By Greg Garrison
The two bishops who oversaw a historic mass exodus of United Methodist churches disaffiliating in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle the past few years are moving on.
In their place will be one new bishop who will oversee the entire state, plus the Florida Panhandle.
Bishop Jonathan Holston, who currently serves the South Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, will move to Alabama to lead the North Alabama and Alabama-West Florida Conferences, effective Sept. 1.
Holston, who is Black, was elected a bishop in 2012. Although he will be the first Black United Methodist bishop leading the North Alabama Conference, he won’t be the first for the state. Bishop William Morris led the Alabama-West Florida Conference from 1992-2000. Morris, who died in 2016, made news in 1998 when he was one of the clergy who officiated the funeral of former Gov. George Wallace, who was a United Methodist.
Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, currently head of the North Alabama Conference, will keep a smaller conference she also oversaw called Holston in Tennessee. She’ll also oversee the West Virginia conference.
Bishop David Graves, currently head of the Alabama-West Florida Conference, will oversee the Kentucky-Tennessee Conference, taking over for Bishop Bill McAlilly, who is retiring after recovering last year from a near fatal car accident.
Graves’ tenure has been especially controversial, as churches launched several lawsuits accusing him of not allowing them to leave the Alabama-West Florida Conference. Two of the lawsuits made it to the Alabama Supreme Court. In one case, a group of 44 churches that sued the Alabama-West Florida Conference were told by the Supreme Court that they would have to pursue their cases through the church courts, not civil courts. In another case, the state’s high court ruled that Harvest Church in Dothan did have the right to have its case heard in civil courts. This month, a 114-year-old church in Bay Minette sued, asking the court to declare that the church property belongs to the congregation, not the denomination.
Bishop Holston will take over the two conferences that Wallace-Padgett and Graves oversaw.
The assignments for the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church were announced July 11 at the regional meeting at Lake Junaluska, N.C.
