Key points:
- Highland Park United Methodist Church leaders held a town hall that aired their perspective on the dispute with the Horizon Texas Conference that has now landed in civil court.
- They also shared why they think the Dallas megachurch should break away from The United Methodist Church.
- Leaving with property is not so simple as a congregational vote.
Amid a legal battle with its conference, leaders of a Dallas megachurch are now urging congregation members to consider a vote to withdraw from The United Methodist Church.
Highland Park United Methodist’s church council held a town hall Oct. 11 for church members that laid out the leaders’ perspective on what transpired before the lawsuit and their broken faith in United Methodist leadership, especially Horizon Texas Conference Bishop Rubén Saenz Jr.
“The question is: Knowing what we know now, should our church remain part of The United Methodist Church?” Caroline Nowlin told those gathered. She grew up at Highland Park United Methodist and since January has served as chair of the 23-member church council.
“The church council has not decided on that question, though many of us can’t help but have strong opinions,” she added. “As we’ve told you, we won’t make this decision alone. We’ll make it with you. If the church council recommends severing our ties with The United Methodist Church, the decision to do so would come to a vote to you.”
Some 800 people in the congregation of more than 15,000 attended the town hall, which was also livestreamed and recorded. A question-and-answer session followed that was not shown online in hopes of encouraging people to speak openly. Most of the 20 or so members who spoke shared the speakers’ anger with the conference, with a handful urging caution.
The church council plans to meet Oct. 13 to deliberate on its recommendation. At this point, a vote on disaffiliation has not been scheduled.
A big part of the dispute has been about how much say congregants have in their church’s decision-making under bylaws and new state incorporation documents Highland Park United Methodist Church filed in 2022.
The Horizon Texas Conference filed a lawsuit Aug. 10 against the church — arguing the church council’s changes to the bylaws improperly removed oversight by the denomination and the church’s own congregants.
The conference’s lawsuit followed meetings in December and March in which Bishop Saenz and other conference leaders urged the church to revise its bylaws to bring them back in line with the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s law book, and United Methodist processes.
Among other changes, the revised bylaws strip away earlier references to the denomination’s Discipline, and the legal documents now list the church’s official name as “Highland Park Methodist Church.” The congregation’s business name remains “Highland Park United Methodist Church.”
During the town hall, church leaders insisted they had followed the Discipline in making the changes and decried what they saw as the bishop’s intransigence in mandating they be changed. The church leaders also spoke in defense of the Rev. Matt Tuggle, the church’s senior pastor, who they said is now facing a complaint under church law for not working to restore the bylaws.
In the response to the lawsuit, filed Sept. 21, the church leadership said it informed the conference of the changes at the time and strongly denied that the church was trying in 2022 to cut ties with The United Methodist Church.
The church council announced the town hall the same day that Judge Bridgett Whitmore announced Oct. 12, 2027, as the date for the suit’s non-jury trial.
However, no Highland Park leader mentioned the trial date in the town hall’s announcement or public presentation.
Instead, the eight leaders who spoke at the town hall said, given their current disagreements with the bishop, they were having second thoughts about the church staying United Methodist.
Greg Swalwell, a member of both Highland Park’s church council and pastor-parish relations committee, noted that Saenz is currently also president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops.
“I also really don’t have any confidence in the entire episcopal leadership of The United Methodist Church,” Swalwell said, “and I find it hard to trust them as well because they elected him.”
The Horizon Texas Conference “strongly rejects the accusations against Bishop Saenz’s honesty and character,” the conference said in a statement.
“The conference and its clergy and staff have acted in accordance with its responsibility to uphold the covenant we share as United Methodists. The Conference has consistently communicated its concerns about Highland Park’s governing documents and its request that those documents be restored and the relationship between Highland Park and the Conference be reconciled.”
The Rev. Chip Robertson, Highland Park’s pastor of traditional worship and executive projects, acknowledged that the change in the bylaws was intended to give the church more flexibility in whether they stayed part of the denomination.
Robertson echoed the metaphor he said Saenz had used in a clergy meeting that compared the church’s relationship to the denomination to a marriage.
He said the church has “pre-existing rights under Texas law, and those rights say that if the marriage is not going to work, you can get out of it,” he said. “And that’s all the bylaws were, putting in place this legal right that we have always had in a way that the Texas Supreme Court would look at it and say we’ll decide this case.”
Tuggle said if the church opted to leave The United Methodist Church, it would still be Methodist. “Our mission, our commitment to local churches, it would remain exactly the same,” he said. He went on to say he envisions forming a network with other like-minded churches.
Tuggle’s plans alarmed at least two longtime Highland Park members who attended the town hall. The United Methodist Church is already a connectional church whose reach extends far beyond any single congregation or conference, for that matter.
“Connectionalism means that you’re sending mission to places you’ll never be able to go; you’re saving souls you’ll never meet; and you’re providing for and educating children you’ll never be able to hug,” said one of the church members, who asked to remain anonymous so her volunteer work with the church would not be jeopardized.
Connectionalism also means that leaving the denomination with property is not a simple matter of taking a congregational vote.
The United Methodist Church maintains a centuries-old trust clause, first established by Methodism founder John Wesley, that says church property is held in trust for the benefit of the denomination. What that means is that while people can leave a church at any time, they can’t take property with them.
From 2019 to 2023, during the time Highland Park changed its bylaws, the denomination offered a limited release from the trust clause — allowing churches to leave with property if they met certain financial and procedural conditions. Among those conditions was a two-thirds vote of the congregation to leave.
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More than 7,600 churches — about a quarter of the denomination’s U.S. churches — used that policy to leave the denomination with property. However, that policy expired on Dec. 31, 2023. The next year, the denomination’s General Conference took the additional step of removing it entirely from the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s policy book. The United Methodist Judicial Council subsequently declared the trust clause is now back in full force.
Civil courts across the U.S. repeatedly have upheld the United Methodist trust clause in adjudicating church-property disputes because many other nonprofits also have trust provisions for property. The U.S. Supreme Court, in establishing that civil courts should use neutral principles of law in settling such cases, even pointed to a Georgia Supreme Court decision based on the United Methodist trust provision as an example of applying neutral principles.
Highland Park United Methodist leaders cite a 2020 Texas Supreme Court decision that sided with the majority of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth in its breakaway from The Episcopal Church. But the United Methodist trust provision is set up differently from what Episcopalians use.
The 110-year-old Highland Park United Methodist stands adjacent to Southern Methodist University in a well-heeled Dallas neighborhood, and leaders talked about the financial resources the church has to support its clergy and stand up to The United Methodist Church.
The church has about 100 people on its staff and some 80 volunteers serving on its administrative committees.
The Horizon Texas Conference stretches from the Texas Panhandle south to almost Austin and east to Paris, Texas. Highland Park is the conference’s biggest church, but the conference is also home to other large churches including First United Methodist-Fort Worth with nearly 11,000 members and First United Methodist- Richardson with more than 6,000 members.
During the town hall, the church leaders joked that if they didn’t stand by Tuggle, he might be sent to a new appointment in Lubbock. First United Methodist in Lubbock is another large church, with nearly 5,000 members.
Since the lawsuit was filed, two clergy who previously served at Highland Park have moved to new appointments in the Dallas area. They now serve University Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, about three miles away, and Christ United Methodist in the Dallas suburb of Plano. Both are also large United Methodist churches.
“As United Methodists, we share a covenant that connects us to one another and calls each of us to honor the commitments we have made together,” the Horizon Texas Conference said in a statement. “The Horizon Texas Conference has asked, and continues to ask, that Highland Park United Methodist Church restore its governing documents in accordance with those shared commitments. That has been our request from the beginning.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
