During his more youthful years, this pastor assumed that politics in the Church was something to be avoided, as much as possible. With the passing of the years, he has changed his mind on this subject. Now it is his opinion that politics in the Church should be the best politics possible -- that is, politics in the Church should be as consistent as possible with the politics of God’s Kingdom.

Each Annual Conference is an event that presents, in full display, the politics of eastern North Carolina United Methodism. The 2007 Annual Conference, which took place in Greenville last month, contained four notable examples of the Church being political.

First, there was the election of delegates who will attend the 2008 General Conference and the 2008 Jurisdictional Conference. During the four-day process of election, 20 clergy (plus 5 alternates to Jurisdictional Conference) and 20 laity (plus 5 alternates to Jurisdictional Conference) were elected. As the delegates were being elected, there was a constant call for the conference to be "inclusive" in its electoral decisions. That is, there was a concerted effort to insure the election of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, women, young adults, and youth. Brief speech after brief speech urged the voters to weigh the race, gender, and age of the candidates. Not one speech asked voters to consider other criteria for voting, such as who might best serve the Church’s faith in the denomination’s international and regional conferences. Certainly, inclusiveness is good, but should it be the one and only (that is, exclusive) stated criteria in the voting process?

Second, the 2008 salary of the District Superintendents was set. It was determined that this salary would be established by computing the average of the salaries of the twenty-five highest paid pastors in the conference during the previous year. For years, there has been an expressed concern at Annual Conference that the gap between the conference-approved "minimum salary" paid to a pastor under full-time appointment and the salary of the District Superintendent (DS) has grown too wide. (In 2008, a DS will be paid 2.56 times the amount paid to a minimum-salary pastor.) One simple way to get a handle on this widening gap might be to pay the DS twice the minimum salary. Just a thought.

Third, the politics of ideas was in play at Annual Conference. For example, when former Bishop Marion Edwards taught on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, he claimed that a person is "lost" when that person is in "the wrong place." That is worth remembering.

Fourth and also from the politics of ideas, The Reverend Bruce Stanley, who is the President of the Methodist Home for Children in Raleigh, made a memorable statement. He brought together the world-changing challenges that our living Lord, the post-Resurrection Jesus, presented to His Disciples. Rev. Stanley’s statement wove together, in a most powerful way, those challenges from the four gospels. (Here it should be remembered that Rev. Stanley is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, which used to have the reputation of treating Christianity as a rather exotic, Ancient Near Eastern religion. Obviously, he has developed way beyond his theological schooling.)

A couple of weeks after Annual Conference, our Sunday Evening Study discussed a different kind of politics. Those present listed the issues that should be most important in evaluating candidates in the ongoing (everlasting?) presidential campaign. These issues emerged in this order: (1) the life issues, (2) marriage and family issues, (3) character (multiple "flip-flopping" on political matters and multiple divorces would be consider negatives), (4) foreign policy, (5) immigration, and (6) the ability to make a moral-political argument and take a moral-political stand.