The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Questions remain after splinter of UMC
Reconciling movement looking forward to UMC General Conference
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Edgehill United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, has long embraced the LGBTQ+ community, mobilizing its members to help build a national movement in the denomination. But with an exodus of conservative churches from the UMC, the pro-LGBTQ movement within the denomination are carefully considering their next steps.
“Our mission at that point was to say, ‘How do we survive no matter what the institution says?’” the Rev. Beth Richardson, a queer woman and ordained United Methodist elder, said in an interview. “‘How do we stay in ministry with queer people?’”
Around the time Richardson joined Edgehill UMC in the late 1970s, the church had lent its building to the gayaffirming Metropolitan Community Church to use for Sunday evening worship and to families of AIDS victims for funerals. Later, it extended communion to transgender people as early as the 1990s.
Hospitality to the LGBTQ+ community was an extension of Edgehill UMC’s inclusive mission, inspired by the church’s founding in 1966 as one of the first intentionally racially integrated churches in the Nashville area.
“Edgehill was the model,” said longtime member Kathryn Mitchem, referring to what became known as the Reconciling movement, which seeks to empower LGBTQ-affirming churches in the UMC.
Forty years later, as the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination navigates a historic splintering, there are more than 930 Reconciling congregations.
The largely Nashville-based UMC lost a quarter of its total churches between 2019-2023 following disagreements over theology and church policy, including dealing with LGBTQ+ rights. Many of the churches that left, or “disaffiliated,”
are joining a more conservative breakaway denomination called the Global Methodist Church.
These departures increase the likelihood that the denomination’s top legislative body, the UMC General Conference, will decide to remove restrictive policies against LGBTQ+ people at its assembly in Charlotte in April.
“So many conservatives have left, so they’ll clearly have the votes,” said Mark Tooley, a leading conservative Methodist strategist.
Leaders in the Reconciling movement are leery to predict a precise outcome, partly due to its history of legislative defeats at the UMC General Conference, which meets every four years and includes delegates from across the world.
But the posture of those progressive leaders also emphasizes more than just policy changes but rather on how the Reconciling movement can inspire deeper cultural change often through other means.
“Our work is to make churches safe places for LGBTQ people to go. You can change policy and discipline all day long and that does not change,” said Jan Lawrence, executive director of Reconciling Ministries Network, the nonprofit overseer of the Reconciling movement, in an interview.
Also, in the face of unique international circumstances, the Reconciling movement is backing a UMC General Conference proposal called “regionalization” to give United Methodists outside the U.S. more autonomy, for example, to maintain more conservative policies on LGBTQ+ rights.
The goal is “to build a more equitable and just church,” Lawrence said. “I think this is the moment that we put a stake in the ground and start the future.”
Seeking dialogue amid differences
“Those of us on the reconciling ministry side have come to a much broader sense of how God is at work in the world,” said the Rev. David Meredith, a retired Ohio pastor and Reconciling Ministries Network board chair. “And it’s not solely based in who has the power and who doesn’t.”
Meredith, whose marriage to his husband in 2016 was wrought with attacks and disciplinary investigations, sought to distinguish the Reconciling movement’s outlook from that of conservatives like Tooley. The latter views relationships in the denomination through a lens of factionalism.
“We cannot assess the future of the church based on our own inclusion alone,” Meredith said.
Since its earliest days, the Reconciling movement has encouraged dialogue amid differences both within an individual congregation and between congregations.
When Edgehill UMC went through the process of becoming a Reconciling congregation, its leaders offered special listening sessions for congregants and met with neighboring United Methodist churches to emphasize the importance of consensus.
Locally rooted organizing expands
Amid that past success for the Reconciling Ministries Network, there were also gaps, said Derick Scott III, who leads campus ministries in Florida and a Reconciling Ministries Network board member.
Organizing was mostly geared toward legislative and administrative change. It heavily relied on “anchor churches” and those who “self-selected themselves in,” Scott said.
One need Reconciling Ministries Network has identified is LGBTQ-inclusive theological education, so the nonprofit recently launched its first-ever Vacation Bible School curriculum. Also, the nonprofit is encouraging partner churches to think deeper about wider community outreach, both to the LGBTQ+ population and across racial divides.
“There has to be a sense of engagement within your community, a sense of connection, a sense of risk even,” Scott said. “It is not enough to just say ‘we have the (LGBTQ pride) flag waving.’”
Even Edgehill UMC is coming to new understandings of its service to the community, as more churches embody a similar mission and values.
“For years, we were the only place in town where people truly felt welcome,” Feldhacker said. “Now we’re not the only church in town, so those boom years are over for us.”
While still a home to LGBTQ+ members and congregants of color, Edgehill has aged and grown more homogenous over time. The church’s advocacy against anti-LGBTQ+ restrictions is less forceful and public than some neighboring Reconciling congregations.