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Fassett plans to leave Board of Church and Society Nov. 1


From NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>
Date 21 Feb 2000 13:38:10

Feb. 21, 2000	News media contact: Joretta Purdue·(202)546-8722·Washington
10-21-34-71B{086}

WASHINGTON (UMNS) - The top staff executive of the United Methodist Church's
social action and advocacy agency will leave office Nov. 1.

The Rev. Thom White Wolf Fassett, general secretary of the Board of Church
and Society, has announced that he will have completed his term in office
under the church's 12-year limitation rule for elected agency staff.
Governing members of the board had asked Fassett to remain until July 2001,
but he announced he will be taking an appointment in the church's New York
West Area this fall.

Elected program agency staff are barred from serving more than 12 years in
the same position. The clock for Fassett began ticking on Jan. 1, 1989. The
denomination's Book of Discipline further provides that the agency
responsible for electing staff may annually suspend the rule by a two-thirds
ballot vote. In the denomination, general secretaries, deputy general
secretaries and associate general secretaries are elected.  Fassett is one
of several senior administrators in the denomination facing the 12-year
rule.  

Bishop Charles Wesley Jordan of the Iowa Area, president of the board, will
be appointing a committee to conduct a search for a new executive.

Fassett, 59, became general secretary in 1988. Previously, he had been an
associate general secretary with various duties from 1976 until 1983,
including a stint as acting general secretary in 1980. In 1983, he became
the superintendent of the Alaska Missionary Conference. He remained in that
office until he returned to the Board of Church and Society as general
secretary.

In recent years, Fassett has traveled on several human rights-related
missions, including a peace mission with President Clinton to Northern
Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In 1999, he was part of a team that
spent seven hours negotiating religious freedom issues in Cuba with Fidel
Castro. In 1998, he led an interfaith, nongovernmental organization
delegation to witness the visit of the U.N. rapporteur on religious
intolerance appointed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to confer with
the Dineh (Navajo) in Black Mesa, Ariz., about their land-rights dispute
with the Hopi and the U.S. government.     

"November is nine months away," Fassett wrote in a memo to board members,
"and I expect we will give birth to many creative and exciting programs
during that time even as we nurture the ministries in which we are now
engaged."  

Fassett has been endorsed for the episcopacy by both the Troy Annual
Conference and the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference. If elected a
bishop at jurisdictional conference in July, his term would begin Sept. 1
with those of other active bishops.

Fassett, a member of the Western New York Annual (regional) Conference, was
ordained a deacon in 1965 and an elder in 1967. He began his ministry as a
supply pastor to Stafford (N.Y.) Methodist Church in 1964 while he was a
high school English teacher in Batavia, N.Y. He subsequently served churches
in Medina and Rochester, N.Y., before becoming the founding minister of the
Metropolitan/Urban Mission of the United Methodist Church in Rochester.

Fassett's career also has included working as a special assistant to the
American Indian Policy Review Commission of the United States Senate and
House of Representatives in the mid-'70s, and serving as an urban affairs
officer for Xerox Corp. He has been an adjunct faculty member at several
theological schools.

Recipient of an honorary doctorate from American University in 1994, Fassett
earned a bachelor of arts from Roberts Wesleyan College and both bachelor
and master of divinity degrees from Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

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*************************************
United Methodist News Service
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