New Methodist denomination begins amid a mix of frustration, celebration
AVON, Indiana — Contemporary Christian music pumped up the crowd of “traditionalist” Methodists, followed by scathing sermons about being in “exile” and what they see as an overbearing United Methodist bureaucracy.
Attendees at the two-day event showed they were feeling frustrated and imbued with a revolutionary spirit, and simultaneously relieved and celebratory.
“A new day has dawned for the people called Methodist,” said one of those leaders, the Rev. Keith Boyette, in an address Saturday at Kingsway Christian Church here just outside Indianapolis.
This is what the start of a new Methodist denomination looks like.
The new Global Methodist Church officially launched on May 1, splintering from the United Methodist Church primarily over disagreements about sexuality and gender. It was the biggest development in a years-long schism within the country’s largest mainline Protestant denomination.
The events this weekend for the Wesleyan Covenant Association — the main organization behind the formation of the Global Methodist Church — are helping form the backbone of the new denomination.
The Wesleyan Covenant Association Global Legislative Assembly, a group of about 235 delegates, met Friday and voted on a series of resolutions the Global Methodist Church will use to craft its foundational policies.
The organization then hosted its Global Gathering on Saturday for 900 in-person attendees and more than 1,000 others viewing via simulcast at church sites across the nation.
Still, even with the official launch and this weekend’s groundwork, getting a new denomination started will require a lot more technical details and messy splits as individual churches or entire regional conferences decide whether to stay or go.
“I don’t think we’ll see what the Global Methodist Church will become for another four to five years as conferences and congregations throughout United Methodism and, in other groups even, consider where they want to be,” Ryan Danker, a historian of Methodism and director of the Washington D.c.-based John Wesley Institute, said in an interview.
As Methodists navigate the logistical hurdles, Danker said they will also experience intense emotions, like those on display at the Wesleyan Covenant Association conference this weekend.
“There’s a lot of anger at the process and at the place where the UMC is at now,” Danker said. “Church division brings out emotions you didn’t know was there. It’s a lot like a divorce.”
Leaving the UMC
Before the split, the UMC had more than 6.2 million members, according to 2020 data. As of 2018, the denomination had more than 12 million members worldwide.
The Wesleyan Covenant Association formed in 2016 to represent and advocate for United Methodist churches with more conservative views on sexuality and gender, claiming to more authentically represent the views of Methodism founder John Wesley.
Hundreds of United Methodist clergy came out as gay in 2016, intensifying a debate that would escalate to a 2019 special session for the UMC General Conference, when delegates from across the world gathered to make policy decisions about the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and allowing the celebration of same-sex weddings.
Traditionalists won the 2019 policy vote in large part due to delegates representing more conservative parts of the country and world.
But the conflict remain unresolved, so traditionalist churches began “disaffiliating” while United Methodist leaders negotiated a plan to split the denomination, called “The Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation,” or “The Protocol.”
Delegates at the UMC General Conference
were expected to vote on “The Protocol” in 2020, but United Methodist leaders continued to postpone the General Conference due to COVID-19 travel restrictions for international travelers.
The most recent General Conference postponement — from August 2022 to August 2024 — led Global Methodist Church leadership to decide to launch early on May 1.
“We had thought The Protocol would have been passed and we would have been in our happy denominational home,” the Rev. Rob Renfroe, a Texas pastor, said in a featured address on Saturday. “And failing that, we had hoped the bishops would agree to some kind of just and fair resolution that we might depart.”
The Protocol, if approved, would make it easier for churches to disaffiliate from the UMC and retain ownership of church property. The current process is not the same across the board.
“And failing that, we certainly had hoped that those who had lectured us for the last two and half decades for having a heart of peace would not now be demanding their piece of flesh on our way out,” Renfroe said in his speech, drawing “ooohs” from audience members validating the preacher’s critique.
The Protocol would also give the Global Methodist Church $25 million to get started.
‘Sexual holiness’ policies
As the Wesleyan Covenant Association sorts out logistics for the current transition, it also sought to get on with the business it started the new denomination over.
A previously established Wesleyan Covenant Association task force on “sexual holiness, wholeness and brokenness” presented Friday a report and a series of recommendations as part of a process for the Global Methodist Church to establish its sexual ethic.
The report, embodying the larger traditionalist Methodist perspective, exclusively affirms heterosexual marriages and cisgender identities.
In addition, the sexual holiness task force report addressed sexual abuse, sex outside of marriage, pornography and other items classified as part of the definition of “sexual brokenness.”
“Marriage is part of a sacred, exclusive, covenantal relationship, and sexual activity outside of this is sinful and falls short of God’s design,” read the report’s introduction.
The Wesleyan Covenant Association legislative assembly then voted for a resolution Friday endorsing the task force’s recommendations, thus forwarding it along to the Global Methodist Church’s temporary leadership board.
But the report and policy recommendations “represents a narrow theological viewpoint that produces bad fruit,” said Ophelia Hu Kinney, spokesperson for Reconciling Ministries Network, a national organization advocating for LGBTQ inclusion in the UMC.
“History has shown the consequences of doctrine that conflates abusive behavior with the beautifully mundane reality that some people are LGBTQ+ by God’s design,” Kinney said in a statement.
The recommendations include requirements for seminary instruction, a counselor certification course, ongoing training for pastors, and the establishment of a task force to create resources for proposed sexual holiness-focused discipleship groups.
History amid historical precedent
The weekend concluded with a presiding United Methodist bishop, who has been supportive of the Global Methodist Church, celebrating communion.
“God invites us to take a pivot. To turn our lives to the fullness of God’s reality and God’s promise,” Bishop Mark Webb of the Upper New York Annual Conference of the UMC said in a sermon Saturday. “To pivot from our agenda to God’s agenda. To pivot from sin to holiness.”
As attendees lined up for communion, vendors out in the lobby — organizations that plan to partner with the new denomination, including several universities and seminaries — closed up shop.
For Wesleyan Covenant Association leadership, the 12 hours or work and events on Friday and Saturday represented a culmination of their enduring labor to reclaim what they believe as their faith identity.
For historians like Danker, this weekend was significant, but not one without historical precedent.
“There has always been division,”
Danker said. “I think the reason why is because Methodism is a movement… And that often produces what we might call division, but what we also call multiplication.”
Historical precedent aside, many United Methodists are mourning.
“In the midst of heartache of separation, let us launch and proclaim once again a unity of purpose in ministry together,” Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton, president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, said in a meeting last week, according to United Methodist News.
A retired Texas bishop resigned the same week from the United Methodist Council of Bishops because he was joining the Global Methodist Church.
The current number of churches that have already sought to join the Global Methodist Church is unknown, Boyette said in an interview. But 107 Florida churches announced their collective intent to leave the UMC on Thursday, according to the Florida chapter of the Wesleyan Covenant Association.
The entire Bulgaria-romania conference of the UMC already left the denomination.
The Wesleyan Covenant Association’s coordinator for the African continent said on Friday, “our goal is to move as a bloc from Africa” from the UMC to the Global Methodist Church.
More churches are expected to join the new denomination after the summer when regional United Methodist conferences meet. After a church congregation internally votes to disaffiliate, delegates at regional conferences must vote to approve resolutions allowing the disaffiliations.
“We will now focus our efforts on helping individuals and local churches navigate this season of uncertainty in the United Methodist Church,” Boyette said in his speech Saturday. “We will use our influence in the church to enable God’s new wine to fill the new wineskin he has created. Separation is no longer in the future, separation has occurred.”
Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on Twitter @liamsadams.