UMC Parental Leave

Parental Leave in The United Methodist Church

Paragraph 355 in the Book of Discipline

Parental leave is a workplace benefit that allows employees to take time off work to care for a newborn, adopted, or foster child. In the United Methodist Church, the parental leave policy outlined in paragraph 355 of the Book of Discipline guarantees paid leave for eight weeks, has been considered open to interpretation, and has not always applied equitably across the connection, since “one-fourth of year” is thirteen weeks. While the BOD might guarantee clergy better than a lot of secular employment does, it's still a huge gap in actually supporting families according to our UMC values. 

When the UMC first instituted an eight-week paid “maternity and paternity” leave policy, we were trail-blazing a path among mainline denominations. But over the last thirty years, other denominations have leap-frogged over the UMC in terms of what they provide for their clergy. The Presbyterian Church in the USA, for example, guarantees twelve weeks of paid parental leave. It’s time for the UMC to re-look at our parental leave policy for the next generation.

Join the movement

For the last few years, a grassroots movement of UMC clergy has been organizing to lead annual conferences in developing supplemental legislation that would close up loopholes in the Book of Discipline, expand financial support from the conference level, and encourage men to take parental leave. The General Commission on the Status and Role of Women is supporting this effort by collaborating through organizational support, planned trainings, and resources. We encourage you to be involved in the following ways:

1. Attend monthly group meetings — The grassroots team meets as a large group about once a month on Mondays. These are accountability check-ins and workshopping strategies for Phases 1-2. 
2. Work with your annual conference — Work specifically with your Annual Conference COSROW to get the model legislation passed. If there’s already a group in your annual conference working on this policy, this could mean speaking on the floor of the Annual Conference next year and lobbying with individual lay/clergy conference members.  
3. Help develop key messaging — We need people to read and contribute to the "Key Messages" that will be used in every annual conference. This can be done over email or there may be a small group that takes this on and meets at times other than Mondays. We will also be looking for stories and testimonies that demonstrate the difference that paid parental leave makes.