KC helped the United Methodist Church return the focus of its once-every-four-year legislative body to the church’s hopeful, aspiring mission, diffusing the expected rancor around the church’s debate over divisive contemporary social issues.
In early 2007, many UMC leaders feared its upcoming meeting of its governing body would suffer from rancor and negative news coverage because of ongoing and heated legislative debate on contemporary social issues. Because the UMC has been declining in numbers in North America for many years, church leaders believed that another General Conference defined by infighting over social issues such as homosexuality could have dire consequences for the denomination.
The church’s spiritual leaders crafted a global initiative about global leadership against poverty and disease in attempt to re-align the UMC with its mission and create a positive focus for the General Conference. At the same time, leaders respected that culturally, the General Conference is a leadership body that can not be scripted or managed.
The new initiative was global in its scope. To indicate the criticality of the initiative, leaders across the church overhauled some long-standing institutional norms and cultural practices in order to prepare the church to implement the global initiative. And the initiative represented a very focused return of the church to its heritage and stated mission.
United Methodist Communications contracted with KC to build awareness of and excitement around this new initiative in the year leading up to General Conference. The goal was shape news coverage, and both formal and informal conversation among United Methodists, about what the focus of General Conference would be.
In addition, KC was integral to a strategy to architect the opening day of General Conference, breaking traditions and rules that had been 40 years in the making. The purpose was to convince the delegates that the new initiative was a great and disruptive new source of hope for the church, and thus they should feel hope that the two-week congress could be conciliatory and constructive.
Results
The strategy overwhelmingly worked. By the time the General Conference arrived, op-eds and blog posts from a range of authors about the new initiative had appeared across the universe of UMC communications channels. The keynote speakers of the opening day of General Conference, including the top spiritual leaders and administrators of the church, had come to view KC as an invaluable resource, relying on KC daily at the highest levels for speech-writing, editing, presentation coaching, and guidance on multi-media support.
The opening day was an orchestrated affair, dramatically departing from previous General Conferences, and one that risked alienating the delegation because of the degree to which its messages were coordinated. Instead, applause and standing ovations dominated the day, and anecdotal reports poured in that the delegates were inspired.
At the close of the two-week event, a third-party researcher found that delegates reported hope and unity as their dominant impressions of General Conference. The study found that delegates continue to be concerned about the church’s philosophical divides, no surprise. But the delegates reported that the new initiative is moving the church into the urgent work it is called to do.