United Methodist Church Beliefs

1. What the United Methodist Church Believes

The United Methodist Church confesses the Trinity, the incarnation, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the authority of Holy Scripture for salvation, and it teaches the Wesleyan doctrine of grace: God's grace goes before any human decision, justifies the sinner who believes, and then works real holiness in the believer's life. Its beliefs are fixed in four doctrinal standards carried in the Book of Discipline, the Articles of Religion, the Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, John Wesley's Sermons and his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, and the General Rules. The denomination baptises infants, keeps an open table at Holy Communion, ordains women and men, and settles its teaching and its law through a General Conference made up of equal numbers of lay and clergy delegates from around the world.

The United Methodist Church was formed on 23 April 1968 in Dallas, when the Methodist Church united with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. That merger is why the denomination carries two sets of confessional articles rather than one. The Methodist side brought the Articles of Religion, which John Wesley abridged from the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and sent to America in 1784. The Evangelical United Brethren side, a body of German-speaking American origin with its own Wesleyan and Pietist roots, brought its Confession of Faith. The 1968 union kept both, and both are protected against amendment.

What Makes This Denomination Distinct

Wesleyan theology is held in common by every Methodist body, and our guide to Methodist beliefs and denominations covers that shared doctrine across the whole family, including the Holiness churches and the historic Black Methodist denominations. What belongs to the United Methodist Church alone is the machinery: a written constitution with Restrictive Rules, a quadrennial General Conference that is the only body authorised to speak for the denomination, annual conferences that hold the clergy rather than the congregations holding them, a Judicial Council that can strike down an unconstitutional act, and a trust clause that keeps local church property in trust for the whole connection. Anyone trying to understand a United Methodist decision has to understand that structure, because in this denomination doctrine and polity are bound together in one volume.

2. The Doctrinal Standards and the Restrictive Rules

The doctrinal standards of the United Methodist Church are four documents named in the Book of Discipline and shielded from amendment by the constitution. They are the Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church, the Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, the Standard Sermons of John Wesley, and Wesley's Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament. The General Rules of the Methodist Church, Wesley's three-part rule of life for members of the early societies, stand alongside them.

The Articles of Religion

Wesley produced the Articles of Religion by cutting the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England down to twenty-four and sending them to the American Methodists in 1784, as part of the same act by which he provided them with ordained ministers after the Revolution had left them without Anglican clergy. The Americans added one article of their own, on the rulers of the United States, which is why an English-derived confession contains a paragraph about the sovereignty of the United States government. Wesley's edits removed the material he judged unnecessary or too Calvinist for Methodist use, including the article on predestination and election.

Several articles matter directly for a Catholic reader, and they should be quoted rather than paraphrased away. Article V holds that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, so that nothing not read in it or proved by it is to be required of any man as an article of faith. Article XIV rejects what it calls the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory, pardon, the worshipping and adoration of images and relics, and the invocation of saints. Article XVI counts baptism and the Lord's Supper as the two sacraments ordained of Christ, and says the five commonly called sacraments, confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony and extreme unction, are not to be counted for sacraments of the Gospel. Article XVIII rejects transubstantiation and says the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. Article XXI permits the marriage of ministers.

Those articles were written in the sixteenth century as polemic and carried into the eighteenth by abridgement, and modern United Methodist theologians read them as historic standards rather than as a current polemical programme. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which the World Methodist Council associated itself with in 2006, is the clearest evidence of how much the argument has moved since the articles were drafted.

The Confession of Faith

The Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church runs to sixteen articles and covers similar ground in nineteenth and twentieth century language. It confesses the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the sufficiency of Scripture, justification by faith, regeneration, sanctification and Christian perfection, the two sacraments, the Church, the Lord's Day, Christian obedience, and the last things. Its article on sanctification is more explicit than anything in the Articles of Religion, teaching that the believer is cleansed from sin and empowered for holy living. Where the two documents overlap they are read together; where the Confession says something the Articles leave out, the Confession supplies it.

The Restrictive Rules

The Restrictive Rules are the constitutional provisions that put the doctrinal standards beyond the reach of an ordinary vote. The first forbids the General Conference to revoke, alter or change the Articles of Religion or to establish any new standards or rules of doctrine contrary to the present existing and established standards of doctrine. The second does the same for the Confession of Faith. Further rules protect the episcopacy and the plan of itinerant general superintendency, the right of clergy and of members to trial and appeal, and the use of certain funds.

The practical effect is that a General Conference can change almost any paragraph of the Book of Discipline by majority vote and cannot touch the confessional articles at all without a constitutional amendment process that requires a two-thirds vote of the General Conference and ratification by a large majority of the annual conference members voting worldwide. When people say that United Methodist doctrine changed in a given year, the doctrinal standards are almost never what changed. What changes is church law and the Social Principles.

3. What the Book of Discipline Is

The Book of Discipline is the single volume that carries the constitution, the doctrinal standards, the theological task, the Social Principles and the whole church law of the United Methodist Church, and a new edition is published after every General Conference. Nothing in United Methodism is settled outside it. A pastor's appointment, a congregation's property, a bishop's authority, the trial process for clergy, the membership vows and the ordering of the sacraments are all there in numbered paragraphs.

Its ancestor is the set of minutes of Wesley's conferences with his preachers, published as question and answer: what shall we teach, how shall we teach, what shall we do. American Methodism carried that form from its organising conference in Baltimore in 1784 onward, and the modern volume still shows the shape underneath. A companion volume, the Book of Resolutions, gathers the position statements the General Conference has adopted on particular questions and is also reissued each quadrennium.

Who Can Change It

Only the General Conference can amend the Book of Discipline. Bishops cannot, annual conferences cannot, boards and agencies cannot, and no local congregation can adopt its own version. The Discipline states plainly that no person, no paper and no organisation has the authority to speak officially for the United Methodist Church, that right being reserved exclusively to the General Conference. A bishop who writes a pastoral letter is expressing a bishop's judgment. A denominational agency that publishes a study is publishing a study.

The Judicial Council

The Judicial Council is the denomination's highest court, elected by the General Conference, and it decides whether an act of the General Conference, a bishop's ruling or an annual conference's decision is constitutional under the Discipline. Its decisions are final. It functions as a genuine check: it has invalidated General Conference legislation for conflicting with the constitution, and it has reversed episcopal rulings. A Catholic reader will find no close analogue in Catholic governance, where the interpretation of law runs through dicasteries and tribunals answerable to the pope rather than through an independent court that can void an act of the Church's supreme legislative body.

The Trust Clause

Every local United Methodist church holds its property in trust for the whole denomination. The trust clause has been part of Methodist practice since Wesley's model deed and is written into the current Discipline, and it is the reason a congregation cannot simply vote to leave and keep its building. This became the central practical fact of the separation described in section 10, because departing congregations needed a provision in church law that released the trust, and the terms of that release were negotiated and contested conference by conference.

4. General Conference and the Connectional Structure

The United Methodist Church is a connectional church, which means that congregations, clergy and conferences are bound to one another by shared law, shared funds and shared appointment of ministers rather than existing as independent units. The structure runs upward from the local church through the annual conference to the General Conference, and it is the annual conference, not the congregation, that is the basic body of the church in United Methodist reckoning.

General Conference

The General Conference meets once every four years and is the only body with legislative authority for the whole denomination. Delegates are elected by the annual conferences, half of them lay and half of them clergy, in a proportion that has always been a defining Methodist commitment: the laity legislate on doctrine and discipline with exactly the same voting weight as the ordained. Bishops preside over the sessions and hold no vote. Petitions come from any member, any local church and any agency, are assigned to legislative committees, and reach the floor as recommendations. A simple majority carries most legislation.

For a Catholic reader the contrast is worth naming clearly rather than scoring. In Catholic teaching the deposit of faith is guarded by the bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome, and an ecumenical council is a council of bishops, its acts requiring papal confirmation. In United Methodism a body composed half of lay delegates can rewrite church law and moral teaching by majority vote. Each Church acts consistently with what it believes about where teaching authority is located.

Bishops, Annual Conferences and Itinerancy

United Methodist bishops are elected from among the elders by jurisdictional conferences in the United States and by central conferences elsewhere, and they are consecrated to the office of general superintendency. They preside, they appoint pastors, they lead an episcopal area, and they hold office for life or for a term depending on the region. The Council of Bishops meets as a body and speaks pastorally, and it has no legislative power.

The annual conference is where the ordained belong. Clergy hold their membership in the conference rather than in a congregation, and the bishop appoints them to charges year by year under the system of itinerancy that Methodism has kept since Wesley sent his preachers on circuits. Congregations receive the pastor the bishop sends. The system produces a clergy that is mobile, a set of small congregations that would struggle to attract a minister on their own but are covered anyway, and a real cost in continuity that United Methodists debate among themselves.

A Worldwide Denomination

The United Methodist Church is present far beyond the United States, with substantial membership in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines and Europe, organised in central conferences that may adapt parts of the Discipline to their own legal and cultural settings. Those central conferences elect delegates to General Conference on the same basis as United States conferences, and their share of the total has grown as African membership has grown. This is why any account of United Methodist decisions that treats the denomination as an American church misreads the voting arithmetic. Our guide to Christianity in Africa covers the wider growth that stands behind it.

This page states no membership figures for the United Methodist Church or for any body it separated from. Reported totals moved substantially during and after the disaffiliations of 2019 to 2023, and we could not verify a current number to the standard this site requires. The denomination's General Council on Finance and Administration publishes the official statistics, and any single figure quoted elsewhere should be checked against it.

5. Grace and Salvation in United Methodist Teaching

United Methodist soteriology is Wesley's, and it describes salvation as a work of grace in three movements that a person actually experiences. Grace goes before, awakening the sinner who has not sought God. Grace justifies, forgiving the sinner who trusts Christ. Grace sanctifies, making that believer progressively holy in fact. Wesley called the first prevenient grace, and it is the point where Wesleyan teaching parts from the Reformed doctrine of unconditional election, since a grace that enables a response can also be refused. Our guide to Methodist beliefs works through the three phases of grace across the whole Wesleyan family; this section stays with how the United Methodist standards state them.

Prevenient Grace

Prevenient grace is the grace that comes before conversion and makes any response to God possible, and United Methodist practice leans on it directly, since it is the ground on which the denomination baptises infants. The doctrine holds together two things a Catholic reader will recognise: total dependence on grace for the first movement toward God, and a real freedom that grace restores rather than overrides. The Second Council of Orange in 529 settled the same question for the West against semi-Pelagianism, and the Council of Trent taught that grace precedes and prepares the will while the will can dissent. Our guide to free will and grace works through the Catholic doctrine in detail.

Justification and Assurance

Justifying grace is received by faith, and United Methodists teach with Article IX that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wesley coupled justification with the new birth, insisting that the same moment which forgives also begins to change. He also taught the witness of the Spirit, an inward assurance given to the believer, drawn from Romans 8:16, and the memory of his own experience at Aldersgate Street on 24 May 1738 shaped how Methodism has spoken about assurance ever since.

Sanctification and Christian Perfection

Sanctifying grace is the doctrine on which Methodism has most to say and on which it comes closest to Catholic teaching. Wesley taught that a believer may be so filled with the love of God and neighbour that no sinful desire remains ruling in the heart, a condition he called Christian perfection or perfect love, and he described it as attainable in this life and as the proper goal of the Christian journey. He did not mean freedom from error, ignorance, temptation or infirmity, and he insisted it was a gift of grace rather than an achievement. The Confession of Faith carries the doctrine, and United Methodist ordinands are still asked Wesley's historic questions, including whether they expect to be made perfect in love in this life and whether they are groaning after it.

Catholic theology says something recognisably similar with different vocabulary. Sanctifying grace really inheres in the soul and really makes the person holy, the universal call to holiness was taught by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium chapter 5, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats growth in holiness as the ordinary shape of Christian life. Where the traditions differ is on what completes the work. Catholic teaching holds that anyone who dies in God's friendship still imperfectly purified undergoes a final purification before the vision of God, which Article XIV rejects by name. Our guide to purgatory sets out the Catholic case.

6. Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience

The Book of Discipline directs United Methodists to do theology with Scripture as the primary source and criterion, tested and confirmed by tradition, illuminated by reason, and confirmed in personal experience. The section that says so is titled Our Theological Task, and it sits immediately after the doctrinal standards. The four terms are popularly called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a name the Wesley scholar Albert Outler coined and later said he regretted. Our guide to Methodist beliefs tells that story and sets out what each of the four sources does across the Wesleyan family; this section stays with the text of the United Methodist Discipline.

What the Discipline Actually Says

The Discipline is explicit that the four are not equal. Scripture is primary. Tradition is the witness of the Church through the centuries, which the text treats as a genuine source rather than as decoration. Reason is the capacity by which the believer orders and tests what Scripture says. Experience is the personal appropriation of the gospel, the believer's own encounter with grace, and the Discipline is careful to say that experience is authenticated by Scripture rather than the reverse. Read in full, the passage is closer to a hierarchy with Scripture at the top than to a square.

The practical difficulty is that once experience is named as a theological source, arguments inside the denomination tend to be conducted through it, and both sides in every recent United Methodist dispute have appealed to it. Traditionalists have argued that experience cannot overturn a scriptural prohibition. Progressives have argued that the Church has repeatedly revised its reading of Scripture in the light of what it learned from believers' lives, citing slavery and the ordination of women as precedents. Anyone reporting on this denomination without understanding that both arguments are made from inside its own stated method will misdescribe what is happening.

The Catholic Comparison

Catholic teaching holds Scripture and Tradition together as one deposit of the Word of God, transmitted by the apostles and authentically interpreted by the living teaching office of the Church, a doctrine set out in the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum 9 and 10. Reason has a large and honoured place, and personal experience is not a source of revelation. The distance between the two methods is smaller than it looks on tradition, since Article V's insistence that nothing be required as an article of faith that is not proved by Scripture is compatible with a great deal of what Catholics mean by Tradition, and it is wider on the teaching office, since United Methodism has no organ that can definitively settle an interpretation. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture sets out the Catholic position, and our guide to the Bible covers canon and interpretation.

One concrete difference in the text itself: United Methodists use the Protestant canon of sixty-six books, and the deuterocanonical books that Catholic Bibles include are not part of it. Article V of the Articles of Religion names the canonical books of the Old Testament and receives the New Testament as commonly received, and it stops there, because Wesley dropped from the Anglican original the paragraph that had listed the apocryphal books and allowed the Church to read them for example of life and instruction of manners. Our guide to the deuterocanonical books covers why the canons differ.

7. Baptism and Holy Communion

The United Methodist Church holds two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, defined in Article XVI as ordained of Christ and described as signs of grace and God's good will toward us, by which he works invisibly in us. Two study documents adopted by General Conference set out how the denomination now teaches them: By Water and the Spirit, on baptism, adopted in 1996, and This Holy Mystery, on Holy Communion, adopted in 2004. Both are official interpretive statements rather than doctrinal standards, and both are unusually clear.

Baptism

United Methodists baptise infants and adults, by sprinkling, pouring or immersion, and they understand baptism as God's action. By Water and the Spirit describes it as the sacrament of initiation and incorporation into the body of Christ, the sign and seal of the covenant, and the work of the Holy Spirit rather than a testimony the candidate gives about a decision already made. Infants are baptised on the basis of prevenient grace and the faith of the Church, and the congregation vows to raise them in the faith.

The denomination does not rebaptise. When a member wants to mark a renewed conversion, the pastor is directed to use a service for the remembrance or reaffirmation of baptism, and the document is direct about why: to repeat the sacrament would imply that God's earlier act failed. A baptised infant is a baptised member of the congregation, and professing faith, normally at confirmation, makes that person a professing member. The Catholic Church recognises United Methodist baptism as valid when it is performed with water and the Trinitarian formula, so a United Methodist received into full communion with the Catholic Church is not baptised again. Our guide to baptism covers the Catholic doctrine and the conditions for validity.

Holy Communion

United Methodists affirm that Christ is really present in Holy Communion and that the presence is received by faith. This Holy Mystery states that Jesus Christ is truly present in the sacrament, that the elements are consecrated and are to be treated with reverence, and that the Church has no need to define how the presence occurs. Article XVIII rejects transubstantiation by name and says the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper only after a heavenly and spiritual manner, and that the mean whereby it is received is faith.

Three United Methodist practices regularly surprise Catholic visitors. The table is open, and the invitation is addressed to all who love Christ, repent of sin and seek to live in peace with one another, without requiring denominational membership. Unfermented grape juice is used rather than wine, a nineteenth-century American temperance practice that This Holy Mystery retains while acknowledging its origin. And the frequency varies, since many congregations celebrate monthly or quarterly, though Wesley himself urged constant communion and This Holy Mystery calls for weekly celebration as the norm the denomination should move toward.

The Catholic Church teaches that at the consecration the whole substance of the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ, the appearances alone remaining, and that Christ is present body, blood, soul and divinity, a doctrine defined at Trent and set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1373 to 1381. Catholic discipline consequently restricts reception to those in full communion who are properly disposed, which is why a Catholic does not receive at a United Methodist service and a United Methodist is not ordinarily admitted to Communion at Mass. Our guide to the Eucharist explains the Catholic teaching and the reason for the discipline.

The Other Five

Confirmation, penance, ordination, marriage and anointing of the sick all exist in United Methodist practice as rites, and none is counted a sacrament. Confirmation is the moment a baptised person professes faith and becomes a professing member. Confession is practised as general confession in the liturgy and as pastoral conversation, without private sacramental absolution. Marriage is a covenant blessed by the Church. Ordination is a solemn act with the laying on of hands. Anointing and prayer for healing are provided for in the service books. A Catholic reading Article XVI should notice that the article denies these are sacraments of the Gospel and does not deny that they are good and useful. Our guides to confession, confirmation and the priesthood set out the Catholic doctrine on each.

8. Ordained Ministry, Women and Itinerancy

The United Methodist Church ordains two orders, elders and deacons, and elects bishops from among the elders to the office of general superintendency. Elders are ordained to word, sacrament, order and service, and they preside at Communion and receive appointments through itinerancy. Deacons are ordained to word, service, compassion and justice, and they connect the congregation with the world. Licensed local pastors, who are not ordained, serve appointed charges and may be authorised to administer the sacraments within their appointment.

Women in Ordained Ministry

The Methodist Church granted full clergy rights to women in 1956, and the United Methodist Church has ordained women and elected them as bishops throughout its existence. The Wesleyan tradition had women preaching long before that, since Wesley authorised women as class leaders and eventually as preachers, and the Holiness bodies that split from mainstream Methodism ordained women decades before the mainstream did. A United Methodist congregation that receives a woman as its appointed elder is following settled denominational practice.

The Catholic Church holds that it has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women, a judgment John Paul II stated in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and grounded in the constant tradition and in Christ's choice of the Twelve. That is a difference of doctrine about the sacrament of order, and it should be stated as such rather than as a difference of sentiment about the capacities of women.

What Rome Holds About Methodist Orders

John Wesley remained a presbyter of the Church of England all his life and was never a bishop. In 1784, facing an America where the Revolution had left Methodists without clergy to give them the sacraments, he set apart Thomas Coke as superintendent and ordained two men as presbyters for America, acting on his conviction, drawn from his reading of the early Church, that presbyters and bishops are one order and that a presbyter may ordain in a case of necessity. American Methodism organised itself at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore in December 1784 with Coke and Francis Asbury as its superintendents, and the title bishop followed.

The Catholic Church does not recognise the ordained ministry of the Methodist churches as the sacrament of order, because it holds that ordination requires a bishop standing in apostolic succession. The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 22, states that the ecclesial communities separated from the Catholic Church have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of order. The same decree insists that they are used by the Spirit as means of salvation and that their members are joined to Christ in baptism, and the two statements belong together.

Itinerancy in Practice

Appointment is annual and the bishop makes it, in consultation with district superintendents and with the congregation's pastor-parish relations committee. A United Methodist pastor can be moved with a few months' notice, and a congregation cannot hire or fire. The guarantee that ran alongside this, that every elder in good standing would receive an appointment, has been narrowed in recent decades as conferences faced fewer congregations and tighter budgets. The system is the direct descendant of Wesley's circuit riders, who covered enormous American distances on horseback and shaped the denomination's early growth.

9. The Social Principles and Moral Teaching

The Social Principles are the section of the Book of Discipline that states the denomination's convictions on social, economic and political questions, and the Discipline describes them as instructive and persuasive rather than as church law. They are organised around the natural world, the nurturing community, the social community, the economic community, the political community and the world community, and they are accompanied by the Social Creed. The General Conference revises them, and a full revision was adopted in 2024.

What the Social Principles Have Held

Several positions have been stable across many quadrennia and are worth naming for a Catholic reader, because a good deal of the agreement between the two Churches on social questions goes unnoticed. The United Methodist Church opposes capital punishment. It rejects war as an instrument of national foreign policy and commends conscientious objection while also honouring those who serve. It calls for the care of creation and names environmental responsibility a Christian duty. It opposes racism in strong terms. It commends abstinence from alcohol as a witness and treats addiction as a disease requiring care. It supports the rights of workers to organise and treats economic justice as a gospel obligation. Catholic social teaching arrives at most of those conclusions by its own route, and our guides to capital punishment, just war and Catholic social teaching set out the Catholic reasoning.

Where the Two Diverge on Life and Marriage

On abortion the United Methodist Social Principles have historically expressed opposition to abortion as a means of birth control or gender selection alongside a qualified acceptance of it in some circumstances, and the denomination withdrew from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in 2016 after decades of membership. That is a different position from the Catholic Church's, which holds that direct abortion is always gravely wrong because human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception, taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2270 to 2271. Our guide to abortion and Catholic teaching gives the argument in full.

On marriage the two Churches now teach differently, and section 10 sets out how that happened. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, open to life and indissoluble, given in the order of creation and confirmed by Christ in Matthew 19:4-6, and it teaches at the same time that people with same-sex attraction are to be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity and that every sign of unjust discrimination against them is to be avoided (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2358). Our guide to marriage as a sacrament explains the Catholic doctrine.

On contraception the divergence is older and is shared with almost all of Protestantism, since Methodist bodies have permitted the use of contraception within marriage since the mid-twentieth century while the Catholic Church teaches in Humanae Vitae that every marital act must remain open to life. Our guide to contraception covers the Catholic teaching and its reasoning.

10. What Changed at the 2024 General Conference

The General Conference that met in Charlotte in the spring of 2024 removed the Book of Discipline's prohibitions on ordaining clergy in same-sex relationships and on clergy performing same-sex weddings, adopted a revised set of Social Principles, and approved constitutional amendments for worldwide regionalisation. It was the first General Conference to meet since 2019, after the pandemic postponed the scheduled 2020 session three times, and it met after a large disaffiliation had already changed who was in the room.

What the Discipline Said Before, and How It Was Changed

The Book of Discipline had said since 1972 that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, and the General Conference added the prohibition on ordaining self-avowed practising homosexual clergy in 1984 and the prohibition on clergy conducting same-sex union ceremonies in 1996. A special General Conference in St. Louis in February 2019 retained and strengthened those provisions, and the same session adopted a temporary provision, Paragraph 2553, that released the trust clause and let United States congregations leave with their property on stated financial terms before a deadline of 31 December 2023. Roughly 7,600 United States congregations were approved to go under it, about a quarter of the denomination's United States churches. In 2024 the delegates who remained struck the ordination and wedding prohibitions out of the text, which is the change that alters the book itself rather than the membership of the room.

The disaffiliation total was reported by United Methodist News Service as annual conferences ratified departures through 2023, and the denomination's General Council on Finance and Administration publishes the official statistics. Congregations that disaffiliated did not all join the Global Methodist Church, since some became independent, some joined other Wesleyan bodies and some closed. No membership figure for either denomination is stated on this page, for the reason given in section 4.

The negotiations, the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace that was published in January 2020 and never voted on, the conference-by-conference terms of departure and the founding of the Global Methodist Church are a separate story with its own arithmetic, and our guide to why the Methodist Church split follows it from the first contested vote to the new denomination's own Book of Doctrines and Discipline. This page stays with the United Methodist Church and the book it kept.

Regionalisation

The 2024 session also approved a plan of worldwide regionalisation, in the form of constitutional amendments that would let each region of the denomination, including the United States, adapt parts of the Book of Discipline to its own setting while a shared core remains common. Constitutional amendments in the United Methodist Church do not take effect on a General Conference vote alone; they must then be ratified by the required majority of the aggregate votes of the members of annual conferences worldwide, and the Council of Bishops certifies the result. Anyone writing about the current status should check the denomination's own reporting on the ratification rather than assume it from the General Conference vote.

What the Catholic Church Holds

The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, open to life and indissoluble, and that this is given in the order of creation and confirmed by Christ (Matthew 19:4-6). It teaches at the same time that people with same-sex attraction must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and that every sign of unjust discrimination against them is to be avoided (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2358). A Catholic watching a Methodist separation should take no satisfaction from it. Christ prayed that his followers would be one, and every division among Christians is a wound in that body.

11. Where Catholics and United Methodists Agree

Catholics and United Methodists share more than most members of either Church realise, and the agreement is documented rather than assumed. Both confess the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed, the Trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Christ, his ascension and his return in glory, and the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Both baptise infants and recognise each other's baptism. Both hold that Scripture is the inspired Word of God.

The Formal Dialogue

The Joint Commission between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council has met continuously since 1967, one of the oldest of the modern bilateral dialogues, and publishes a report at the end of each five-year round, named for the World Methodist Conference that receives it. Successive rounds have addressed the Eucharist, ministry, authority, the Church as koinonia, holiness, the communion of saints, and the meaning of tradition. The tone of these reports is unusually warm, and they record the shared inheritance in spirituality and in the doctrine of holiness that the two traditions have in common.

The act most often cited from that relationship is the World Methodist Council's association with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 2006, at its meeting in Seoul, seven years after the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the original in Augsburg in 1999. The declaration states a shared understanding of justification by grace through faith and records that the sixteenth-century condemnations on this point do not apply to the teaching of the partners as now presented. Our guide to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification explains what it did and did not settle.

The Wesleyan Debt to Catholic Sources

Wesley read the Fathers, the medieval mystics and the Catholic spiritual writers, and he said so. Thomas à Kempis and the Imitation of Christ shaped his early religious life. He read the Eastern Fathers on holiness and drew his doctrine of Christian perfection partly from them. He abridged and published Catholic devotional works for his societies. The Wesleyan insistence that grace really changes a person, rather than only changing that person's legal standing, sits closer to Catholic sanctifying grace than to anything in the Reformed tradition, and our guide to faith and works shows why that matters for the older argument.

12. Where the Two Churches Differ

The differences between the Catholic Church and the United Methodist Church concentrate in three areas: the sacraments, the ordained ministry, and where teaching authority sits. Each is a real difference of doctrine, and each is stated below with the United Methodist position first in its own terms.

The United Methodist column follows the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Faith as printed in the Book of Discipline, together with the General Conference study documents By Water and the Spirit (1996) and This Holy Mystery (2004). The Catholic column follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the conciliar and papal documents named. Neither column is a summary of what any individual believes.

The Difference That Carries the Others

Authority is the difference underneath the rest. United Methodism locates the settling of doctrine and law in a conference that meets every four years and decides by vote, protected only by the Restrictive Rules that guard the confessional articles. Catholic teaching locates it in the college of bishops with the Bishop of Rome at its head, holding an office it believes Christ established when he gave Peter the keys (Matthew 16:18-19) and told him to feed the sheep (John 21:15-17). Once that question is settled in either direction, the disputes about sacraments, ministry and Marian doctrine take their shape from it. Our guides to the papacy and to Catholic and Protestant differences set out the Catholic case at length.

What Rome Says About United Methodists

The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism calls those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptised outside the Catholic Church brothers and sisters in the Lord, holds that they are put in a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, and teaches that the separated communities are used by the Spirit of Christ as means of salvation. The Council also asks Catholics to recognise the riches of Christ and virtuous works in the lives of those who bear witness to Christ, sometimes to the shedding of their blood. Our guide to ecumenism covers how that principle is applied.

13. Talking With United Methodists

Most conversations between Catholics and United Methodists go wrong on facts before they reach doctrine, and a few corrections prevent the usual failures. Learn the structure before commenting on a decision, because a bishop's statement, an agency's publication and a General Conference action carry entirely different weight. Do not describe the United Methodist Church as an American denomination, since a large part of its membership and its voting strength is in Africa, the Philippines and Europe. Do not tell a United Methodist that Methodists do not believe in the real presence, because Article XVIII and This Holy Mystery both affirm it while rejecting transubstantiation, and the distinction is the whole point.

Practical Notes

If you attend a United Methodist service as a Catholic, you may pray, sing and listen, and you should not receive Communion, since Catholic discipline reserves reception to the Eucharist celebrated in a Church whose orders the Catholic Church recognises. Explain that gently if asked, since an open table makes the refusal look personal when it is not. If you are a United Methodist attending Mass, you are welcome to come forward with arms crossed for a blessing, and the Catholic Church's restriction reflects what it believes about the sacrament rather than a judgment about you.

In a marriage between a Catholic and a United Methodist, the Catholic party needs permission from the local ordinary for a mixed marriage and a dispensation from canonical form if the wedding is to take place in the United Methodist church, and the Catholic party promises to do all in their power to have the children baptised and raised Catholic. Those requirements are ordinary and are granted routinely. Sorting them out early prevents a great deal of pain later.

The Honest Summary

United Methodists are baptised Christians who hold the creeds, love Scripture, take holiness seriously, and belong to a tradition whose founder read the Fathers and the Catholic mystics and told his preachers to aim at perfect love. The Catholic Church regards them as brothers and sisters in a real, imperfect communion. The differences on the sacraments, on ordination and on where teaching authority sits are serious and should be stated plainly. Both things are true at once, and a Catholic who can hold both will be a better witness than one who can hold only one.

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