With a deadline approaching, the United Methodist Church is falling apart

With 17,000 members, White’s Chapel Methodist Church in Southlake, Texas, offers multiple worship services every weekend, along with the kind of attractions that only the largest houses of worship can boast: a coffee shop, an indoor playground, a Christmas festival with pony rides and fireworks, and almost daily opportunities for volunteering and socializing. On Sunday mornings, a little white bulldog named Wesley, after the founder of Methodism, wanders around campus with an attendant to greet admirers.

“They call this place the biggest little church,” said Linda Rutan, who sat with her husband near a sprawling holiday train on a recent Sunday morning. The Rutans have been attending White’s Chapel since moving to Texas from California in 2022. “It’s so friendly,” she said, “you don’t feel like it’s a huge church.”

Until July, White’s Chapel was the second-largest United Methodist congregation in the country. The conservative-leaning church lost its status this year not because it was shrinking – it is growing, its leaders say – but because it left the denomination.

America’s second-largest Protestant denomination is in the final stages of a slow-motion rupture that has so far led to the departure of a quarter of the country’s roughly 30,000 United Methodist churches, according to the denomination’s press office .

Central to Methodists is the issue of ordaining and marrying LGBTQ people, an issue that has splintered many other Protestant denominations and that Methodists have debated for years.

In 2019, Methodist leaders opened the option for congregations to forego “reasons of conscience,” which in most cases would allow them to take their belongings and belongings with them on a clean slate if they were allowed to leave before December 31, 2023. Many conservative congregations have done just that.

“It’s the largest church schism ever,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University. According to the US Religion Census, there were eight million Methodists in the United States in 2020. Between large-scale departures and the broader trend of decline, that number could fall by half within a decade, said Dr. Burge.

The exodus marks a disastrous decline for the broader tradition of Protestantism, which once dominated the American religious, social and cultural landscape.

As the deadline approaches, the remaining congregations and leaders are taking stock of their losses and looking ahead to a future in which the denomination’s footprint in the United States may continue to shrink (even as it grows abroad, especially in Africa ). In Texas, a historic stronghold for United Methodists, more than 40 percent of churches have left.

“It’s significant, and it comes at a high cost,” said Thomas Bickerton, a lifelong Methodist who chairs the denomination’s Council of Bishops. More than 7,500 congregations have left since 2019, a number he said was slightly higher than leaders expected when they made the offer. Next year, the Methodists plan to vote on what will likely be their lowest quarterly budget in four decades.

Officially, the United Methodist Church still prohibits same-sex marriage and does not allow “self-identified, practicing” gays to serve as ministers. But in recent years some leaders began to defy official restrictions on these practices, and the church now has a number of openly gay clergy and two gay bishops. Many expect that church law could change — and lead to more departures — at the denomination’s quadrennial meeting next spring in Charlotte, N.C.

That meeting was initially scheduled for 2020, but was postponed several times in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, conservatives launched a rival denomination, the Global Methodist Church, which says it will not ordain or marry homosexuals. As of this fall, the new denomination said more than 3,000 congregations had joined.

White’s Chapel is helping to launch a new denomination, the Methodist Collegiate Church, of which it will serve as the inaugural “cathedral.” Many other departing churches have thus far chosen to remain independent of any denomination.

The history of the Methodist movement dates back to 18th-century England, when preacher John Wesley proposed a “method” to encourage a deeper commitment to the Christian life, including small group meetings and an emphasis on holiness and service. In the United States, faith grew rapidly in the 19th century as circuit riders crisscrossed the country preaching and planting churches. Methodists have ordained women since the 1950s, an issue that has divided many Protestant traditions but remains uncontested within Methodism.

After a series of mergers and schisms, the current United Methodist Church – by far the largest expression of Methodism – was founded in Dallas in 1968. As of 2020, only the Southern Baptist Convention was larger among Protestant denominations.

Historically, United Methodism has been a denomination characterized by both geographic and ideological diversity. Judge Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the Supreme Court opinion establishing the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, was a Methodist; This also applies to President George W. Bush, who signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act thirty years later. The list of 31 current members of Congress who are Methodist includes conservative Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and his progressive Democratic colleague Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

But the era of big-tent Methodism may now be coming to an end, as conservative congregations retreat. Mr. Cotton’s lifelong congregation, now known as the Dardanelle Methodist Church, left the denomination this year and joined the Global Methodists. A Analysis this summer found that departing churches were disproportionately white, located in the South, and likely led by male pastors.

The United Methodist Church is part of the tradition of mainstream Protestantism, which is now generally progressive in its theology and traditional in its worship style. Mid 20th century, more than two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestant. Now most studies show less than 15 percent of the country identifies with the mainline, a group that also includes the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The split is the latest in decades of division within Christian denominations over questions of sexuality and theology. Most major denominations now endorse same-sex marriage — and most have seen a significant portion of their churches split into new denominations that maintain their traditions and worship styles while restoring what they describe as theological orthodoxy.

Mr. Bickerton, the bishop, said that many of the congregations that left the United Methodists seemed to be motivated as much by a desire for financial independence as by deep theological differences.

“We have learned that this is not as much about human sexuality as we thought,” he said. “This is about power, control and money.”

That’s not the language White’s Chapel leaders use to describe their decision to leave. But they acknowledge that their congregation’s dissatisfaction with United Methodism extended beyond its approach to sexuality.

In Southlake, congregants were increasingly wary of the direction of the national denomination’s theology. But they were also dissatisfied with the Methodist policy of moving ministers to new locations every three years. Money was also a problem. Because of its extraordinary growth, White’s Chapel was paying the denomination about $600,000 annually and had lost confidence that the money was being well spent by a remote administrative bureaucracy, said the Rev. Larry Duggins, a longtime member the church hired to help manage the divorce . process.

“We wanted to see: Where did that money go?” said Rev. Duggins, who is now chancellor of the new denomination of the Methodist Collegiate Church. “We were not happy with what we saw.” The church felt that too much of the money was going to administrative overhead rather than its core missions.

Last year, 93 percent of church members voted to leave, a decision that was formalized this summer.

For many members, the vote meant that their theological and political values ​​were increasingly out of step with mainstream Christianity.

“There is a trend to liberalize many things in society, not just churches,” said Bruce Krieger, who has attended the church since the 1990s. The sexuality issue had become a political football, he said, in which liberals in the denomination wanted to demonstrate their allegiance to a broader range of progressive causes that made Mr. Krieger and his wife — “conservative people” — increasingly uncomfortable.

They voted to leave.

According to Mr. Krieger, Sunday mornings have not changed much since White’s Chapel left the United Methodists. The Christmas season had begun and he was looking forward to the brunch for all the churches after a special service that included a live nativity scene – a long-standing tradition.

Some people had left after the vote, but not many, he said, and newcomers have already arrived to take their places.