(RNS) — When the Rev. Carieta Cain-Grizzell reached age 75, she had expected to retire after a lifetime as an African Methodist Episcopal Church member who became a pastor of several of its churches.
Instead, the Washington, D.C., native-turned-Californian is now “on loan” to the United Methodist Church, first pastoring a Fair Oaks congregation and recently appointed to one in Oakland.
“Pastoring is my ministry,” said Cain-Grizzell, whose lineage in the historically Black AME denomination traces back five generations. “It was something that I wanted to do,
although I had to do it even if I didn’t want to do it.”
Cain-Grizzell is one of thousands of pastors, elders and staffers of the AME Church who lost substantial portions of their retirement savings due to an alleged mishandling of the accounts. A class action lawsuit filed in 2022 against the church calculated the total loss at $90 million. As of Wednesday (Aug.21), church leadership has not revealed a clear path to restore the funds.
As the AME Church opened its weeklong quadrennial General Conference on Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, people like Cain-Grizzell questioned how the fallout from the financial crisis might be addressed at the meeting, which concludes on Aug. 28.
In the first business session of the conference, the church’s general counsel gave an update on the investigations and litigation related to the “legacy retirement plan” and there was an “intense debate” between two bishops as the Department of Retirement Services was discussed, reported The Christian Recorder, the church’s official publication.
Douglass Selby, the church’s attorney, said the church has been treated as a victim rather than a subject of investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“The AME Church is objectively in a much stronger position in liability than 12 months ago,” he said, according to The Christian Recorder.
The bishops debated how money might be restored to plan participants, with one seeking a route that did not increase the denomination’s debts and another aiming to protect its legal strategies, the newspaper reported.
A third bishop, who co-chairs the retirement services commission, said plan participants who have expressed concerns would have a first-time “full briefing” in an Aug. 30 webinar.
As of Thursday, 2,100 delegates were attending the gathering of the denomination that dates to 1816.
At the opening worship service, the litany on the meeting’s theme — “The Pandemics, The Promise, The Plan” — spoke of division in the AME Church’s ranks.
Bishops process in during the opening of the African Methodist Episcopal Church quadrennial General Conference on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio. (Video screen grab)
“We confess that our fellowship has been fractured,” read Bishop E. Anne Henning Byfield. “Some feel betrayed and injured, a circumstance with the potential to tear us apart, fragmented and feeble. Was the Vision given to our venerable founder merely myopic?”
The response in the litany for other worshippers was: “A thousand afflictions to vex our souls, yet we are the Church, we are called to Hope.”
Later on the first day of the General Conference, the church’s AME bishops released their quadrennial episcopal address, a summation and commentary on what had occurred within and outside the denomination since their last meeting — including the retirement issues.
