The African delegates were organized as a bloc and were effective legislatively. They gained 25 percent of the legislative committee officer seats, previously typically getting none. They also filled two of four open slots on the church’s top court, the Judicial Council, with a Congolese pastor and a Harvard Law trained Liberian, as well as electing a Congolese university president to the oversight body for United Methodist seminaries.

The global 12 million member United Methodist Church, now likely the world’s 9th largest communion, is no longer a predominantly liberal U.S. denomination. Its quadrennial governing General Conference, which met for 10 days in Tampa ending May 4, refused to alter the church’s official disapproval of homosexual practice.

Some news stories huffed disapproval and surprise. After all, the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and United Church of Christ have all surrendered to American culture on sexual ethics. Their membership spirals subsequently accelerated into formal schisms. But United Methodism, unlike these other historic denominations that once dominated American religion and liberalized in the early 20th century, is now a growing church and has a record number of members.

Unlike the other traditionally liberal-led Mainline denominations, United Methodism is fully global in membership. (The 2 million member Episcopal Church of the U.S. does include the small churches of Latin America, Europe and Taiwan but is still 90 percent U.S. persons.) There are 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S. and 4.5 million overseas, almost all in Africa, mostly in the Congo. With the U.S. church losing about 100,000 members a year (down from 11 million 44 years ago) and the African church gaining over 200,000 a year, the denomination likely will become a majority non-U.S. church in about 10 years or less.

These statistics frustrate United Methodist liberals who have dominated the domination for 50 years or more. Homosexuality has been debated at the church’s General Conference every four years since 1972. And the church consistently decreed that homosexual practice was “incompatible with Christian teaching.” Over the years, the denomination formally prohibited clergy who were actively homosexual (as well as any clergy sexually active outside traditional marriage) and banned same-sex unions.

For the last 12 years it has even supported “laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of man and woman,” though normally loquacious bishops and other church elites decline to articulate this stance even as the nation debates it.

United Methodist liberals always assumed their church would follow American culture on sexual permissiveness, just as the church had followed on so much else across the 20th century, starting with divorce and contraception. They always consoled themselves, “If not this time, then next time!” Sounding like deterministic Marxist Hegelians, they believed history sided with sexual inclusion.

But this year in Tampa, the church once again rejected any dilution of his disapproval of homosexual practice, despite a full court lobby campaign. Liberal caucus groups pitched a full size tent outside the Tampa Convention Center, served daily lunches to any delegates, mobilized hundreds of volunteers in rainbow stoles, and distributed a full-size daily newspaper, sometimes translated into other languages. As chronicled by the just released Forgetting How to Blush: United Methodism’s Compromise with the Sexual Revolution by the Rev. Karen Booth, pro-gay caucus groups have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from non-church philanthropies.

It was largely wasted money. A record 30 percent of delegates came from Africa this time, up from 20 percent just 4 years ago (and 10 percent 8 years ago), and they voted uniformly against any liberalization of the church’s sexual teaching. Combined with many Filipino and European delegates, plus U.S. evangelicals, who were themselves about 20 percent of the total, there was an insurmountable conservative majority on key issues.

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