Key Points:
- The Lewis Center for Church Leadership has released its third and final report comparing U.S. congregations disaffiliating from The United Methodist Church with those staying.
- About 25% of the denomination’s U.S. churches have left since 2019 under a policy prompted by intensifying debate over LGBTQ inclusion.
- But even as they mourn these losses, United Methodists are starting new faith communities and welcoming people long unaffiliated with any church.
- Also worth noting: The vast majority of United Methodist congregations remain in the denomination.
As the new Christian year began on Dec. 3, so did a new United Methodist faith community in Haywood County, North Carolina — filled with hope that after months of heartache, God is doing a new thing.
Formed by people who wanted to stay United Methodist even as their former congregation left the denomination, the emerging faith community spent a busy Advent worshipping at Clyde Central United Methodist Church and caroling across the county.
The outreach culminated with a midnight Christmas Eve service by the giant outdoor cross overlooking Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center. Amid the bitter cold and spritzing snow, more than 90 people huddled together by candlelight to join in Holy Communion and celebrate Christ’s birth.
“All these conditions that don’t seem good for hosting an outside event, and yet people showed up,” said the Rev. Nicole Jones, the pastor helping the Haywood Emerging Faith Community get started. “People came because there was an open table, there were candles at midnight and there was light in the darkness.”
No question The United Methodist Church — the second largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. — has seen dark times recently.
Over the past four years, more than 7,600 U.S. congregations have disaffiliated under a denominational policy that expired at the end of 2023. Altogether, those exits represent a quarter of the 30,541 U.S. congregations that the denomination had in 2019.
The United Methodist Church’s presence in the U.S. is now substantially smaller, with its steepest decline in the South.
That’s the upshot of the third and final report on church disaffiliations by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, released this week. The Lewis Center — part of United Methodist-related Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington — previously released reports in March and August last year comparing disaffiliating churches to those staying.
The departures have led to restructuring, shrinking budgets and rethinking ministry at all levels of the international denomination. More significantly, each departure represents a loss — of friends, of colleagues and a sense of connection in the shared work of Christian discipleship.
But amid these troubles, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of U.S. United Methodist churches remain in the denomination.
“Our challenge is to both heal and move forward with purpose, vision and determination,” said Council of Bishops President Thomas J. Bickerton, who also leads the New York Conference.
“It is critical that we put these events in our rearview mirror,” the bishop added. The next step, he said, is “to aggressively map out and lean into a vision of the kinds of ministries that are needed to reach a world that is broken and to reach emerging generations that deeply long for ministry that is relevant.”
Many United Methodists are starting to do just that.
Like green shoots sprouting from the ashes of a forest fire, new United Methodist faith communities such as the one in Haywood County are springing up from the remnants of disaffiliations.
Jones, the faith community’s pastor, said she saw at its first Christmas Eve service that people have a hunger “to encounter Christ in our world today." Millions are doing so under the emblem of The United Methodist Church’s Cross and Flame.
The Haywood Emerging Faith Community began with about 20 people who wanted to stay United Methodist after their former church home, Long’s Chapel in Waynesville, North Carolina, voted to leave late last year.
Ray Hausler, who preached at the Christmas Eve service, is one of the key people getting the new community off the ground.
He and his family moved to North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains from California in 2021 so he could serve as director of student ministries at Long’s Chapel. But when that church voted to leave, he and his wife decided they wanted to stick with The United Methodist Church.
He is now serving as a lay supply preacher while also studying for ordained ministry at United Methodist-related Duke Divinity School on scholarship through its Thriving Rural Communities initiative.
“Why we ended up in The United Methodist Church was because of theological diversity. I believe in the ‘big tent,’” he said. “I think that Scripture can be complicated at times and it begins a conversation for us. And when we’re devoted to Christ and in conversation with one another around Scripture, we can have disagreements and still hold onto the main thing.”
From the beginning, the Haywood community has sought to reach people who previously were not involved in a church at all.
One of the faith community’s newcomers is Henson Sturgill who became disenchanted with organized religion after a bad church experience.
But what he found in the Haywood community, he said, was a very accepting and welcoming group of people who are allowing him to wade back into the Christian faith at his own pace. He added that he also appreciates the community’s inclusive nature.
“I’m still rediscovering what God and Jesus mean to me,” he said, “but it feels wonderful to not be so alone on the journey.”
General Conference, the international denomination’s legislative assembly, instituted the disaffiliation policy in 2019 after decades of intensifying debate about the place of LGBTQ people in church life.
The policy allowed U.S. congregations to leave with property, “for reasons of conscience” related to homosexuality, if they met certain financial and procedural obligations by the end of 2023. Those requirements included that congregations vote by at least two-thirds for disaffiliation and then receive the majority approval of their annual conferences — regional bodies with voting members from multiple congregations.
A majority of annual conference voters approved all but a handful of the disaffiliations that came before them. The exceptions were three in Arkansas, one in Virginia, one in Oklahoma and three in North Georgia. In each of those cases, conference voters cited specific issues with those disaffiliation requests.
The Lewis Center report, in discussing questions for further study, noted that disaffiliating churches had other motivating factors beyond homosexuality.
More from Lewis Center
Denomination-wide bans on same-sex marriage and “self-avowed practicing” gay clergy also are still on the books, and only General Conference — set to meet April 23-May 3 — has the authority to alter them.
But indications are that most disaffiliating churches are conservative on matters of homosexuality while the U.S. churches that remain are seeing a shift toward greater LGBTQ inclusion.
The coming General Conference faces petitions to expand disaffiliation policies, and a handful of annual conferences are already planning to allow churches to leave under the denomination’s procedures for church closures. The Rev. Lovett H. Weems Jr., senior consultant for the Lewis Center and lead author of its disaffiliation reports, said he thinks that continuing with church withdrawals would be a mistake.
“We’ve devoted a lot of time to disaffiliations between 2019 and 2023. We’ve had a fair process,” he said.
“Now’s the time to turn the page and shape a new United Methodist Church where really everyone is welcome including those with varying theological, political and social views. What unites the church is Christ.”
Disaffiliations accelerated in 2022 after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a theologically conservative, breakaway denomination with a commitment to keep those bans. The Global Methodist Church has recruited most of its membership from the United Methodist fold.
The new denomination has 4,336 congregations, said Keith Boyette, the Global Methodist Church’s transitional connectional officer. The congregations are in the U.S. and 12 other countries, including a few like Spain and Qatar that previously had no United Methodist presence.
“We add anywhere from 50-100 churches each week in this present season,” he said. The new denomination plans to hold its convening General Conference in September this year in Costa Rica.
Still, the Lewis Center report says that at this point, many former United Methodist churches are remaining independent. “It appears that only about half of disaffiliating churches are joining another denomination, but no one knows for sure,” the report said.
That lack of new affiliation is one “stark difference seen between disaffiliating churches and similar departures from other mainline denominations,” the report said.
That’s not the only difference. The Lewis Center report also notes that The United Methodist Church has seen more than double the percentage of church exits experienced by other mainline Protestant denominations when they underwent separations over homosexuality. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Presbyterian Church (USA) each saw less than 10% of their congregations leave.
Yet, the center’s report also points out that the current United Methodist separation pales in comparison to the big U.S. Methodist split over slavery in 1844 — a precursor to the U.S. Civil War.
That divide led to about 40% of Methodist Episcopal Church members leaving for the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Denominational records tracked members rather than churches back then.
Tracking the official disaffiliation data
The Lewis Center report said that altogether, disaffiliating churches accounted for about 24% of the denomination’s U.S. membership in 2019 — before the COVID pandemic upended so much of religious life.
While smaller in scope, the current separation does fall along similar geographic lines.
The Lewis Center report notes that 50% of disaffiliating churches were in the denomination’s Southeastern Jurisdiction, which encompasses 14 annual conferences stretching from Mississippi to Florida and up to Kentucky and Virginia.
Twenty of the 53 U.S. annual conferences have seen 30% or more of their churches leave. All but four are in the denomination’s Southeast or South Central jurisdictions, which long boasted the largest concentration of United Methodists in the U.S.
Trends the Lewis Center identified in its previous reports also continued through the last withdrawals before the deadline.
Compared to United Methodist churches that remain, exiting churches are disproportionately majority white, more likely to be led by a male pastor and slightly less likely to be led by an ordained elder.
But the sizes of churches disaffiliating and those remaining have been similar. Small churches of fewer than 50 members are the majority in both groups.
The Lewis Center report said further study will be needed to determine how much today’s political polarization in the U.S. may have contributed to The United Methodist Church’s disaffiliation movement.
But perhaps not surprising in a denomination whose history so closely aligns with that of the United States, the disaffiliation map is similar to the red-and-blue maps on Election Day — with the more conservative red areas seeing more church disaffiliations compared to the more progressive blue areas.
Figuring out the full impact of disaffiliations on United Methodist membership will take time. That’s in part because a number of United Methodist churches that stayed have seen members head for the doors. At the same time, a number of members of exiting congregations are opting to remain United Methodist by transferring to other churches and helping them grow or planting new United Methodist faith communities.
The Haywood Emerging Faith Community is one of 17 such communities that the Western North Carolina Conference has started in the wake of disaffiliations. Both the Western North Carolina and neighboring North Carolina Conference have seen more than 300 of their churches withdraw. Both conferences have received grants of $5.25 million from the Duke Endowment to start new faith communities and revitalize existing ones.
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The Rev. Rob Hutchinson, Western North Carolina’s director of church development, described the pastors who lead the conference’s emerging faith communities as modern-day circuit riders who are spreading the faith across a particular region, not just within the confines of a single church building.
Hutchinson said the new communities are exploring the question “What does it look like to cultivate and lead a healthy, vital United Methodist spiritual movement in a particular region?”
The Rev. Bryan Tener, director of contextual evangelism for the denomination’s Discipleship Ministries, has witnessed among U.S. United Methodists a new fervor for starting new faith communities. That excitement extends to more conventional church planting as well as organizing United Methodist Fresh Expressions — often lay-led Christian communities that reach new people outside church walls in places like coffeehouses, laundromats and even tattoo parlors.
Tener said some 420 United Methodists have registered for the inaugural Fresh Expressions United Methodist National Gathering on Feb. 7-9 at Providence United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Tener also noted that some recent church plants formed this past year in the wake of disaffiliations are already averaging 100 to 150 in worship attendance — far more people than the initial remnant groups that started the congregations.
“I think these examples point towards a more hope-filled future for The United Methodist Church by remembering our beginnings as a people called Methodists,” Tener said. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, lay people led the spread of the Methodist movement. That is what he is seeing now.
“Whether it’s disaffiliation or the COVID pandemic or some other disruption that has occurred, there is still the life-giving good news of Jesus Christ to share,” Tener said. “And there are people who have discovered and discerned their call and purpose and desire to live that out faithfully as disciples of Jesus.”
Jones, the Haywood Emerging Faith Community pastor, said she feels like she is serving on a new frontier.
“We have to meet people where they are,” Jones said. “We step into spaces where God is already at work — to be the hands and feet and voice of Jesus, to share God's love.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Friday Digests.
