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My relatives are turning over in their graves. This is not the Methodist Church of old.

But there are many, many, many Methodist churches both here and abroad (I know of them in Brazil and England) that are as Methodist and Bible-believing as they ever were in Wesley's day. The problem was that the Methodist church has become ruled not by the laity but by the ecclesiastics. This was probably how it became possible for so many higher church offices to have been occupied by functional unbelievers. Some people tell folks in these Bible-believing Methodist churches that they need to leave the United Methodist Church. They, on the other hand, say that it is their church and that it would be immoral for them to abandon it, to just hand everything that so many have worked for over so many years over to a bunch of unbelievers. I'm happy for those who are in particular congregations who are unable to get rid of an unbelieving pastor leave to join other churches of the Methodist tradition (Free Methodists, Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists). About 5 families came to our church from a United Methodist Church after they finally discovered that the pastor didn't even consider himself to be a Christian but had become a pastor because that was how he saw himself able to engage in social activism. He was also the college roommate of that UM pastor who performed a ceremony of union for a homosexual couple in Chicago and was censured for it. But it's also a good thing for United Methodist churches to try to oppose liberals in the church hierarchy and seek to convert them or throw them out on their unbelieving butts. Oops, did that sound uncharitable?

The problem was that the Methodist church has become ruled not by the laity but by the ecclesiastics.

The same thing has happened in the Presbyterian churches nationwide.... There is a HUGE movement afoot to wrest control for the soul of this denomination from the clutches of truly wacko leftists and give it back to the grassroots in the pews. The call themselves the Covenant churches within the PCUSA and publish their own newspaper, The Presbyterian Layman, to keep the grassroots aware of the efforts to bring the denomination back to its moorings.