An Alabama attorney and former judge who served as a top woman lay leader for the United Methodist Church and played a highly visible role at this year’s controversial General Conference in Charlotte, has announced she’s stepping down.

Dawn Wiggins Hare, general secretary of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women of the United Methodist Church, has announced she will retire in January 2025.

Hare, 67, a former circuit judge in Monroeville, has served 12 years in the denominational agency CEO-style post, the maximum allowed.

She was recruited into church leadership by Monroeville attorney Alice Lee, sister of Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Hare was friends with both Alice, who died in 2014 at age 103; and Nelle Harper Lee, who died in 2016 at 89.

“Nelle was a friend, but Alice was the one that was really close, and my mentor,” Hare said in an interview this week with AL.com.

Alice Lee was a longtime attorney in Monroeville and childhood friends with fellow attorney Nicholas Hare. Wiggins Hare married Hare’s son, Chip Hare, also a lawyer.

“My relationship with Nelle Harper was one of deep respect, because she knew how close Alice and I were,” Hare said. “She and Nelle Harper both loved Chip, loved his dad. Miss Alice and Chip walked to elementary school together.”

There is a Press-Register picture of Hare sitting between Alice and Nelle in 2006 at Alice’s 95th birthday party. The three were all members of Monroeville First United Methodist Church.

Alice, who had been a General Conference delegate, encouraged Dawn to take on a church leadership role and become a General Conference delegate herself. “She got her eye on me,” Hare said.

Hare drew a lot of attention during this year’s historic General Conference in Charlotte, when a new practice began of speakers stating their race, gender and preferred pronouns when they approached a microphone.

“We did ask that, but it was voluntary,” Hare said.

Hare advised delegates to avoid “exclusively male language for God,” and helped give daily updates on gender and racial inclusion, scolding the conference if too many white men spoke during meetings or were elected to legislative committees.

“The rules of General Conference are that when you go to a microphone, you’re supposed to identify yourself by your name, your annual conference and your status, clergy or lay,” she said.

Adding gender and race to that helped track fairness, she said.

“That would greatly aid our work in being able to collect that data and report it back to them, so there could be some self-analysis on ‘Are there too many white women speaking?’” she said. “There would be that moment of reflection of, ‘Maybe what I have to say is important, and maybe I should sit on my hands and let everybody else speak, because everybody going to the microphone looks like me.’”

One conservative social media account, “Woke Preacher Clips” on X, dubbed her the “PC (politically correct) hall monitor” for the United Methodist General Conference. There was even some skepticism among delegates at the General Conference, and at one point a bishop chairing the conference was accused of misgendering a non-binary speaker.

“We realize the awkwardness of this, including the time it eats into people’s comments, and that’s not great,” Hare said in the interview. “You try so hard to be culturally sensitive, and you’re going to make mistakes, but you just do your best and ask for grace and try to have a spirit of love.”

In the future, asking for ethnicity and gender and other information in registration would work better, she said.

“Including women in leadership, including women in different roles, has been tumultuous for years,” she said. “It didn’t just start when I got there.”

The effort to increase awareness of fairness mostly worked well, with participation some days basically equal by gender, she said.

“Backslid is a Baptist term, not a Methodist term, but there was some backsliding,” she said. “One of the days we reported the number of men coming to the microphone was 77 percent. ‘Okay, friends, let’s be aware.’”

The key question, she said, was “Are we empowering everyone to speak at the table? All the voices?”

Hare was a key United Methodist leader during a time when the denomination went from a ban on same-sex marriage to endorsing it, along with officially welcoming LGBTQ clergy.

She praised the conference after the votes to allow same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ clergy.

“You did good work, very good work, yesterday in our journey towards full inclusion,” Hare said during the conference. “You indeed set the table wider and pulled up some extra chairs.”

Hare has also been an outspoken lay leader in the Alabama-West Florida Conference, as it struggled to handle churches that wanted to leave the denomination over changing standards and beliefs on human sexuality.

A judicial court of the United Methodist Church will take up the issue of clarifying how Alabama churches that want to leave may still be allowed to depart the denomination.

More than 40 churches have been involved in lawsuits as they were denied in their attempts to leave the denomination and take their property with them. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that those churches would have to take their case to the church’s court, not state courts.

Guy’s Chapel, a 114-year-old church in Bay Minette, last month sued the Alabama-West Florida Conference in an effort to leave. Hare declined comment on those cases.

“It’s not that it’s not important to me,” she said. “I just don’t want to weigh in on those local legal issues.”

Statewide in Alabama, more than half of United Methodist congregations disaffiliated – about 555 churches. Most of those departures have taken place since 2022. Nationwide, 7,600 churches, about a quarter of the denomination, left.

Those who were disaffiliating were making a decision that Alice Lee might have frowned upon, she suggested.

“Miss Alice’s idea of when you join the United Methodist Church, it was like a marital covenant,” Hare said. “You promised to uphold the church with your time, your talents, your service and your gifts. It just takes a lot to even consider breaking that covenant.”