| Conference leads church in diversity By Erik Alsgaard UMConnection staff The Baltimore-Washington Conference leads The United Methodist Church in the United States in the racial and ethnic diversity of its membership, according to a newsletter published in December by the Office of Research at the General Board of Global Ministries. As a conference, Baltimore-Washington showed 19.9 percent of its membership was African American, 0.1 percent was Native American, 0.6 percent was Asian, and 0.2 percent was Hispanic. Numbers used in the report on church membership were taken from 2000, the most recent year for which figures were available. The conference reported 207,956 members at the close of 2000. The general population within the conference boundaries by comparison, was 32.5 percent African American, 0.6 percent Native American, 4.5 percent Asian, and 4.9 percent Hispanic. Those numbers were taken from 2001, and based on a population of 5,614,327. According to the Rev. John Southwick, editor of the newsletter, Background Data for Mission, the message is clear. The United Methodist Church membership does not come close to reflecting the general population, except in those cases where the general population has little racial and ethnic diversity, he said. The conferences most closely resembling their population, he said, were West Virginia, Wyoming (which includes a portion of New York and Pennsylvania), Holston (which includes parts of Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia), Iowa and Central Pennsylvania. Those with the largest gap between their membership and the general population are New Mexico (which includes parts of western Texas), Southwest Texas, and California-Pacific. After the Baltimore-Washington Conference, the next most diverse conference is South Carolina (a total of 20 percent), California-Nevada (19.2), and Mississippi (17.9). The least diverse, according to Southwick, were Wyoming (0.3), the Dakotas (which includes both North and South Dakota (0.3), and Central Pennsylvania (0.4). General population numbers for Annual Conferences are not all exact, Southwick said, because some boundaries are not clear. Those conferences which follow state and county boundaries precisely are easier to determine than those which do not. Rio Grande, Oklahoma Indian and Red Bird are not included in this report, he noted, because they do not have well-defined boundaries, and in the first two cases, have boundaries that overlap other annual conferences. Southwick added that there are various shortcomings in the reporting process for such a project as this. Churches often make little effort to be accurate in reporting racial or ethnic membership, he said. In fact, seven annual conferences do not report any race or ethnic membership numbers. The Baltimore-Washington Conference has been gathering racial and ethnic membership information for at least the last 15 years, according to conference treasurer, the Rev. Jim Knowles-Tuell. He said that in addition to the categories used in the boards study, Baltimore-Washington identifies Pacific Islander as a race and uses Other for people of mixed racial backgrounds. Those people comprise about one-tenth of one percent of conference membership, he said. Another factor in the reporting, Southwick added: missions and new church starts are not included in the final membership totals. This affects the Hispanic reporting in particular, he said. | 
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