The spring meeting of the North Carolina Conference Historical Society and Commission on Archives & History will take place on Saturday, April 9, 2022, at the NCC United Methodist Conference Building in Garner, NC.
The Society will meet at 10:00 am and adjourn for lunch at noon. The Commission will meet after lunch. Our speaker will be Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff, General Secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History of the UMC. In this role, she ensures that the UMC understands its past in order to envision a more equitable future for all Methodists. Dreff earned her PhD from Drew Theological School’s Graduate Division of Religion, specializing in both Methodist/Wesleyan Studies and Women’s/Gender Studies. She earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, specializing in American Religious History. She has previously worked as staff at the General Commission on Archives and History (2012-2014) and the Connectional Table of The United Methodist Church (2014-2016). She was the Director of United Methodist Studies and Assistant Professor Christian History at Hood Theological Seminary (Salisbury, NC), an AME Zion Seminary, from 2017-2019 and was the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at High Point University (High Point, NC) from 2019-2020. Dreff is a lay member of the Arkansas Annual Conference and the daughter of two ordained United Methodist ministers. Her Methodist lineage dates beyond this, back to the early 19th century when her great-great-great grandfathers were Methodist circuit-riders. She is the author of Nevertheless: American Methodists and Women’s Rights (2020) and Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality (2018).
The focus will be on the proposed split in the UMC that will be voted on at the next General Conference of the UMC and how the General Commission plans to handle the split if approved and maintain our United Methodist and the archives for a possible new Methodist denomination.