Organization
The basic governmental structure of the UPCI is congregational. Local churches are autonomous, electing their own pastors and other leaders, owning their own property, deciding their own budgets, establishing their membership, and conducting all necessary local business. The central organization embraces a modified presbyterian system: ministers meet in sectional, district, and general conferences to elect officers and to conduct the church's affairs. The annual General Conference is the highest authority in the UPCI, with power to determine articles of faith, elect officers and determine policy. A General Superintendent is elected to preside over the church as a whole. On October 1, 2009, Dr. David K. Bernard was announced as the new General Superintendent.
Ministers at all levels are allowed to marry and have children, but homosexuality is forbidden.
According to the UPCI, in the United States and Canada it has grown from 521 member churches in 1946 to 4,305 churches in 2011, with 9,193 ministers. The UPCI has a presence in 193 other nations with 34,133 licensed ministers, 19,686 churches and meeting places, 748 missionaries, and a foreign membership of about 2.2 million. Total worldwide membership, including North America, is estimated at 3,000,000.
Read more about this topic: United Pentecostal Church International
Famous quotes containing the word organization:
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“... every woman’s organization recognizes that reformers are far more common than feminists, that the passion to look after your fellow man, and especially woman, to do good to her in your way is far more common than the desire to put into every one’s hand the power to look after themselves.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)