Judi Kenaston’s WV roots run deep, but in a new role, she now helps connect the mission and ministry of The UMC across the globe.

CHARLOTTE — West Virginia Conference Delegate Judi Kenaston addressed delegates at General Conference Wednesday morning in her role as Chief Connectional Ministries Officer for The Connectional Table.

“There has probably not been a General Conference more highly anticipated than this one,” Kenaston told the crowd of more than 800 delegates and hundreds of observers at the Charlotte Convention Center, where she stood on stage with Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of The UMC Council of Bishops (and a West Virginia native); incoming Council of Bishops President Tracy S. Malone of the East Ohio Conference; and Bishop Mande Muyombo of the North Katanga Area of the Congo Central Conference, all part of The Connectional Table.

”The United Methodist Church many of us knew for a lifetime now looks far different than we have seen,” Kenaston said as she and the three bishops informed the audience about regionalization.

“We are all living into a new reality,” Kenaston said, “adapting to the reductions to the numbers of bishops and articulating the priorities for how the general agencies’ function is essential. … How do we best oversee and carry out the mission and ministry of the church in the midst of a rapidly changing world? This is both our challenge and our opportunity.”

Her address preceded anticipated legislation regarding regionalization, one of the many pieces of legislation expected to be voted on at General Conference, which began Tuesday. Regionalization is supported by The Connectional Table.

What is The Connectional Table?

West Virginia Annual Conference attendees know Kenaston best for her role as conference secretary and conference journal editor, posts from which she retired in 2023 while serving as interim general secretary of The Connectional Table. Since then, the “interim” title has been removed, Kenaston confirmed.

“Think of The Connectional Table as the church council of the entire denomination,” Kenaston said.

On it are representatives from all agencies of The UMC, all regions, board presidents, bishops and ethnic caucuses.

”The Connectional Table helps coordinate the work of the agencies,” she explained.

Its purpose? To discern and articulate a shared vision that guides the Church forward, stewarding its mission, ministries, and resources. The Table is led by the decisions of the General Conference and in partnership with the Council of Bishops. It is committed to fostering unity, nurturing faith, and empowering ministries across our global connection.

And Kenaston sits at the head of it.

“It is an honor and a privilege to have Judi Kenaston serve as director of The Connectional Table,” West Virginia Conference Bishop Sandra Steiner Ball said during a break between Conference sessions. “Her leadership, her faithfulness, her dedication, her love of The United Methodist Church has been active for a long, long time.

“The position that she’s in right now is a culmination of all the experiences and all the service that she has given both to the West Virginia Conference and the United Methodist Church over a number of years,” Steiner Ball continued. “You couldn’t find anyone more committed, more faithful, more dedicated than Judi to serve in this leadership role.

“Judi’s leadership with the General Church is a constant reminder of the importance and strength of the ministry of the laity,” Steiner Ball said. “It is an honor for me and the West Virginia Conference to have a member of our Conference family serve in such a position of leadership within the denomination. Judi understands the importance of the collaboration of laity and clergy in the mission and ministry of Christ and the importance of being a worldwide connectional movement of caring and compassionate mission and ministry that changes things and brings life.”

But Kenaston’s main focus in Charlotte through May 3 is not on The Connectional Table.

“I will be there primarily as a delegate,” Kenaston explained prior to arriving in Charlotte. “Being a delegate takes so much time. It’s really hard to do two things. I’ll be relying on my CT associate to do the day-to-day things, but I will still be in touch with everybody.”

What is the role of our delegates?

The West Virginia Conference has six delegates out of a total of 862 delegates to General Conference. (The event is officially called The Postponed 2020 General Conference, meeting in 2024.) It’s not the smallest delegation. Those delegations have only two representatives—one laity, one clergy. For comparison, Virginia has 22 delegates.

The West Virginia Conference elected its delegates in 2019, though various circumstances have placed reserve delegates into official delegate slots since that time and additional reserve delegates have been elected to fill empty reserve slots. Half are laity. Half are clergy.

The Conference’s six voting delegates are Kenaston (laity), Amy Shanholtzer (clergy), Jeff Taylor (clergy), Rich Shaffer (laity), Lauren Godwin (clergy), and Rachel Fulton (laity).

The Conference also has six reserve delegates at General Conference. They will not be voting, Kenaston explained, but they will be monitoring legislative sessions and reporting back to the delegates.

”The reserves will be there to help us,” Kenaston said.

There are 14 committees. So the West Virginia Conference has one delegate on each of six committees. The Conference’s reserve delegates will monitor an additional six committees.

”So we can’t cover all the legislative committees,” Kenaston said. “As a delegation, we picked the six we believed were most strategic.”

And unlike larger delegations in which delegates choose their committees based on order of election seating, West Virginia’s smaller delegation uses a discussion process, agreeing on who sits where based on individual gifts and expertise, Kenaston explained.

“Some delegations choose committees in order of election,” she said. “Ours in West Virginia has always been more democratic. We work together.”

How will they vote?

“We don’t vote as a delegation,” Kenaston explained. “We don’t even know how each other votes. With some delegations, every delegate has to vote the same. We don’t do that. We vote as we are led to vote, and that may be different from some expectations. The reality is that the Conference voted to use my knowledge and my experience and my faith to guide my vote.”

So delegates will attend their respective committees and vote. If an item is approved by a committee, it goes onto a consent calendar. The petitions that are placed on the consent calendars are those that are passed with no more than 10 votes in opposition in the legislative committee—in other words, only those items with strong support go onto the calendar. Items that change the constitution or have a minority report are never on the consent calendar.

Then, in plenary sessions, delegates vote on those consent calendars. Some of those consent calendars could have as many as 20 items on them. Thousands of pieces of legislation could pass that way and never be discussed on the plenary floor.

“Generally, people trust that the legislative committees represent the whole body enough so that if two-thirds of a legislative committee supports something, then generally the whole conference would,” Kenaston said. “The same goes for voting against something — something that was not supported by a committee.”

If an item is not supported by a committee or if it narrowly passes through a committee, then that item could come to the plenary floor, where the whole body would vote on it, she explained.

One of those floor items could be regionalization.

What is regionalization?

Long before this General Conference, Kenaston was a proponent of regionalization, one of the conference’s major pieces of legislation. Now, as part of The Connectional Table, Kenaston is working to move regionalization legislation forward.

According to official language from The Connectional Table, “the regionalization proposal aims to address what many United Methodists see as a longstanding problem limiting the denomination’s missional effectiveness — namely that the church in the U.S. and the central conferences have unequal standing in decision-making.”

Under the proposed plan, there will be eight regions in four areas — Africa, Europe, Philippines and the U.S. — all possessing the same duties and powers to pass legislation for greater missional impact in their respective regions. It would create a region for each of the seven Central Conferences and one in the U.S., Kenaston explained.

“The goal is to empower each region to act more nimbly in reaching people for Christ — without waiting for General Conference, which typically meets every four years,” The Connectional Table states.

But what would that mean for the local church? Kenaston explained it this way:

“It would mean a change in how The United Methodist Church is structured, but it won’t necessarily affect people in the local church,” she said. “The purpose is to provide equity throughout the Church. And it’s really, really important.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that our church was established in the United States, so it’s designed like our government. There is a legislative, executive, and judicial branch,” she said.

When The United Methodist Church formed in 1968, only 10 percent of its members were outside the United States, she explained. That number has grown to closer to 50 percent, yet the Church remains dominated by U.S.-centric things. For instance, a Master’s of Divinity degree doesn’t exist in some parts of the world, yet The Book of Discipline refers to it.

Similar situations arise where The Book of Discipline discusses issues like trusts, property matters, and pensions. In 2012, Kenaston recalled, General Conference spent a day and a half talking about pension plans, and the Central Conference delegates (from Africa, Europe, and The Philippines) had to vote on it though they knew little to nothing about U.S. pensions and would not be impacted by the decision.

Though attempts have been made to adapt sections in The Book of Discipline to specific regions, it often proves difficult to impossible, Kenaston said. “Some words are just not adaptable.”

“So, it really wouldn’t affect the local church, but instead of everybody going to General Conference and talking about U.S. stuff, regional conferences could make those decisions earlier, then, the focus at General Conference could be more about mission and ministry. It would be shorter and more productive.”

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