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. The GMC, in many ways, will echo the nondenominational world. 

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.

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.

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