05/24/2026
What A Role Model
Bishop Scott Jones inherited a tradition, fought to hold it together, and when he could not, went and built something new. He turns 72 today. He is nowhere near done.
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He was born into the church the way some people are born into a country not by choice but by blood, shaped before he was old enough to question it. His great-grandfather preached. His grandfather preached. His father rose to lead two of Methodism’s most important seminaries. His younger brother followed their father into one of those very same deanships. Scott Jones, carrying the weight and the wonder of all that inheritance, became a bishop, an author of eleven books, a seminary professor, and eventually one of the founding episcopal leaders of a denomination that did not exist five years ago.
Today, May 23, he turns 72. He has seven grandchildren and a church that is still very much under construction. If you were expecting a man who has earned the right to slow down, you have not been paying attention.
Scott Jameson Jones does not slow down. He rides. In a generation starving for leaders worth following, he is something rarer than a bishop. He is a role model.
“I’ve been praying for the renewal of Methodism since 1988. I’m now living it. What a blessing it is.”
The Inheritance
Scott Jones was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 23, 1954, and grew up in a household where the ministry was simply what the men did. His father, S. Jameson Jones Jr., was a preacher who became president of Iliff School of Theology in Denver and then dean of Duke Divinity School. His younger brother, L. Gregory Jones, would go on to hold that same deanship at Duke before becoming president of Belmont University. The family name, as retired bishop Will Willimon of Duke Divinity School has put it, belongs to “truly one of the first families of Methodism.”
Scott grew up in a pastor’s household that moved constantly (Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Colorado) which perhaps explains why stillness has never quite suited him. He sensed his calling at sixteen on a mission trip in Tampa, Florida, though his earliest instincts were more social than theological. He thought the church was primarily a vehicle for change in the world. Then he got to seminary and met John Wesley, and everything shifted.
He went from his master’s degree directly into a doctoral program at Southern Methodist University, writing a dissertation on Wesley’s understanding of scripture. It took him eleven years, partly because he loved being a pastor too much to sit still long enough to finish it. He served churches in small-town Texas during those years, and the congregation came first. It was his wife, Mary Lou, who eventually pushed him back to the desk. She has always known when the important thing needs to get done.
The dissertation became a book. The book led to a faculty position at Perkins School of Theology as the McCreless Associate Professor of Evangelism. The faculty position became eleven books total, a career of teaching future pastors what it actually means to be Wesleyan, and a major scholarly work, “United Methodist Doctrine: The Extreme Center” that became a seminary textbook across the country. The phrase came from The Economist, which used it to describe a position progressive in some respects, conservative in others, and completely immune to institutional inertia. Jones adopted it because it described what he loved most about Wesleyan Christianity: the refusal to choose between false alternatives, the insistence on holding justification and sanctification together, evangelism and justice together, the ancient faith and the living mission together.
The Woman Who Builds Bridges
Mary Lou Reece Jones spent thirty-five years as a highway contractor. She has built real, concrete bridges, the kind you drive across without thinking about who designed them or who made sure the rebar held. Her husband has spent his career building metaphorical ones, and the symmetry has not been lost on either of them.
When Jones talks about what it is like to plant a new denomination from scratch (the improvisation, the uncertainty, the strange act of building something while you are standing on it ) it is always her language he reaches for. She once told him that building a bridge is a real thing: you pour a segment, move your equipment out onto it, and then pour the next one. You never have the whole bridge before you start. You just have to trust the engineering and keep going.
She has also been beside him in every chapter of this one. When Jones travels to difficult places (and he has traveled to genuinely difficult places in these years ) Mary Lou goes too. She is not a woman who stays home when things get hard. She never has been.
They have three children, seven grandchildren, and a home in Dallas. The grandchildren matter to him in a way that is pastoral, not merely personal. He is not building a church for a legacy or a record. He is building something he hopes will still be standing when the youngest of those seven is old enough to be shaped by it.
“Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?” - John Wesley, the standard Jones carried for two decades across the widening divide
Staying at the Table
Jones was elected a bishop in 2004 and served episcopal areas in Kansas, the Great Plains, and Texas for nearly two decades. Those were also the years when the denomination he served was pulling apart at the seams. Slowly at first, then all at once. The fault lines were doctrinal and deep, and every annual conference became a kind of renegotiation of what the church was and who got to decide.
Through all of it, Jones kept preaching the same thing: stay at the table. He wrote a book with that title. He convened conversations between parties who could barely be civil. He pointed everyone, repeatedly, toward Wesley’s own words, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?” He believed it. He still believes it. The difference is that he eventually accepted, with clear eyes and genuine grief, that the institution he was trying to hold together had already decided otherwise.
“These doctrinal and moral disobedience questions have made it hard to keep the idea that we really are a church following the same discipline,” he said publicly in early 2023. He said it without bitterness which is the thing that strikes you most about him. In a season when so many people on every side of the Methodist divide have allowed their pain to curdle into contempt, Jones has managed to grieve what was lost without hating the people who lost it with him. That is what a role model actually looks like…not someone who never breaks, but someone who breaks without ever losing their grace.
Nine Days
He retired from his former denomination on December 31, 2022. Nine days later, on January 9, 2023, he joined the Global Methodist Church as an elder and was recognized as a bishop. The Transitional Leadership Council welcomed him with open arms and called him “a tremendous blessing.” His critics called the timing convenient. His supporters called it inevitable.
Whatever you make of the nine days, what followed them is harder to dispute. He joined Bishop Mark Webb as one of two active bishops overseeing a denomination with no general agencies, a provisional book of discipline, and roughly 1,100 congregations scattered across the country and beyond. They divided the world between them. Jones took thirteen conferences.
He held eight annual conferences in his first eight weeks. He has since ordained more than a thousand clergy. He signs every certificate by hand. The gold seal is pressed by himself and Mary Lou together, at a table in Dallas, with no secretary and no buffer between the bishop and the act of blessing. For a man who once managed seventeen district superintendents and a full professional conference staff, there is something quietly radical about the simplicity of that image.
“We’re building this bridge as we walk on it.”
Airline Instead of a Horse
Jones’ model for what a bishop should be comes from the eighteenth century. Francis Asbury, the founding bishop of American Methodism, never owned a home, never married, and spent every year of his ministry in motion up the Eastern Seaboard in the spring, back down the other side in the fall, holding annual conferences, ordaining clergy, and lighting fires in every direction. He held eight annual conferences in 1811 alone. He was present everywhere and resident nowhere.
Jones has named Asbury as his primary model, noting one difference, he has American Airlines instead of a horse. He also has a wife, a home in Dallas, and seven grandchildren who are presumably glad he does not have to sleep in a barn.
The comparison is not merely nostalgic. Jones believes that the residential bishop model (the version where a bishop is essentially a regional executive, managing staff and budgets and annual conference machinery) is a relatively recent invention, one that turned shepherds into administrators and cost the church something important. The traveling bishop is, by contrast, a theological leader whose authority comes from presence and relationship rather than organizational position. That is the kind of bishop he has tried to be in the Global Methodist Church. That is the kind of church he has tried to help build.
As Wide as the World
In early 2026, Jones traveled to Kenya after discovering that forty Methodist congregations (many of them communities of displaced people living in camps that house more than 200,000) wanted to join the Global Methodist Church. He went to meet them.
Think about what that means for a moment. A 72-year-old bishop, months away from receiving the title of Bishop Emeritus, boarding a flight not to a conference center in Nashville or Atlanta but to one of the most remote and difficult corners of the earth to sit with Christians who have lost nearly everything and still want to worship, still want to belong to something larger than their suffering, still want to be Methodist.
He did not send a representative. He did not schedule a Zoom call. He went.
That is the Asburian impulse made flesh in the twenty-first century. Asbury rode to where the people were. Jones flies. The horse is different. The bishop is the same.
The Global Methodist Church, in Jones’s vision, was never meant to be an American institution that happened to have international affiliates. It was always meant to be exactly what its name says, “global”, from the ground up, from Dallas to the Nile, from the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg to a refugee camp in Kenya. He has spent three and a half years trying to build it that way. The congregations along the Nile are his proof that he meant it.
Johannesburg
This August, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Global Methodist Church will hold its first General Conference on African soil. The denomination insisting, in the location of its very first gathering on the continent, that it means what it says about being global. Eight new bishops will be elected and consecrated, each serving six-year terms. Scott Jones will not be among them. He is not seeking re-election. At General Conference 2026, he will receive the title of Bishop Emeritus.
It is a good word for this moment. Emeritus. From the Latin for one who has served, and who has served well.
“It’s exciting to be in a community of people who are focused on worshipping passionately, loving extravagantly, and witnessing boldly. I love that mission statement and look forward to being a part of it.”
Here is what we want to say to Bishop Scott Jones on his birthday.
Thank you for not giving up on the idea that the church can be extraordinary. Thank you for writing eleven books about Wesley when you could have written none. Thank you for the eleven years it took to finish the dissertation because the fact that you loved being a pastor more than you loved being a scholar tells us everything we need to know about the kind of bishop you became. Thank you for meaning it when you said stay at the table, and for being honest when the table was gone. Thank you for getting on the plane to Kenya. Thank you for pressing the gold seal with Mary Lou.
The Global Methodist Church is young and still finding its shape. The thousand ministers you have ordained are just beginning. The grandchildren are still growing. There is more road ahead than most people realize, and a great deal of it would not exist without you.
Happy birthday, Bishop Scott. What a role model.
