad nominations could completely derail the best laid plans.