Whither Methodism?

For nearly 60 years, the United Methodist Church has really been the divided Methodist Church. Now members of what was for decades the third-largest denomination in the United States and the biggest church left in mainline Protestantism are finally going their separate ways. What comes next could either be a footnote to or an exciting new chapter in American Christianity. 

Thousands of mostly conservative and orthodox American churches disaffiliated from the United Methodists throughout 2023. Then this year, the denomination—one of the last holdouts in mainline Protestantism affirming traditional marriage and sexual ethics—liberalized those teachings and others at its General Conference in May. This led to the exit of nearly 2 million Africans, the only large region where the church was still growing.

Now what remains of the United Methodist Church is a smaller, more liberal rump supporting a bureaucracy built for an 11 million–member denomination that was already shrinking rapidly before these departures. It remains to be seen what the orthodox Methodist diaspora is able to build unencumbered by this dead weight.

It wasn’t until the year before the 1968 merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which created the UMC in the first place, that the Southern Baptist Convention overtook the Methodists as the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. But it was around that time that the church started losing thousands of members a year. Over the same time period, other smaller Wesleyan denominations—the Free Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of God, and the Assemblies of God—experienced explosive growth, though none ever came close to attaining or replicating the larger Methodist Church’s previous importance to the country as a whole.

Superficially, the United Methodist Church was like many other American institutions. Once a strong force in the public and religious life of the nation, it was riven with divisions over social issues and politics. The leadership became unresponsive to the members it was supposed to serve and kept moving leftward over time. A costly church bureaucracy often worked against the denomination’s official teachings. 

This is all true, as far as it goes. But the United Methodist Church was like a lot of mainline Protestant denominations. It peaked in terms of membership, influence, and cultural relevance sometime in the 1960s. But the roots of Methodism’s decline really began 100 years ago, when the seminaries were captured by theological revisionists who downplayed Biblical teaching and preached a Christianity nearly devoid of the supernatural aspects of the faith, while largely laity-led movements tried to fight back.

American Methodism was both the religious tradition of horseback-riding itinerant preachers and tent meetings, thoroughly evangelical and evangelistic in nature, and the Social Gospel. Methodists of both stripes played a large role in the temperance movement, which translated into private practice that was a strong witness of personal holiness and public policy that ended in disaster through Prohibition. But soon these different strains of Methodism, one deeply conservative and the other inherently liberalizing, came into tension with each other. As late as 1965, the Methodist Church added 27,000 new members—the last time in almost 60 years it actually grew.

In politics, there is a rule attributed variously to Robert Conquest and John O’Sullivan: if an organization is not explicitly right-wing, it will become left-wing over time. Theologically, the United Methodist Church wasn’t quite so simple. It was becoming more progressive and revisionist over time, but officially it remained steadfastly orthodox. That’s what kept United Methodism united for as long as it was: The denomination was traditionalist on paper and liberal in practice, except in jurisdictions where evangelical or other more conservative Methodists were numerically prevalent.

Many of the more conservative United Methodists, the renewal and confessing movements, sought to defend the denomination’s traditional teachings and take back operational control from the liberals, who were often clergy and even bishops. The liberals hoped to thwart these ambitions and keep pushing the denomination leftward. Both wings of the church coexisted uneasily under the uninspiring banner of “theological pluralism.”

A pastor friend compared the United Methodist Church’s General Conference, the denomination’s quadrennial legislative body, to attending the Republican and Democratic conventions at the same time. My preferred analogy is to imagine the Southern Baptists and the Episcopalians being closer in overall size and then forced to merge into one church. The result is an awful lot of intense debate, to say the least.

Just 20 years ago, it looked like the conservatives were winning. Large majorities voted at the 2004 General Conference to not only retain but in some instances strengthen the church’s teachings on human sexuality. Three-fifths of the delegates voted to preserve language saying that homosexual practice was incompatible with Christian doctrine, with a somewhat smaller majority rejecting language that would have recognized disagreements within that church about that issue. Four-fifths voted against the church performing same-sex weddings and 77 percent backed “laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” which at that time were passing virtually everywhere they were placed on the ballot. Eighty-five percent voted that clergy must be celibate when single and monogamous when married, with 72 percent specifically reaffirming the ban on open, practicing homosexual clergy. 

The United Methodist Church adopted its “prayerfully pro-choice” position on abortion in 1972, before Roe v. Wade was decided. But official church teaching on the subject was gradually revised in a pro-life direction. “We cannot affirm abortion as an acceptable means of birth control, and we unconditionally reject it as a means of gender selection,” the Methodist Book of Discipline stated. “We oppose the use of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (partial-birth abortion) and call for the end of this practice except when the physical life of the mother is in danger and no other medical procedure is available, or in the case of severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life.”

In 2008, these teachings were updated to support pro-life crisis pregnancy centers and “parental, guardian, or other responsible adult notification and consent before abortions can be performed on girls who have not yet reached the age of legal adulthood.” In 2016, 61 percent of General Conference delegates voted to remove the United Methodist Church from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. 

Two things differentiated the United Methodists from other mainline Protestant churches. Its U.S. membership was somewhat more Southern and Midwestern. There were more evangelicals in the United Methodist Church than Episcopalians in the whole country. But it was also the case that the denomination was more global, with growing membership in Africa, especially. These overseas members had voting power at General Conference. African and American evangelical delegates together formed an orthodox majority.

But their victories at General Conference every four years did little to alleviate the liberal control of the church agencies running the denomination day to day, the Council of Bishops or the seminaries training the clergy. Despite the prominent role Africans were playing in keeping the denomination orthodox, liberals viewed the church’s intransigence on homosexuality as morally equivalent to Southern Methodists’ past support for slavery and racism. (Many Africans, who had given up polygamy to join the church, disagreed.) And in the U.S., United Methodist membership was declining everywhere, even in the South. Being orthodox on paper and liberal in practice was no longer an acceptable compromise for either side, especially once same-sex marriage was declared a constitutional right by the Supreme Court in 2013.

The final straw came when the General Conference voted in 2019 to reject several compromise measures and instead adopt the so-called Traditional Plan reaffirming all the church’s positions on marriage and sexuality with tougher penalties for clergy violations. The 53 percent majority was a wake-up call of sorts to both sides—barring some dramatic shift in church membership or attitudes, liberals weren’t going to have the votes to change these teachings for the foreseeable future but conservatives were faced with massive dissension in the U.S. church. 

For a brief moment, conservatives were on the precipice of triggering a liberal exodus from the denomination and thus succeeding where the renewal movements in every other mainline Protestant church had failed. But liberals still retained control of the major denominational institutions. So instead it was the conservatives who were given a limited-time offer to leave the denomination and take their churches with them in exchange for paying two years worth of apportionments plus clergy pension liabilities. This generally required a two-thirds majority at the congregational level. 

The process wasn’t easy. Not all churches that wanted to leave had the money or the confidence to do so. There was some confusion about how long this expedited disaffiliation process would continue. Some jurisdictions tried to attach other conditions for departure. Many congregations were majority-conservative but not quite homogeneous enough to reach the two-thirds threshold. Bishops and district superintendents often tried to dissuade churches from leaving.

Still, nearly 7,700 churches left the United Methodist Church. The very next General Conference repealed prohibitions on the celebration of same-sex unions (though it included some language stating clergy would not be “required or compelled” to perform them) , the requirement of “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness” among clergy, and affirmed that sexuality is “expressed in wonderfully diverse ways.”

“The United Methodist Church affirms this statement and upholds a person’s right to an abortion after informed consideration with their family, medical practitioners, pastor, and other pertinent counsel,” the denomination’s Social Principles now declare. “State and federal laws and regulations prohibiting abortion violate a person’s right to the full range of reproductive health care, and, potentially, life.” 

None of these votes were particularly close, with many of the American evangelicals gone and the participation of African delegates down (“visa issues” were often cited). Since General Conference, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, and Kenya-Ethiopia voted to exit United Methodism despite assurances they could be allowed to set their own policies in this area—in exchange for being effectively disenfranchised from denominational decision-making beyond their borders.

The orthodox Global  Methodist Church just held its first General Conference in Costa Rica. It could bring back together many of those who left United Methodism in both Africa and the U.S. Or the departing churches could continue the post-denominational trend in evangelical Protestantism. Whether a new Methodism emerges, free of the liberalism and bureaucracy that strangled the old one, remains to be seen.