by Tom Raabe
The window that opened in 2019 to allow United Methodist churches to depart their embattled denomination closes in a week or so, at the end of the year, and at this late hour, approximately one-fourth of the member churches that constitute Protestantism’s second-largest denomination have climbed through that window.
In the largest U.S. church schism since Civil War times, nearly 7,700 churches of the roughly 30,000 in the United Methodist Church (UMC) have voted to take their property and go elsewhere.
The issue of contention in the 19th century was slavery. Today, in the UMC, it’s LGBTQ-related issues. Liberals have been defying denominational rules banning same-sex marriages and the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals,” and conservatives have been taking advantage of a temporary rule passed in 2019 that allows their congregations to vote on whether to leave, taking their property and buildings with them.
The number of leavers is greater than expected — Methodist insider Mark Tooley earlier this year put the low-ball number at 3,000 leavers, with an upper limit of 5,000. In actuality, a massive rush for the door by 5,642 departing congregations in 2023, the last year the deal is in effect, brings the current total to 7,659.
How Things Got to This Point
The UMC, as a church body, has resisted the tsunami of LGBTQ fervor that has swept through the rest of liberal Protestantism. Indeed, it has endorsed at every general convention since its initially passing in 1972 a stricture in the denomination’s Book of Discipline that declared the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
The vote at its most recent conclave, a special session of the General Conference in 2019, was more nail-biter than previous totals, however, as the group upheld, by a 438–384 count — that is, by a mere 54 votes — the church’s ban on same-sex marriage and “self-avowed practicing” gay clergy. Buoying the conservative tally was the presence of a sizable African contingent who, as a group, hew to much more traditional views regarding marriage and sexual issues.
Not content to abide by the vote, many progressive UMC clergy and higher-ups vowed to bless same-sex marriages and install gay clergy in their conferences anyway, the Book of Discipline be damned.
In an effort to preclude the inevitable metaphorical bloodletting, a coalition of Methodist power brokers fashioned a compromise proposal in late 2019, to be voted on at the 2020 General Convention, that would allow churches wanting to depart the denomination to do so.
COVID destroyed that proposal, as the 2020 convention at which it was to be taken up was canceled, as was another conclave two years later, and another one after that — both due to COVID — throwing the issue out to the 2024 General Convention.
Impatient at the delay, conservatives seized on a temporary provision installed in the Book of Discipline in 2019 allowing conferences and congregations to exit the church body while retaining their property. This temporary proviso, rule 2553, expires on Dec. 31, 2023, and stipulates that a congregation must convince a two-thirds majority of a voting assembly to get out, and, to keep their property, they had to ante up two years’ worth of apportionments (proportional contributions to the larger church’s ministries and mission) and pension liabilities. It was these conditions under which nearly 7,700 Methodist churches bolted for the denominational door.
A large contingent of the leaving group — about 4,000 — found their way into the Global Methodist Church, a new body started in 2022 that vows to stick with the traditional view of marriage and sexuality and to enforce stricter bishop accountability.
Where Does the UMC Go From Here?
Having rid itself of its American right-wingers, the UMC, when it meets in General Conference in the spring of 2024, will no doubt eagerly gallop hard left to catch up with its mainline peers in endorsing sexual otherness. Think how embarrassed UMC officials must be at ecumenical soirées, representing a church body that refuses to get with the sexually libertine times and endorses a view of marriage and sexuality that has been the default position of God’s people for over 5,000 years. How heavy must lay the mantle of “intolerance” and “sexual prudery” on the shoulders of these enlightened ecclesiasts.
But even that flight to sexual “freedom” — and generic progressivism — is less than certain. Because of the Africans again.
Amid the turmoil Stateside over the past half decade, conservative Methodist churches elsewhere in the world — the UMC has two times as many members overseas as here in the U.S. — have had no exit vehicle available. Conservative conferences in Africa and elsewhere have been sitting patiently waiting for the disaffiliation process to sprout international wings.
Once that is set, it could be that African churches flee the denomination like their conservative American peers. The president of the conservative Wesleyan Covenant Association, Scott Field, predicted to the Associated Press earlier in December an “African wave” of churches heading for the door.
The African church hierarchy itself, however, seems torn. While some bishops seek an exit vehicle similar to that provided by rule 2553, other African prelates, backed by the U.S. bureaucracy, are urging loyalty to the church body even while hewing to traditional views on sexual matters, including marriage.
A proposal thought up by UMC hierarchy, called regionalization, will make this possible. According to regionalization, the Methodist church in the U.S. and Western Europe would consider itself its own regional conference, with the ability to write its own Book of Discipline, with a progressive definition of marriage and the lawful ability to ordain LGBTQ clergy. The African and Eastern European churches, meanwhile, could stick with the current definition of marriage — the one man–one woman sort — and refuse to ordain practicing gay and lesbian pastors. The UMC would remain united, international, and large, albeit internally discordant. A house divided against itself on sexual and marital policy.
Eleven of the 14 African bishops signed off on regionalization earlier this year in a meeting in New York. Wrote the bishops, who hold conservative views on marriage and sexuality:
Notwithstanding the differences in our UMC regarding the issue of human sexuality … we categorically state that we do not plan to leave The United Methodist Church and will continue to be shepherds of God’s flock in this worldwide denomination.
This prompted pushback from the UMC Africa Initiative, a group of 40 African leaders who rejected “the progressive views of the largely white, relatively rich, and declining church in the US.” The bishops’ statement continued:
We reject the proposed regionalization plan, aimed at silencing the voice of the church in Africa. The effect of that plan would be to compartmentalize sin within the UMC and make the African church complicit in allowing the U.S. church to adopt unscriptural teachings and standards.
Will regionalization work? Tooley doesn’t think so. He writes:
Most United Methodists are in Africa.… They are overwhelmingly strongly traditionalist. Some U.S. United Methodist institutionalists think that excluding Africa from new liberal marriage and sexuality standards will persuade them to stay. Maybe, but I doubt it. Africa in the past has already rejected similar proposals. Many bishops in Africa, whose salaries are U.S.-paid, want to stay United Methodist. But they will unlikely persuade many Africans after United Methodism fully liberalizes next year.
He sees the internal inconsistency as determinative. Africans, after all, dwarf the U.S. church in membership numbers — a growing 7 million to a shrinking 5 million. If all collected in one body, the Africans will quickly tire of a smaller American contingent dictating church policy and attempt to exert a stronger hand. The U.S. church, meanwhile, will find it increasingly intolerable to countenance views they consider retrograde on sex and marriage. Opines Tooley: “U.S. progressives who think ahead will not want repeatedly to contend with growing numbers of Africans whose views are so opposed to their own.”
The big issues will no doubt shake out at the 2024 General Conference, scheduled for April and May in Charlotte. It is then and there that new marriage and sexuality policies will likely be passed and the fate of overseas conferences and congregations — whether they stay in the UMC or go their own way — will be determined.
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Tom Raabe is a writer and editor living in Tempe, Arizona.
