A Quarter of Mainline Methodist Churches Left the Denomination Last Year. Now What?

This month is the 100th anniversary of the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, the stately edifice sitting across from the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court. Built to house Methodism’s advocacy for Prohibition, the “Methodist Vatican” was derided by Clarence Darrow as the “most brutal, bigoted, ignorant bunch since the Spanish Inquisition.” Its locale, he said, allowed Methodist busybodies to “smell Congressmen’s breath on the way to the Capitol.”

Since 1924, Methodism has suffered a long downward spiral from its peaks of American influence. For most of the 20th century, it was America’s largest Protestant institution. Last year, it suffered a schism over sexuality, resulting in more than 7,660 mostly traditional congregations quitting the denomination. This exodus, perhaps the largest church schism in America since the Civil War, represents 25 percent of United Methodism’s once 30,000 U.S. churches.

Exodus

The deadline for churches to exit United Methodism, which was America’s third-largest religious body, was December 31. Exiting churches needed approval from governing regional bodies, and the last such vote was December 14, when the Texas Conference, centered around Houston, approved four more church exits for a total of 319—or 51 percent—of its once 621 churches.

Conservative congregations were anxious to exit under a temporary church law before the next governing General Conference on April 23 to May 3, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s widely expected, absent many traditionalists, to finally liberalize the church’s policies on marriage and sex. United Methodism will be nearly the last of the once paramount mainline Protestant denominations to liberalize.

United Methodism is widely expected, absent many traditionalists, to finally liberalize the church’s policies on marriage and sex.

Church properties in United Methodism are owned by the denomination through local regional conferences. In 2019, at a special General Conference that reaffirmed traditional teachings on marriage and sex by 53 percent, delegates created the temporary policy to let churches exit with property and assets. Exiting congregations had to vote by two-thirds and pay hefty exit fees to the denomination. Small churches paid thousands of dollars, and larger churches had to pay hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions.

Issues

Unlike other historically liberal mainline denominations, such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodism has never liberalized on sex. That was thanks to delegates from its growing churches in Africa, where there are 7 million United Methodists, compared to less than 6 million in America before the exits. Conservatives in the U.S., aligned with those in Africa, prevented liberalization for decades.

But U.S. bishops, church agencies, seminaries, and most clergy are overwhelmingly progressive and increasingly refused to uphold church law. While successfully running for bishop in 2022, Kennetha Bigham-Tsai, who now presides over Iowa United Methodism, declared, “No, it is not important that we agree on who Christ is.” She elaborated, “God became flesh, but not particular flesh. There’s no particularity around that. God became incarnate in a culture, but not one culture.” Also in 2022, bishop Ken Carter of Florida explained, “While I believe in our traditional, orthodox faith that’s rooted in the Scriptures, I also have always believed that we have to adapt our doctrine and our Scriptures to changing life circumstances that people have.”

After the 2019 General Conference, liberals and conservatives agreed to a negotiated church split that the scheduled 2020 General Conference likely would have approved. The pandemic repeatedly postponed the conference, and liberals backtracked. So traditionalists, aware of the 2023 deadline, organized their mass exits.

United Methodists largely avoided the prolonged lawsuits the Episcopal Church experienced. But there were ecclesial explosions. Seven churches were denied exits by Arkansas, Virginia, and North Georgia, forcing congregations to abandon now mostly empty properties. One large church outside Atlanta was denied exit by the North Georgia Conference on a Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday morning, most of its congregation was worshiping across the street in a funeral home chapel. Other congregations failed to attain two-thirds majorities for exit, with frustrated majorities quickly splitting off into new church plants.

GMC

Over 4,300 exited churches so far have joined the new Global Methodist Church (GMC), which includes churches from the U.S., Africa, the Philippines, and Europe. Many more U.S. churches will join, but some are skittish about losing autonomy. U.S. Protestant Christianity is increasingly nondenominational, with younger people rarely guided by once-strong multigenerational denominational loyalties. Nearly all U.S. denominations, liberal and conservative, are declining.

Conservatives in the U.S., aligned with those in Africa, prevented liberalization for decades.

The GMC, in many ways, will echo the nondenominational world. Unlike the old denominations, it won’t have large agencies, official seminaries, a publishing house, or a powerful hierarchy. It will have binding church doctrine and bishops, in a system that Methodists call “connectional.” But GMC congregations will have more autonomy—for example, the GMC allows congregations to own their property.

Future

When old Methodism built the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in 1924, it was a great, confident national denomination that saw itself as stewarding American civilization. Prohibition, imposed by constitutional amendment, was Methodism’s last great political crusade. The building now houses mostly ignored progressive religious advocacy. And the United Methodist Church, once 11 million members strong, is now—after decades of decline amplified by the recent schism—approaching 4 million, with a bleak demographic future.

The new GMC, with networks of other exited churches, will be a large but still countercultural religious insurgency. But John Wesley, an 18th-century Church of England priest who founded Methodism to renew both church and society, would recognize the model.

Whether through the GMC or other entrepreneurial networks, a renewed Methodism could contribute mightily to Christian vitality in America. Methodism at its core focuses on personal and social holiness, with Christian perfection as the goal. This pursuit of holiness can be empowering and transformational. And doesn’t the church in America need more grace-driven seekers of holiness?