United Methodists gather in Pittsburgh this week for northeastern conference

Hundreds of United Methodists are in Pittsburgh this week for the first time since the denomination voted to remove restrictions on LGBTQ pastors and same-sex marriages.

Delegates from 12 states are attending the 2024 Northeastern Jurisdictional Conference, typically held every four years. The event brings together about 600 members of the church from the northeastern corner of the U.S. to discuss and vote on administrative matters.

The gathering comes after landmark votes in May at the international General Conference, where, along with changes to LGBTQ policy, delegates made plans for how the church will handle its shrinking budget and discussed alterations to the way the church defines its global regions.

The northeastern jurisdictional conference, which runs through Friday , also comes after a schism that saw 25% of churches vote to disaffiliate, or leave the denomination, last year in response to the debates around same-sex marriage and LGBTQ pastors. Many of the departing churches left to join the newly created Global Methodist Church, seeking a more conservative denomination.

In 2023, at the June annual conference in Erie, 298 Western Pennsylvania churches split from the denomination. There are 427 United Methodist churches remaining in the region, according to spokesperson Liz Lennox.

Related:

• Western Pa. United Methodist churches react to denomination's revised LGBTQ policies

• United Methodists will vote on the church's future at upcoming General Conference

• Months after schism, former and current United Methodist churches pick up the pieces

• Remaining United Methodists look to religious life after disaffiliations

• Some Western Pennsylvania United Methodist churches make split official at conference

Regional gathering

Hosting the conference in Pittsburgh this year is a point of pride for Western Pennsylvania and Susquehanna Conference Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi.

“It’s a big honor to be able to do this,” she said. “We’ve been planning for a few years now for folks to come here. It’s a big honor to be able to host everyone and to be able to show off who we are as Western Pennsylvania and who we are as Pittsburgh folks.”

A jurisdictional conference is a mid-level gathering that falls between the smaller annual conferences, such as the Western Pennsylvania conference, and the General Conference, in which delegates from around the world meet, Moore-Koikoi explained. Annual conferences get into the nitty-gritty details, whereas the jurisdictional conference sets a broader vision.

Ten episcopal areas, governed by bishops, are represented at the event: Washington, Philadelphia, Greater New Jersey, Boston, New York, Peninsula-Delaware, Harrisburg, Upper New York, West Virginia and Pittsburgh.

“The jurisdictional conference basically helps to realize or to implement what the general church has said and what the local annual conference is going to be actually doing on the ground,” Moore-Koikoi said.

At the jurisdictional conference, delegates likely will determine processes for how to admit churches that disaffiliated back into the United Methodist Church if they decide they want to return.

Other conferences have had some churches express interest in returning, Moore-Koikoi said, and some pastors have expressed interest in the northeastern region as well.

History and legacy

Sixty years ago, during a General Conference that also was held in Pittsburgh in 1964, civil rights advocates spoke out against the policies of structural segregation that existed within the Methodist Church at the time. The more than 1,000 protesters brought along a cross that had been burned by the KKK on the lawn of Tougaloo College Chaplain Ed King, who had advocated for desegregation.

The denomination was desegregated four years later through the merger that created what today is known as the United Methodist Church. But the cross was later coated in bronze and made into a sculpture by artist James Kearney, at the request of the Rev. Gerald Forshey, organizer of the protest. Titled “Crucifixion,” it was donated to First UMC at The Chicago Temple.

The sculpture is back in Pittsburgh as a commemoration of that anniversary, explained Amy Wagner, lead pastor at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Allison Park. Wagner previously worked at the Chicago church where the statue was held, and helped facilitate bringing it back for this year’s conference.

“For me, it is very much a reminder of the work that still needs to be done. It’s a reminder of the parts of the story of racial segregation that we don’t always hear,” Wagner said. “We’ve brought it back to Pittsburgh because it’s the 60th anniversary of it being here at General Conference, what they referred to then as the ‘Pilgrimage to Pittsburgh.’”

The church’s initiatives in confronting racism in recent years will be one topic of discussion during this year’s conference, Moore-Koikoi said.

“This jurisdictional conference will allow us to do some celebration around that, the work that we’ve done, and also some planning for, ‘OK, what’s the next step now,’” she said.

Attendees also hope to create a vision for how the church will interact with and help the community.

“What can we do collectively as a jurisdiction to have an impact on the communities around us,” she asked. “That will be part of what we will be talking about while we are gathering in Pittsburgh.”

Ryan Taylor, a delegate from the Baltimore-Washington conference, looks forward to the chance to meet United Methodists from other states. She’s also interested in hearing and participating in planned discussions about diversity within the church.

“I’m a little new to the process. For certain, I know we’re doing God’s work at the end of the day,” she said. “(I’m) interested to hear aspects from different people from different places on how they feel about diversity.”

Bishop discussion

One topic of discussion at the conference will be how bishops will be allocated moving forward. At the larger general conference this year, delegates talked about the practical restructuring of finances and leadership the church must undertake after losing a quarter of its congregations.

“We have known for some time that we were going to need to decrease the number of bishops in the Northeast; even before disaffiliations, we knew that we needed to decrease because of our membership realities,” Moore-Koikoi said.

After the conference deliberates, bishops may be asked to cover more than one region or share, and some retiring bishops may not be replaced.

“(There are) four bishops who were covering two annual conferences already,” she said. “We will find out where we’ll be assigned at the end of this jurisdictional conference. But most likely, those who were covering two will continue to cover two.”

Especially when it comes to reorganizing bishops, Alyce Weaver Dunn, head of the delegation and also the director of connectional ministry for Western Pennsylvania United Methodist Conference, thinks flexibility will be important.

“With the different circumstances that we find ourselves in right now, it’s not necessarily going to be business as usual,” she said. “There’ll have to be some deep conversations and exploration together about how we are going to look at the jurisdiction, and how we are going to be moving forward in our ministry.”