A paragraph-by-paragraph reference to the constitutional amendment on regionalization (Petition 21039) adopted by the 2020/2024 General Conference of The United Methodist Church and certified as ratified on 5 November 2025.
The existing public explainers describe the change without showing the instrument. This site shows the instrument: every paragraph the amendment touches, the text before and after, and a generated word-level diff where the paragraph was edited rather than replaced.
Astro 5, no runtime dependencies, static output. Same stack, tokens, and
editorial posture as ~/denominations — the two are sibling
reference sites and should stay visually identical.
pnpm install
pnpm run extract # regenerate src/content/paragraphs/ from sources/
pnpm run dev
pnpm run check # astro check — must be 0 errors
pnpm run predeploy # clean build + dist gate
src/content/paragraphs/*.yaml is written by scripts/extract-amendments.py
from the archived ballot PDF and the 2024 Book of Discipline. Do not hand-edit
the text fields — they are overwritten on every extract. Only summary and
whatChanged are editorial, and the extractor currently clears the directory on
each run, so move any authored prose out before re-extracting.
The extractor asserts rather than assumes. It will exit non-zero if the ballot's declared scope stops matching what it parses, if Roman article numbers shear, if a running head leaks into the prose, or if an enumerated list has a gap with no ellipsis in the source. Each of those guards was added because it caught a real defect.
The ballot papers and the 2024 Book of Discipline use different paragraph
numbers — the ballot runs one behind, because Article VI on gender justice was
inserted at ¶6 by an amendment ratified in 2019 and shifted everything after it.
MAPPING.md records the full old-to-new table, how the offset was derived, and
the three paragraphs whose article numbers legitimately do not line up.
This site uses Discipline numbers in URLs and headings, and shows the ballot number alongside on every paragraph page.
Inherited from ~/denominations/CONVENTIONS.md:
- Describe, don't promote. Regionalization is contested. Where a provision is disputed, state the strongest version of the objection and the rationale, and adjudicate neither.
- Cite the instrument, not the vibe — "¶32.5(a), as amended by Petition 21039".
- Coverage honesty. A missing summary renders as a stated gap, not as
silence. The provisional status of the text is on
/sourcesand gated incheck-dist.sh. - The post-ratification text here is the ballot text. No official reprinting of the amended Constitution has been located. If one appears, correct against it and drop the provisional notice.
- Vercel project on the Labs team, DNS-only record at Cloudflare.
- Send the Publishing House a note describing the scope of quotation (see
src/pages/rights.astro). Not a blocker; the fair-use posture stands.
src/editorial/summaries.ts holds the per-paragraph summary and whatChanged,
keyed by Discipline number. It lives outside src/content/paragraphs/
because the extractor clears that directory on every run. A build-time gate
fails on a missing entry or an orphaned one, so the set cannot drift out of sync
with the corpus.
GAPS.md records the survey of published explainers this was written against —
what they claim, what checks out, and what they leave unexplained. Read it before
revising the summaries; several of them are deliberately answering a specific
public gap.
scripts/emit-church-documents.py writes the corpus into ~/church-documents as
umc-constitutional-amendments-2024, from the same generated YAML the site
renders, so the two cannot drift. Re-run it after any re-extract.
It deliberately does not patch bod-2024.json. That file is a faithful parse
of the printed 2020/2024 edition, which genuinely still reads the pre-amendment
way, and being able to cite the printed book is worth keeping. Instead the
manifest entry for bod-2024 is flagged superseded in part, and consumers overlay
the amendment document. bod-2024 ¶¶10–62 are stale; ¶¶1–9 are unaffected.