Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett said Friday she was involved in a serious car crash recently, and it gave her a better perspective on surviving the split in the United Methodist denomination.
Giving her state of the North Alabama Conference address on Friday at its annual meeting in Huntsville, Wallace-Padgett said that on May 8, she was riding with her husband, Lee Padgett, who was driving through Chattanooga on the interstate.
Going about 70 mph in their red Prius, they were hit from behind by an 18-wheeler, which then sideswiped them. She said her husband worried the car might flip, but instead they were able to pull off the interstate and come to a stop on a grassy area. She shared a slide with pictures of the of the wrecked Prius.
“Our Prius was totaled,” Wallace-Padgett said. “But we were unscathed.”
Two good Samaritans stopped to help, including an off-duty police officer going the other direction who came back to help, she said. A woman also stopped, and when Wallace-Padgett got out of the car, the woman said, “That’s my bishop!”
The woman was a pastor in the Holston Conference in Tennessee, which Wallace-Padget also supervises. The bishop joked that she has now assigned the woman as pastor of the largest church in the conference. “Not really,” she said.
The near-disastrous wreck gave her a new perspective, Wallace-Padgett said.
“I now look at life in a little different way,” she said, thinking “how precious it is and how quickly it can change.”
She said the same has happened as she dealt with the disaffiliation of 330 churches from the North Alabama Conference over the past year – leaving 305 churches.
“It’s been hard but we’ve come through that with grace and strength,” she said. “It has impacted our perspective.”
More than a quarter of all clergy in the conference, active and retired, have left over the past year as part of the disaffiliations, she said.
“Our focus is not on budgets or buildings or statistics, but it is on discipleship and passionate spiritual disciples and passionate spiritual leaders,” Wallace-Padgett said. “That’s who we are as a church. That’s what we are focusing on.”
In the conference budget report on Thursday, it was revealed that the 2023 budget of $9,647,931 had to be slashed by 35 percent, about $2.3 million, to adjust for the impact of disaffiliating churches.
The 2024 budget will be $5,867,368, to account for an additional projected loss of $755,000 due to continued disaffiliations.
The number of district superintendents, who supervise regional areas, will be reduced from seven to four superintendents, supervising eight districts.
Those remaining in the North Alabama Conference are called to pursue a “deeper relationship with God and other people,” Wallace-Padgett said.
“All is well,” she said. “The savior we follow and serve is risen from the dead.”
Later on Friday, the North Alabama Conference approved a resolution calling for the next General Conference to remove language from the Book of Discipline that calls homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching” and bans same-sex marriage and ordainly openly gay clergy.
