There have been some references recently to the "Minutes" - praying
through the Districts. I wonder how many have noticed that in 2019
there was a change to Part IV: Useful addresses, with the final four
lists being omitted:
Lay Mission Partners Overseas;
Lay Officers, Chaplains and members of committees;
Methodists and related organisations;
Index to Circuits.
The last index is one I used fairly regularly so I queried this with our
Chairman. She suggested I e-mailed Jane Bates. I did this and got the
following reply last July:
"These changes have been made incrementally over the last two or three
years, with a fuller review last year which had to take into account the
implications of changes in the data protection law (GDPR, in
particular). This last meant that we were advised that we should not
include full postal addresses of lay members of committees. This year,
we will be including an e-mail contact (which will no longer be a
personal e-mail address) for all the chairs of the major connexional
committees, which I hope goes some way to addressing that point.
"The details of lay mission partners are available on the website, along
with the details of our partner churches around the world (at
https://www.methodist.org.uk/our-work/our-work-worldwide/global-relationships/our-world-parish-partner-churches-and-our-mission-partners/)
This enables the list to be kept up to date during the year, and for the
pages to be interactive.
"I'm afraid that the alphabetical list of circuits became very difficult
to manage and to keep updated each year in the light of the increasingly
complicated circuit mergers and changes. The decision was therefore made
that it was not as helpful as it should be and could indeed be
misleading and difficult to use.
"For data protection reasons, the Minutes are no longer available for
the general public to purchase, and we therefore continue to consider
what is most useful to ministers (particularly the Directory aspects of
it). It's very helpful to hear from you about those sections that you
have found useful in the past, and I will feed that into the ongoing
review."
So GDPR prevents showing details of Lay Officers, etc., but not
Presbyters and Deacons. And as for the index to Circuits, I find it
strange that some software and a database can't cope with "the
increasingly complicated circuit mergers and changes". I have not heard
any more since July. Maybe Tony, after sorting out our address list,
could advise the Connexion!! Has anyone else noticed these omissions?
Alan
