UMC General Conference with Mae Forrest Barnes

Welcome to the season finale of Queer PoliFaith! And do we have a special episode for you! Our guest today is Mae Forrest Barnes, who you may remember from our conversation about Dignitas Infinita in July. As I promised then, she is back on to talk about the 2020/2024 General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC). Mae Forrest Barnes is a theologian and PhD candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Her area of focus is in disability studies, science, bioethics, and gender studies. She is a former United Methodist pastor, now laity in the Episcopal Church, and is looking forward to finishing her doctorate so that she can become a professor of theology and ethics. She loves writing about numerous topics, including pop culture, literature, and more, which can be found on her blog on Substack, or on Twitter @dr_maeforrest.   Mae starts us off by giving us some background about the governance of the UMC and what the General Conference is. Then she gets into some of the events that led up to this particular General Conference and to the formation of the Global Methodist Church. After that, she tells us about some of the important items that were agreed to in the General Conference.   I found the whole conversation to be fun and utterly fascinating. As I said in the podcast, I did not grow up with church governance like this, so I mostly just sit back and listen to Professor Mae.   We will be back with season 4 in late January or early February. Please keep an eye on social media for announcements about topics and when we will return.   As always, please rate and review the podcast on whatever platform you listen to it on. You can follow the podcast on Instagram or Threads (@queerpolifaith). You can also send questions or comments to [email protected].   Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.