Congregations pledge to welcome all who wish to remain United Methodist when their home churches vote to disaffiliate.ĭiscipleship Ministries, the UMC agency responsible for helping local churches, has reinvigorated a 2010 course, “ Launchpad,” designed to give churches some handles on how to proceed through the spiritual and emotional effects of “regrouping in the wake of disaffiliation.” ‘Stay UMC’Ĭhurches that “Stay UMC,” as a popular loyalist slogan goes, sometimes are finding themselves disrupted by a human equivalent of “fruit-basket-turnover.” In regions such as North Carolina, Western Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Ohio and parts of Texas, congregations are replicating a movement known as Lighthouse Churches. The deadline for leaving under a current exit provision comes Dec. That number will rise as more annual conferences continue to approve exits through mid-July. Great Plains (Kansas and Nebraska): 156 churches out of 905Īn unofficial tally being kept by UM News showed a total of 4,814 churches approved for disaffiliation by annual conferences as of June 7. A sample gathered from secular news and church media shows the following departures: Departing churches’ subsequent affiliations run a gamut from joining the year-old conservative Global Methodist Church to moving into other Wesleyan denominations or becoming independent.īecause of the wave of conference disaffiliation approvals, the number of churches leaving the UMC has swelled recently. A report by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership published in March showed the bulk of disaffiliating churches are in the South and Southwest and are predominantly white and rural. Geography, demographics and theology also play big roles. Annual conferences must approve a local church’s exit in order for the church to claim its real and personal property. This year, conference sessions frequently include approvals of churches whose congregations have voted by two-thirds margins to leave the UMC over “reasons of conscience.” Those “reasons of conscience” typically involve disputes over the acceptance of LGBTQ persons - specifically the prospects of ordaining LGBTQ clergy or opening churches to allow same-sex weddings, both practices the UMC currently bans. Late spring and early summer are known as “annual conference season.” Late spring and early summer are known as “annual conference season” when regional bodies gather to review mission and ministry, renew acquaintances and receive yearly pastoral appointments made by bishops. United Methodists throughout the United States are feeling anew the effects of the UMC’s breakup, no matter whether their congregations are voting to depart or stay. (UM Insight Screenshot from Bartlett UMC website) Feeling breakup effects anew She added: “We may be mostly old, but we’ve got gumption.”īaker’s views about the ongoing current of churches leaving the United Methodist denomination appear typical of how grassroots congregations are dealing with the split, according to reports in secular newspapers, from church members and from a church agency tasked with helping local churches.īartlett United Methodist Church has a small but vigorous congregation that serves its surrounding community, says member Tami Baker. We provide loaded backpacks for area children at the beginning of school and host a neighborhood Easter Egg hunt with crafts and story time.” “We help distribute food to Bartlett residents provided by the Caring Place in Georgetown. “We run a free clothes closet twice a month (three times when there’s a fifth Saturday) and also distribute furniture, food and kitchenware through the clothes closet and open it as needed in times of fire and flood,” Baker wrote. Nonetheless, in keeping with Methodism’s founder John Wesley’s instruction to “do good,” the church tends to the needs of people in its surrounding area. We still love them.”īartlett UMC typically has fewer than 20 people in worship on Sunday in its town of 1,633 residents located about 55 miles northeast of Austin. Sometimes they come back sometimes they move parallel to us and sometimes they seem to take sharp right turns or go in bizarre directions. They now must forge their own path while hopefully maintaining our basic lessons for being a good human. When tiny but energetic Bartlett United Methodist Church in central Texas began to talk about the denomination’s split, member Tami Baker said she felt “a sense of dread and then grief as talk of the pending split increased.”įurther into the conversation, Baker said, she had a revelation: “As parents, we raise our children to think independently while trying to impart wisdom and encourage compassion.
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