Why the Methodist Church Split

1. The Short Answer

The Methodist split of 2019 to 2024 was a separation inside one denomination, the United Methodist Church, over whether it would ordain clergy in same-sex relationships and allow its clergy to officiate at same-sex weddings. The denomination's law book, the Book of Discipline, had forbidden both since the 1980s and 1990s, and those prohibitions were contested at every General Conference for thirty years without either side winning permanently. A special General Conference held in St. Louis in February 2019 voted to keep and tighten the prohibitions, and in the same session adopted Paragraph 2553, a temporary provision letting United States congregations leave with their property on stated financial terms before the end of 2023.

What followed was a four-year wave of congregational departures. Traditionalist leaders concluded through 2020 and 2021 that the 2019 decision was going unenforced in many annual conferences. The Global Methodist Church launched on 1 May 2022 as a new denomination for congregations holding the traditional position. Roughly 7,600 United States congregations were approved to disaffiliate before the December 2023 deadline. Then, in the spring of 2024, with many traditionalist delegates from those departed churches no longer seated, the General Conference meeting in Charlotte removed the prohibitions entirely.

Source: United Methodist News Service and the denomination's General Council on Finance and Administration reported disaffiliation totals as annual conferences ratified them through 2023. Two cautions apply to any figure quoted anywhere, including this page. Congregations that disaffiliated did not all join the Global Methodist Church; some became independent, some joined other Wesleyan bodies, and some closed. This page states no membership figure for either denomination, because reported totals moved substantially during and after the separation and we could not verify a current number to the standard this site requires.

2. What the Argument Was Actually About

The presenting question was human sexuality, and specifically two provisions of church law: whether a person in a same-sex relationship could be ordained and appointed as a United Methodist pastor, and whether a United Methodist pastor could conduct a same-sex wedding. Underneath those two provisions ran three deeper disagreements that gave the fight its length and its bitterness.

Scripture and How It Is Read

Traditionalists in the UMC argued that the biblical texts on sexual conduct (Genesis 2:24, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10) carry a consistent moral teaching that the Church has held everywhere and always, and that a denomination is not free to reverse it. Progressives argued that Scripture is read through the whole of the Wesleyan inheritance, that Methodism has already revised its reading of biblical texts on slavery and on the ministry of women, and that faithful reading of Scripture in the light of tradition, reason and experience can reach a different conclusion here. Both sides invoked John Wesley. Both sides invoked the same four sources.

Whether Church Law Binds

The second disagreement was about enforcement, and it may have mattered more than the first. Some bishops and annual conferences declined to bring complaints against clergy who performed same-sex weddings, or resolved such complaints with a reprimand and no penalty. Others enforced the Discipline to the letter. Traditionalists concluded that the denomination had a written law that a significant part of it had stopped obeying, which meant that winning votes at General Conference achieved nothing. Progressives held that consciences could not be coerced and that pastoral practice on the ground had already moved ahead of the law book.

Who Gets to Decide, and Where

The third disagreement was structural. The UMC is a worldwide body, and its General Conference is the only entity that can speak for the whole denomination. By the 2010s a growing share of the delegates came from central conferences outside the United States, above all in Africa, where the traditional position had strong support. American progressives found themselves losing votes on a question they regarded as settled in their own context. American traditionalists found themselves winning votes that their own bishops would not enforce. Neither outcome is stable, and the whole separation can be read as the collapse of a structure asked to hold together regions that had reached different conclusions.

3. The Road to 2019: Fifty Years of Votes

The dispute did not begin in 2019. It began at the first General Conference held after the United Methodist Church was formed, and it ran continuously for half a century. Getting the sequence right explains why the eventual break was so complete: by 2019 both sides had spent decades learning that the other side would not concede.

1972: The Language Enters the Book

The General Conference of 1972, the first after the 1968 merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, adopted a new statement of Social Principles. A floor amendment added the sentence that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. The sentence had not been in the drafting committee's text. It stayed in the Book of Discipline for fifty-two years, and every General Conference from then on received petitions to remove it.

1984 and 1996: The Two Prohibitions

The 1984 General Conference barred self-avowed practising homosexual persons from ordination and appointment as clergy. The 1996 General Conference added the provision that United Methodist ministers shall not conduct ceremonies celebrating same-sex unions, and that such ceremonies shall not be held in United Methodist churches. Those two rules, plus the 1972 sentence, are the three provisions the whole subsequent fight was about. All three were removed in 2024.

The Trials of the Late 1990s

Church trials followed almost immediately. The Rev. Jimmy Creech was tried in 1998 for conducting a same-sex union service in Omaha and acquitted, then tried again after a second ceremony and defrocked in 1999. The Rev. Gregory Dell of Chicago was suspended in 1999 for the same offence. Cases like these hardened both sides. Traditionalists saw the law vindicated. Progressives saw pastors punished for accompanying their own parishioners.

2016: The Commission on a Way Forward

By the General Conference of 2016 in Portland, Oregon, the body was close to open rupture on the floor. The bishops intervened with an unusual proposal: defer all legislation on human sexuality, appoint a Commission on a Way Forward to design options, and call a special General Conference to decide. The delegates accepted. The commission produced three plans. The One Church Plan would have removed the restrictive language and left decisions to annual conferences and local congregations. The Connectional Conference Plan would have reorganised the denomination into value-based conferences. The Traditional Plan would have kept the prohibitions and strengthened accountability. A majority of the Council of Bishops recommended the One Church Plan.

4. St. Louis 2019 and Paragraph 2553

The special General Conference met in St. Louis from 23 to 26 February 2019, with a single item on its agenda. It adopted the Traditional Plan, keeping the prohibitions on ordaining clergy in same-sex relationships and on clergy conducting same-sex weddings, and adding accountability measures including mandatory minimum penalties for clergy who violated them. The One Church Plan was defeated. The vote was close, and the coalition that carried it combined American traditionalists with a large bloc of delegates from Africa and the Philippines.

The Judicial Council Struck Parts of It

The UMC's Judicial Council, its supreme court, reviewed the Traditional Plan in April 2019 and found several of its accountability provisions unconstitutional under the denomination's own constitution, while allowing others to stand. The result was a partial victory that satisfied nobody. Traditionalists had the prohibitions and had lost some of the enforcement machinery they had passed to make the prohibitions real. Progressives faced a strengthened law they had no intention of obeying.

What Paragraph 2553 Said

The same session adopted a second measure that turned out to matter more than the first. Paragraph 2553 was added to the Book of Discipline as a temporary provision permitting a local church in the United States to leave the denomination with its property, for reasons of conscience regarding the requirements and provisions of the Discipline related to human sexuality. It applied to congregations in the United States only. It expired on 31 December 2023.

The terms were specific and they were not cheap:

• A church conference vote of the professing members present, requiring a two-thirds majority.
• Payment of two years of apportionments, the denomination's connectional funding assessment.
• Payment of the congregation's share of the annual conference's unfunded clergy pension liability, calculated by Wespath, the denomination's benefits agency.
• Any additional terms the annual conference chose to impose, which varied widely from one conference to another.
• Ratification by a simple majority vote of the annual conference itself, which meant a congregation could satisfy every financial term and still be refused.

That last condition is the one most reporting missed. Disaffiliation under Paragraph 2553 was a negotiated exit that the annual conference had to approve, and both the price and the willingness varied enormously by region.

5. The Protocol That Was Never Voted On

In the year after St. Louis a group of sixteen bishops and advocacy leaders from across the denomination's factions met under a professional mediator, the attorney Kenneth Feinberg, and produced a negotiated plan for an orderly separation. The Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation was announced on 3 January 2020. Under it, the United Methodist Church would remain in existence and would remove the restrictive language, while traditionalists would form a new denomination funded with a stated sum from UMC reserves, with further money set aside for Black Methodist, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and Pacific Islander ministries. Congregations and whole annual conferences could align with either body by a vote, and the trust clause would be released for those that left.

The Protocol had broad support and it was never voted on. The General Conference scheduled for May 2020 in Minneapolis was postponed by the pandemic to 2021, then to 2022, then, in an announcement made in early March 2022, to 2024. Each postponement extended the period in which the 2019 law stood on paper and went unenforced in parts of the denomination, and each one pushed the funded, negotiated exit further out of reach.

The Decision to Stop Waiting

The March 2022 postponement was the turning point. Traditionalist leaders organised in the Wesleyan Covenant Association, a body formed in 2016 to hold the traditional position inside the UMC and to prepare a new denomination if separation became necessary, concluded that a further two-year wait would leave congregations trapped. Paragraph 2553 was already running and would expire at the end of 2023, whatever happened at a General Conference in 2024. Within two months of that announcement, the Global Methodist Church launched.

The consequence is worth stating clearly, because it shaped everything after. The separation happened through an unfunded, congregation-by-congregation exit with a hard deadline, rather than through the negotiated settlement both sides had signed. Congregations paid their own way out. Annual conferences set their own terms. Lawyers were involved in a great many of the departures, and in some regions the process consumed years of pastoral energy that would otherwise have gone into ordinary parish work.

6. How Leaving Actually Worked

American congregational property law is the reason this separation was slow, expensive and litigated. A United Methodist congregation that wanted to leave could not simply vote and walk, because in most cases it did not own its building outright in the way its members assumed.

The Trust Clause

Paragraph 2501 of the Book of Discipline states that all property held by a local United Methodist church is held in trust for the benefit of the entire denomination. The clause traces back to John Wesley's model deed of 1763, which secured chapels for preaching that conformed to his Sermons and Notes, and it was carried into American Methodism from the start. Its purpose is to stop a single congregation or a single preacher from capturing a building the wider connexion paid for and built. Its effect in 2019 was that a congregation wanting to leave had to be released from the trust, and only the denomination could release it.

United States courts resolve church property disputes under two competing approaches set out by the Supreme Court. Under the deference approach descended from Watson v. Jones (1871), a civil court defers to the decisions of the highest judicatory of a hierarchical church. Under the neutral principles approach permitted by Jones v. Wolf (1979), a court reads deeds, statutes and corporate documents like any other property instrument, and a trust clause in a denominational discipline will generally be enforced if it is properly reflected in the local documents. Either way, congregations challenging the trust clause in court faced long odds, and most that left did so by paying the negotiated price instead.

The Price

The direct costs were the two years of apportionments and the unfunded pension liability share, and both were substantial for a small congregation. The pension figure in particular surprised many churches, because it reflected an actuarial share of the annual conference's obligation to retired clergy rather than anything the congregation had budgeted for. Annual conferences added their own conditions on top. Some asked for a share of the building's appraised value. Some asked for nothing beyond the Discipline's minimum. Some paused disaffiliations altogether while their bishops and trustees worked out policy, which cost congregations months against a fixed deadline.

The Vote

The congregational vote itself divided parishes. A two-thirds threshold means that a church leaving with 70 per cent support leaves 30 per cent of its members behind in a building that is no longer theirs, and a church staying with 60 per cent support keeps a large minority who wanted to go. Both outcomes produced departures of individual families in the following months. Pastors were placed in an impossible position, since a pastor who advocated one way lost the trust of the members who wanted the other, and a pastor who stayed silent was accused by both.

Those human costs are the part of this story that statistics do not carry. Congregations that had buried each other's parents for forty years stopped speaking. Choirs dissolved. Ministers who had trained together and served neighbouring parishes ended up in rival denominations. Whatever a reader thinks about the underlying question, the pastoral wreckage is real and it is still being cleaned up.

7. How Many Left, and Where They Went

United Methodist News Service reported that roughly 7,600 United States congregations were approved for disaffiliation under Paragraph 2553 before the deadline of 31 December 2023, which is about a quarter of the denomination's United States churches. Most of those approvals came in a rush during 2023, as annual conferences held special sessions to process the final wave before the provision expired.

Source: disaffiliation totals were compiled and published by United Methodist News Service from the ratification votes of the individual annual conferences, with the denomination's General Council on Finance and Administration reporting related figures. The count is of congregations approved to disaffiliate under Paragraph 2553 in the United States. It excludes congregations that left by other routes, congregations that closed, and any departures outside the United States, and it says nothing about how many members went with each congregation.

The Geography Was Uneven

Departures clustered heavily in the South and lower Midwest, and were sparse in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Several annual conferences in Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Louisiana lost large fractions of their congregations. Conferences in New England, New York and the Pacific Northwest lost comparatively few. That pattern followed the theological geography of American Methodism closely, and it also followed the willingness of individual annual conferences to grant exits on reasonable terms.

Where the Departing Churches Went

Assuming that every disaffiliating congregation joined the Global Methodist Church is the most common error in coverage of this story. Departing churches took at least four routes:

• The Global Methodist Church. The body founded specifically for congregations leaving over this dispute, and the destination a large share of the departing churches chose.
• Independence. A substantial number of congregations chose to become independent community churches with no denominational affiliation at all, keeping Wesleyan preaching without a connexion. Some later joined networks of former United Methodist churches formed for mutual support.
• Other Wesleyan denominations. Existing Holiness and Methodist bodies received congregations, including the Free Methodist Church, the Congregational Methodist Church and the Church of the Nazarene, all of which already held the traditional position and had existed for generations.
• Closure. Some small congregations that voted to leave could not sustain themselves without connexional support and closed within a few years.

A smaller movement ran in the other direction. The Liberation Methodist Connexion, launched in November 2020, formed as a home for people who had left the UMC from the progressive side, holding that the denomination's continued debate over their standing was itself the injury. Individual members also left in both directions without their congregations, and that quiet attrition does not appear in any of the disaffiliation counts.

8. What the Global Methodist Church Is

The Global Methodist Church is a Wesleyan denomination that launched on 1 May 2022, organised for congregations and clergy holding the traditional position on marriage and ordination. It began operating under a Transitional Book of Doctrines and Discipline written before the launch, governed by a transitional leadership council, and it held its convening General Conference in San José, Costa Rica in September 2024, where it adopted its permanent discipline and elected bishops.

What It Keeps From Methodism

The GMC keeps the historic Methodist doctrinal standards without alteration: the Articles of Religion that Wesley abridged from the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, the Confession of Faith inherited from the Evangelical United Brethren, and Wesley's Sermons and Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament. It keeps the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. It keeps bishops and an episcopal appointment system, which distinguishes it from the congregational route some departing churches took. It keeps two sacraments, infant baptism, and the Wesleyan account of prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace. It ordains women to full ministry, which several of the older Holiness bodies also do and which the Catholic Church does not.

What It Changed

The structural differences are deliberate reactions to what its founders experienced in the UMC:

Source: the entries above are taken from each denomination's own published law, namely the United Methodist Book of Discipline and the Global Methodist Book of Doctrines and Discipline. No membership figure is given for either body, for the reason set out in section 1.

The Name Confuses People

The word Global in the title has led some readers to assume the GMC is the worldwide parent of Methodism or the international arm of the UMC. Neither is the case. The worldwide association of Methodist and Wesleyan denominations is the World Methodist Council, an older body whose member churches are spread across every inhabited continent, and both the United Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church stand as separate denominations in relation to it. Our guide to the Christian denominations and how they relate places both on the wider map.

9. Charlotte 2024: What the UMC Decided

The postponed General Conference finally met in Charlotte, North Carolina in the spring of 2024, four years late. Its composition had changed fundamentally. Delegates are apportioned by membership, and the seats had been allocated on figures predating the disaffiliations, so many United States delegations arrived representing conferences that had lost a quarter or more of their churches, with the traditionalist congregations that would have elected traditionalist delegates already gone. Delegates had been elected in 2019 for a conference expected the following year, and a number of them had themselves left the denomination by the time it met and were replaced.

The Three Provisions Removed

The conference removed the prohibition on ordaining self-avowed practising homosexual clergy. It removed the prohibition on clergy conducting same-sex weddings and on such weddings being held in United Methodist churches. It adopted a revised set of Social Principles that no longer contained the 1972 sentence about the practice of homosexuality being incompatible with Christian teaching, and that defined marriage in terms permitting both traditional and same-sex unions. Several of these actions passed by wide margins and some without debate, a striking contrast with the knife-edge votes of the previous three decades, and a direct measure of who was no longer in the room.

The Conscience Provisions

The same conference added protections for clergy and congregations holding the traditional view. No clergy member is required to perform a same-sex wedding, no congregation is required to host one, and bishops are not required to ordain or appoint against their conscience on this question. Traditionalists who remained in the UMC point to these provisions as the ground on which they stay. Others regard them as a settlement that will be revisited by a future General Conference, since anything a General Conference passes a later one can undo.

Regionalisation

Charlotte also approved a plan called worldwide regionalisation, designed to let regions of the denomination adapt parts of the Book of Discipline to their own contexts, placing the United States on the same footing as the central conferences rather than treating American practice as the default. Because regionalisation changes the denomination's constitution, the measures took the form of constitutional amendments, which then went to the annual conferences around the world for ratification. The purpose was plain: to allow African and Filipino United Methodists to keep the traditional discipline in their own regions while remaining in the same denomination as United States conferences that had changed theirs.

10. Africa, the Philippines and Europe

A large share of United Methodist membership lies outside the United States, concentrated in Africa, with substantial bodies in the Philippines and in Europe and Eurasia. Any account of this split that describes it as an American story is incomplete, and the international dimension explains several features of the timeline that otherwise look strange.

Why African Delegates Mattered

The UMC's African membership grew steadily through the decades in which its American membership declined, above all in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Because General Conference delegates are apportioned by membership, that growth translated into voting strength. African delegates held the traditional position on marriage in large majorities and said so consistently, and their votes were decisive in every close outcome from the 2000s through 2019. African leaders also objected, publicly and sharply, to being characterised in American church debate as a bloc that had been bought or coached, and insisted their position was their own theological judgement.

They Had No Exit Door

Paragraph 2553 applied to congregations in the United States only. Churches in the central conferences outside the United States had no equivalent route while it was open, which meant the traditionalists with the strongest voting position in the denomination were also the ones least able to leave it. That asymmetry is one reason the 2024 result looked so decisive on the floor while the underlying disagreement in the worldwide church remained unresolved.

What Happened Instead

Whole annual conferences outside the United States began taking their own decisions. United Methodist News reported that the Côte d'Ivoire Annual Conference voted in May 2024 to withdraw from the denomination, a departure at conference scale rather than congregation scale. Elsewhere, conferences and individual congregations aligned with the Global Methodist Church, which has been organising outside the United States since its launch. Others chose to remain and to rely on regionalisation to keep their own discipline. The situation across Africa is genuinely mixed, it is still moving, and any page that states a settled outcome for the continent is overstating what is known.

11. What a Catholic Should Notice

Catholics reading this story should resist the temptation to enjoy it. Christ prayed that his followers would be one so that the world might believe (John 17:21), and every division among Christians works against that prayer. Catholics have their own history of schism, their own scandals, and their own long argument with the Orthodox East. Watching another communion tear is an occasion for prayer rather than for satisfaction.

The Question of Authority

The most instructive feature of the split for a Catholic is what settled it. Methodist doctrine is decided by a General Conference, an elected legislative assembly meeting every four years, and a General Conference can reverse what an earlier one enacted. The UMC demonstrated this precisely: the same body that voted in 2019 to keep the prohibitions voted in 2024 to remove them, with no change in the underlying Scripture or in Wesley's standards, and with the change in outcome tracking the change in who held the seats.

Catholic teaching holds that Christ gave a teaching office to Peter and the apostles and to their successors, and that this office is not a legislature. "Whoever listens to you listens to me" (Luke 10:16). "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church" (Matthew 16:18). The magisterium can develop a teaching and can clarify it; it cannot put settled moral doctrine to a floor vote and reverse it because the delegates changed. That is a claim Methodists do not accept, and stating it here is stating the house position rather than scoring a point. The disagreement about authority is set out fully in our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences.

The Ecumenical Relationship Continues

Catholic and Methodist theologians have been in formal dialogue since 1967, when the Joint Commission between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council began work, and that dialogue has produced reports on the Eucharist, on ministry, on the Holy Spirit and on the nature of the Church. In 2006 the World Methodist Council formally associated itself with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement between Catholics and Lutherans, adding Methodism's assent to a common statement on how a sinner is made right with God. Our guide to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification explains what was agreed and what remains open.

Methodism's account of grace runs unusually close to Catholic teaching. Wesley held that God's prevenient grace reaches every person, that grace can be resisted, that a believer is genuinely transformed rather than only pardoned, and that a Christian can fall away. All four claims sit closer to Trent than almost anything else produced by the English-speaking Reformation. That closeness is why the ecumenical relationship has been fruitful, and it is why this particular division is a loss for Catholics as well.

The Pattern Is Not Unique

Several American Protestant denominations have divided along similar lines within living memory. The Episcopal Church saw the formation of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009 after disputes over the same questions, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) saw congregations depart to form ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians in 2012. In each case a mainline body reached a new position, a traditionalist minority departed, and a property fight followed. Our guides to the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church in North America and the Presbyterian Church (USA) cover those parallel stories.

12. If You Are Living Through It

Some readers arriving at this page are looking up a news story. Others are members of a congregation that voted, or that is about to, and they are trying to work out what to do. The second group deserves something more useful than a timeline.

Find Out What Your Congregation Actually Did

Ask your church office three plain questions. Did the congregation vote on disaffiliation, and what was the result? If it left, which body did it join, or is it independent? What happened to the pastor and to the members who disagreed? Reporting on this split has been imprecise, and a great many people who assume their church is now Global Methodist are attending an independent congregation, or the reverse. The answers are a matter of record and any church office can give them.

Grieve It Honestly

A congregation is a set of relationships built over decades, and losing one is a bereavement whatever the merits of the argument. People in this position often stop praying because the habit was tied to a building and a Sunday morning that no longer exist. Anger at a bishop, at a pastor or at a neighbour who voted the other way is worth naming in prayer rather than carrying silently. The Psalms are full of exactly this kind of speech to God (Psalm 55:12-14 describes the particular pain of a quarrel with a friend who worshipped alongside you).

If You Are Considering the Catholic Church

Some Methodists displaced by this split have looked at Catholicism, and the honest account of what that would involve is worth stating. Catholic teaching holds seven sacraments rather than two, holds that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, and holds a teaching office that Methodists do not recognise. A Methodist baptised with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit has a valid baptism that the Catholic Church accepts and does not repeat. Reception into the Church runs through a parish process of instruction, and it takes time. Our guides to the Eucharist, confession and Scripture and Tradition cover the substance of what would be new.

Catholics with Methodist friends and family in this situation have one obvious job. Ask how they are, remember that they have lost something, and hold the theological argument for later. Ecumenical relations are conducted mostly by ordinary people being decent to each other, and our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what the Church teaches about other Christians sets out the principles behind that.

Related Topics