The main reason I volunteered is that I distrust the Conference. We have been disinventing ourselves ever since we merged the two conferences in Indiana. Positions get shuffled, there's no money or committee support, the powers that be chase mirages. A vacant chair would, I feared, soon go missing, and getting our dysfunctional conference to take the position seriously next year or down the road without someone already in it and being vocal about what to do with it seemed a losing proposition. So, if I accomplish nothing else, I will keep the seat warm and hope to deliver it and its possibilities intact to a successor.
I might even hold onto it for a while. We'll see. It kind of depends on how quickly The UMC starts to disintegrate, and how ugly that becomes when it happens. Annual Conference 2020 could be a wake or a riot. In any case, I don't think The UMC as we have known it can outlast the next quadrennium.
In that case, my first responsibility is to see that Scouting ministry is taken seriously in whatever successor denomination I wind up in, and that will be helped immensely by my already occupying a position of responsibility. Realizing that in any breakup there will be Scouting units in all the successor denominations, I will gladly help anybody tasked with the same in the other piece(s) of the org I don't wind up in. We Scouters need to model the comity that so far has not prevailed in wider UM circles.
I discussed all this with Anna (Pathfinder President) over lunch at the close of AC. The Pathfinder belongs to its members and can do anything it likes; it is not part of the official structure. We could attempt to resource both/all the judicatories that emerge from the breakup, but I doubt we could sustain that effort. We can barely say we're staying on top of the unwieldy and unresponsive Indiana Annual Conference as it is; attempting to keep up communications with two or more unwieldy and unresponsive orgs is probably more than we can do. And it depends on where the members of the Pathfinder land, individually, too. We have kept things going with a skeleton crew, really, and if they mostly go one direction, then that means we can't do much in the other. If the members scatter, we might even have to dissolve the corporation. In any case, I told her my feeling is that for at least a while -- at least while we're still disbursing money that was donated for specific purposes (like the Richert Fund) by people active in the current AC -- we ought to be equally open to making grants to Scouts and projects in all the successor judicatories.
I can't see further down the road than that right now. In my previous run at this office, I was quite adroit at using the machinery of the Conference to magnify the office's voice, but as chaotic and misdriven as the Conference is these days, I don't know if there are any levers I can find to pull to advance the cause much. I will try.