Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: Methodism And Coming Schism
Author: Mark Tooley

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 98

Methodism And Coming Schism

Mark Tooley

Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy

After fifty years of fractious debate over sexuality, The United Methodist Church is about to divide into two or more denominations. This division would have occurred at the scheduled May 2020 quadrennial General Conference, now postponed until 2021 due to COVID-19.

If ratified next year, this schism will be the first organized division of a major national US denomination since before the Civil War, when Methodists, Baptists, and others divided over slavery.

United Methodist traditionalists and liberals have fought ever since the denomination in 1972 declared homosexual practice “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The church subsequently banned same-sex rites and reaffirmed that clergy must be celibate if single and monogamous in male/female marriage, otherwise risking defrocking.

This traditionalist stance has been upheld at every governing General Conference since 1972. These conventions of up to one thousand delegates meet for approximately ten days every four years to set denominational policy. Evangelical and moderate institutionalists in the US church sustained this teaching for decades in sync with American culture. But when the culture shifted, the church’s moderates followed.

But the church’s evangelicals gained new allies with the dramatic rise over the last twenty-five years of United Methodism in Africa, where nearly half and perhaps more of the church’s 12.5 million membership now live. The Africans are staunch theological conservatives.

As other historically liberal mainline Protestant denominations surrendered traditional Christian sexual standards over the past twenty years, United Methodism,

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 99

which is the largest mainline church, became nearly the only holdout for traditionalism. US church liberals, who had long assumed history was on their side, were exasperated and unprepared for this American evangelical-African majority bloc.

The final showdown came at the February 2019 Special General Conference in St. Louis, which was summoned specifically to settle the church’s differences on sex. US bishops, with the US church bureaucracy behind them, pushed a plan to liberalize the denomination by allowing local options on sexual standards. The bishops and other US liberals were stunned when the delegates instead tightened the church’s rules against heterodox sexual behavior. Liberals complained their church had been infected by an “Ebola Virus.” Africans told of spiritual visions they had of invisible cosmic warfare at the convention.