The Christian Post's top 10 news stories of 2024 (part 1)
United Methodist Church votes to allow gay marriages, openly LGBT clergy
The United Methodist Church ended its decades-long bans on the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals and the funding of LGBT advocacy groups.
Delegates at the UMC General Conference, which was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, from late April to early May, voted overwhelmingly to remove these measures from the UMC Book of Discipline.
The result came in large part because approximately 7,500 mostly conservative congregations disaffiliated from the UMC in the years leading up to the vote because of the seemingly endless debate over LGBT issues within the mainline Protestant denomination.
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Thousands of these departing congregations joined the nascent Global Methodist Church, launched in 2022 as a theologically conservative alternative to the UMC.
Delegates also overwhelmingly approved a proposal to amend the UMC Constitution to allow for regionalization, which would let more conservative regional bodies of the global denomination retain the biblical stances on homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
After passing the General Conference in a vote of 586-164 in favor, the regionalization amendment will next require support from at least two-thirds of the annual conference clergy and lay voters before it is added to the UMC constitution.
The changes approved at the General Conference were met with praise from progressives within the denomination, who saw the changes as ending discrimination against LGBT individuals.
However, they were also the subject of much backlash. Shortly after General Conference concluded, the Côte d'Ivoire Conference, which had around 1 million members, voted to leave the UMC over the votes.
The West African conference's approved decision stated that the UMC "has preferred to sacrifice its honorability and integrity to honor the LGBT" cause and that "the new United Methodist Church is now based on sociocultural and contextual values which have consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity."
Many churches within the UMC, such as the prominent megachurch Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, announced that they refused to hold same-sex weddings on their properties.
The General Conference changes also sparked controversy in Nigeria, where both the UMC and the GMC are staking claim to the Nigerian Episcopal Area, a regional body comprised of four annual conferences and around 560,000 members.
In August, the GMC announced that its Transitional Leadership Council had officially welcomed Nigerian Bishop Johnwesley Yohanna and the four annual conferences into membership with their denomination.
However, shortly before GMC made its announcement, the UMC Council of Bishops released a statement saying that Yohanna had resigned as bishop and that the liberal denomination had appointed an interim leadership team for the Africa-based episcopal area.
Amid these changes, some congregations were continuing to leave the UMC via a Book of Discipline measure known as Paragraph 2549, which is centered on how to officially close down a church property.
However, in October, the United Methodist Judicial Council released a ruling titled Decision Number 1512 that said congregations cannot use Paragraph 2549 to exit the UMC.
The UMC's highest court had concluded that the denomination's Trust Clause, which holds that all ecclesial properties are held for the benefit of the whole UMC, cannot be disregarded as it would be by using Paragraph 2549 to disaffiliate.
"Connectionalism is a bedrock principle of United Methodist constitutional polity, and the Trust Clause is its foundational element," stated the ruling. "Disaffiliation is a radical departure from connectionalism, and, therefore, church property can be released from the Trust Clause only to the extent authorized by Church law."
Michael Gryboski contributed to this report.
