Future of the Mountain Sky Area Report

INVITING: OUR DISCOVERIES AND UNDERSTANDING

Friends, as Easter People, Christ calls us to be recreated anew. We are invited to become a new thing that moves the Mountain Sky Area beyond merger and toward a holy communion of both the Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone Conferences to better serve the forming of disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. We want to share our discoveries and understanding.

Both conferences have experienced serious declines in attendance and membership over the past 15 years.

Yellowstone Annual Conference faces an URGENT situation with 99 active clergy (49 elders), 129 churches, and 13,602 members (as of 2012), is declining at a rate that is no longer sustainable as an annual conference.

Rocky Mountain Annual Conference is in a FRAGILE state. With 336 active clergy (229 elders), 265 churches, 65,820 members (as of 2012), this conference has witnessed a 13% decline in worship attendance in the last 10 years and continues on a downward trajectory.

The current structures of the Annual Conferences have become burdensome and redundant. By joining together, we can be better stewards of our human and financial resources.

While we honor our distinctive communities and contexts, joyfully we have found there is more that unites us than separates us.

We think the Wesleyan vision of personal holiness and social holiness is more important than ever.

We want keep it vital in our congregations and in our region.

We need to face it: what we are doing now is not working.

Here’s the good news: admitting that it isn’t working can be liberating and healing. It gives us the freedom to re-imagine The United Methodist Church, and conference connections, for our area.

We need time to better understand how this can happen and what it will look like. So, join us on this journey toward new life, continuing the dialog on a deeper level, moving toward vitality, and change. This is exciting work, and we are convinced we can best do it together.

The Mountain Sky Shared Futures Committee

Yellowstone Conference: Dave McConnell (Bozeman, MT), Co-Chair; Doug Morton (Great Falls, MT); Margaret Nowak (Chester, MT); Debbie Schmidt (Whitefish, MT); Jeremy Scott (Billings, MT); Alice Swett (Buffalo, WY); David Burt (Billings, MT), Staff

Rocky Mountain Conference: Janet Forbes (Highlands Ranch, CO), Co-Chair; Steve Burnett (Colorado Springs, CO); Chris Frasier (Denver, CO); Kristi Kinnison (Greenwood Village, CO); Elizabeth McVicker (Cheyenne, WY); Doug Palmer (Niwot, CO); Youngsook Kang (Greenwood Village, CO), Staff Bishop Elaine Stanovsky

SHARING: CONTEXT, VISION, AND MISSION FIELD

As Methodists living in the Intermountain West, what unites us? The Rocky Mountains connect us north to south, running through our states like a spine. They’re “the backbone of the world,” says the Blackfeet tribe. The five states in the Mountain Sky area — Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho — stretch across the Continental Divide like a woven blanket thrown over a horse’s back. Water flows from our upper ranges to the four directions. A rich harvest of natural resources often follows. This land is filled with wild contradictions. A day’s drive can cross high and dry plains, sheer mountain ranges, red-rock formations, and salt flats. It’s an area blessed with vibrant communities but conflicted by competing interests. We share declining rural towns and sprawling cities, wide-open vistas and crowded resorts. This region’s timeless landscape is changing before our eyes, and our population is changing along with it.

Our demographics shift with the suddenness of our seasons. Workers in recreation and energy migrate into trailer parks and man-camps, and then leave just as quickly, their numbers ebbing and flowing with changes in the global economy. A host of high-tech jobs attract droves of bright, young minds, while dwindling opportunity drains our rural communities of its most creative children. We share a love of visual and musical arts, world-class museums, and leading universities. We are cowboys and farmers, movie stars and ski bums, tech gurus and conservationists, hipsters and retirees, native peoples, immigrants, professors, artists, and laborers. We are divided by an increasing wealth gap, but united by the love of our western way of life. All together, we are people facing the same challenges, united by our love of this place, and its people.

And in the midst of these people, we yearn to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ in ways that transform our communities. We believe that the kingdom of God is among us, and we strive to live here as God intends. We have a Wesleyan vision for the Mountain Sky Area, where to be a neighbor is to serve those at our doorstep. Together, we envision safe, non-violent places for children to thrive, welcoming tables of diversity, vital congregations, and new images of Christian community.

We can imagine not just a new Annual Conference, but a new way of reaching those living in the land we call home: the Intermountain West. Join us as we seek to spread Wesleyan vitality in the Mountain Sky Area.

We recommend to Bishop Elaine that we move forward with two groups.

1. Leadership that builds a NEW ANNUAL CONFERENCE MODEL AND IDENTITY which moves BEYOND MERGER to a simplified ORGANIZATION, focusing on the basic responsibilities of an annual conference so that resources are freed for new uses. This group will bring a petition to the 2016 Annual Conference sessions and to the Western Jurisdictional Conference, July 13-16, 2016 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Questions that might guide our work:
What form of denomination will serve us well for the next 50 years?
What impediments or constraints are we working with that are not necessary?
What set of rules and principles frame a new identity while we experiment?

2. Leadership that identifies ways that the new Annual Conference can cultivate ministry to spread WESLEYAN VITALITY in the MISSION FIELD…both in congregational and non-congregational ways.

Questions that might guide our work:
What do we need to live in the post-denominational world, given the generational shifts, distances, and demographics?
What values and principles do we follow?
What new forms of Wesleyan witness are emerging

link to the full report.