The United Methodist Church

Overview

The standard profile of the United Methodist Church reads: founded 1968 in Dallas, ten million members worldwide, second-largest Protestant denomination in America — and in May 2024 it reversed its LGBTQ bans (Bridwell Library). What the standard profile obscures is the mechanism: the reversal was the aftershock of the largest schism in modern American Protestantism. Between 2019 and 2023, more than 7,600 American congregations — one-quarter of all UMC churches in the United States — walked out under a temporary exit window, driven by conservative dismay that the denomination had stopped enforcing its bans on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination (Associated Press). Then the delegates who remained gathered in Charlotte and, by overwhelming margins, repealed the very rules the departed churches had wanted enforced (Associated Press). The 2024 votes cannot be understood without the exodus that preceded them.

The exodus that made the reversal possible

The rupture had been building for decades, but the breaking point came when enforcement collapsed. The denomination’s Book of Discipline barred “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from ordination and forbade clergy from celebrating same-sex unions — yet across the United States, conferences increasingly declined to enforce those rules (Associated Press). In response, a temporary disaffiliation window opened in 2019 that let American churches leave with their properties — normally held in trust for the denomination — under more favorable than normal terms (Associated Press). Between 2019 and 2023, more than 7,600 congregations took that exit — one-quarter of the UMC’s American churches (Associated Press).

The departures tore congregations and families apart, as delegates at the 2024 conference acknowledged (Associated Press). On the Wednesday of General Conference week, the delegates voted formally to close the exit window, over the pleas of remaining conservatives who wanted it extended — particularly since the window had applied only to U.S. churches, not international ones (Associated Press). “To limit its function to the United States (portion of the) United Methodist Church, that is a form of disfavor for the church in Africa,” said the Rev. Jerry Kulah, a delegate from Liberia (Associated Press). Dixie Brewster, a delegate from the Great Plains Conference, asked for a peaceful path out for her fellow conservatives: “We want a place to go peacefully. We will not be disruptive” (Associated Press).

Charlotte, May 2024: three votes in three days

With the most conservative churches gone, the General Conference — the denomination’s first legislative gathering in five years — moved in a solidly progressive direction (Associated Press). On Wednesday, May 1, delegates repealed the longstanding ban on LGBTQ clergy with no debate, removing the rule forbidding “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or appointed as ministers (Associated Press). The vote was 692-51, so lopsided it was bundled into a “consent calendar” of normally non-controversial measures (Associated Press). “It seemed like such a simple vote, but it carried so much weight and power, as 50 years of restricting the Holy Spirit’s call on people’s lives has been lifted,” said Bishop Karen Oliveto, the first openly lesbian bishop in the denomination (Associated Press). The same day, delegates approved a measure forbidding district superintendents from penalizing clergy either for performing a same-sex wedding or for refraining from one (Associated Press).

On Thursday, May 2, the conference repealed the 52-year-old declaration — adopted in 1972 — that the practice of homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and approved Revised Social Principles defining marriage as a covenant between two adults, without limiting it to heterosexual couples (Associated Press). On Friday, May 3, delegates voted 447-233 to repeal the church-law ban on clergy celebrating same-sex marriages or unions in its churches — “the final major reversal of a collection of LGBTQ bans and disapprovals that have been embedded throughout the laws and social teachings of the United Methodist Church over the previous half-century” (Associated Press). The conference also removed being a “self-avowed practicing homosexual” or performing a same-sex marriage as chargeable offenses under church law, while affirming that clergy would be neither required nor prohibited from performing any marriage (Associated Press). The changes do not mandate or explicitly affirm LGBTQ clergy or same-sex marriage — they remove the prohibitions (Associated Press).

Regionalization and the Africa question

A week before the LGBTQ votes, the conference had endorsed a regionalization plan that would give the churches of the United States the same autonomy other global regions already held — a change still requiring ratification by local annual conferences, and one that could produce a denomination where LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage are permitted in America but not elsewhere (Associated Press). Regional conferences outside the United States already have the right to set their own rules, and a pending constitutional amendment would enable the U.S. region to make such adaptations formally (Associated Press).

The stakes are geographic. The denomination counted about 4.6 million members outside the United States, mainly in Africa — where more conservative sexual values prevail and same-sex activity is criminalized in some countries — and the AP reported the conference votes could prompt departures of international churches through other means (Associated Press). Kulah called the conference’s direction “a serious drift away from the truth”: “The Bible has not changed, but the church has changed” (Associated Press). Samuel Cole of Liberia urged delegates not to approve the marriage measure, saying it would not be accepted in other parts of the world (Associated Press). The regionalization architecture is, in effect, the denomination’s answer to a question the schism left unresolved: how one church holds together when its American and African wings no longer agree on what the rules should be.

What the church is, on paper

The United Methodist Church was created in 1968 through two unions at once. The external union merged the Methodist Church (10,289,000 members) with the Evangelical United Brethren Church (746,000 members); the internal union joined Black and White Methodists into a racially integrated denomination — a dimension of the founding that standard histories routinely skip (Bridwell Library). The Uniting Conference met in Dallas from April 21 to May 4, 1968, and the new body became the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States (Bridwell Library).

The lineage runs deeper. The Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in Baltimore in 1784; in 1939 it merged with the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Protestant Church to form the Methodist Church, which in turn became half of the 1968 union (Maryland General Assembly). That heritage is living, not archival: the denomination’s own website hosts the biography of Minnie F. Abrams, the Methodist Episcopal missionary who arrived in Bombay in 1887 with the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, whose 1906 book The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire reached Methodist missionaries May and Willis Hoover in Chile — and whose revival there founded the Methodist Pentecostal Church and the wider Pentecostal movement in that country (The United Methodist Church). Until recently the third-largest denomination in the United States, the UMC counted 5.4 million American members in 2022 — a figure recorded before the 2023 departures were factored in (Associated Press). And unlike most denominations its size, it has no single headquarters at all: the church’s own “Ask the UMC” page states it has “never had one central headquarters or single executive leader with authority over the mission and ministries of the whole church,” governing instead through its conferences (The United Methodist Church).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a current post-2023 U.S. membership figure, because the latest verified number is the AP’s 2022 figure of 5.4 million, recorded before the departures were counted. It does not state whether the regionalization plan was ratified by annual conferences, or how many departing congregations joined the Global Methodist Church versus became independent — neither was verified from a fully-read source. It does not quote the exact vote to close the disaffiliation window, which appeared only in a lower-tier outlet. It does not claim the 2024 changes mandate LGBTQ inclusion: per the AP, they remove prohibitions without requiring or affirming. And it makes no claim about Arthur Gaeth — the task brief asserted a UMC connection in his profile, but the current file contains no mention of Methodism at all.