Posted on 07/02/2023 8:54:33 PM PDT by Morgana
More than 6,000 congregations have been given the approval to leave the United Methodist Church over the past four years amid a schism within the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States over whether to change its rules against homosexuality.
According to numbers compiled by UM News, the number of UMC congregations granted disaffiliation passed the 6,000 mark earlier this week, with 6,182 as of Thursday morning.
While the number includes all churches that have disaffiliated from the UMC since 2019, more than 1,800 came in 2022 and more than 4,000 in 2023.
The UM News count derives from a "review of U.S. annual conference reports, publicly available journals and reports of special annual conference sessions held in 2022 and this year."
"The General Council on Finance and Administration, the denomination's finance agency, is collecting the official data on disaffiliations and church closures," the outlet added.
"But the finance agency's count of disaffiliations lags behind UM News' data because it must wait for annual conferences to submit official reports."
The number of churches granted disafiliation from the UMC passed the 5,000 mark earlier this month. Several hundred congregations were given the green light to depart over the course of one week alone.
On Wednesday, the UMC Mississippi Annual Conference voted to approve the disaffiliation votes of 189 churches, representing a little over a fifth of the regional body's member congregations.
Mississippi Bishop Sharma Lewis told the assembly after the vote that "this disaffiliation process has been tough" for the regional body and that she wanted "all of y'all to stay."
(Excerpt) Read more at christianpost.com ...
It sounds as if many churches are leaving the United Methodist Church, because the United Methodists have become liberal on homosexuality.
And the Global Methodist Church is adhering to the traditional theology on that subject.
I know denominations have had schisms over the course of history. I guess I never thought that there would be schisms over the subject of homosexuality.
I wonder if the same thing is going to happen in other denominations, with some people wanting to take the denomination in a liberal direction, and others want to adhere to the traditional teachings.
the courage of their convictions...
AMEN
There's your problem.
Exactly.
Well you be staying with the liberal faction, or joining the break-away congregations? What do you think about a denomination supporting the homosexual agenda, as a member of the Methodist clergy?
Perhaps you could share your expertise with us
You took the words...
😉
Sharma is a problem, “ya’all”, at full boil.
Similar magnitude of separations have already occurred in the Lutheran Church ELCA, the episcopal church TEC, I believe the presbyterian church some time ago. The dark side has been busy within the churches, and very successfully at that.
The article says about 1/5 of the UMC churches in Mississippi have disaffiliated. Anyone know the percentage of the UMC as a whole, or the total membership of the UMC before this issue came about?
” she wanted “all of y’all to stay.”
Just another way to say she didn’t want anyone to leave. That’s not entirely accurate. I was an active member of a UMC congregation and conservatives were vilified early and often. Then came the lockdowns. Churches were closed and the conservative pastors were reassigned to smaller churches while not being permitted to re-open. The Conference has been selling the properties and no one seems to know where the money is going. The church I was a member has seen attendance drop by 75% and the pastor is proud of it. Or PRIDE might be more accurate.
Our church is part of a circuit and we are staying. My guess is the denomination would prefer we leave due to cost.
I know of one very small UMC church in our community that chose to leave the UMC for the Global Methodist Church.
This small church had to pay the UMC $65,000 to get legal possession of the land and church building that the members of this small church had purchased many decades ago.
This small church had fewer than 200 members so the cost to leave was about $300 per member.
So if the other 6,000 churches were allowed to leave the UMC under similar agreements, the UMC bosses have collected many million dollars to further their PRIDE agenda with the remaining UMC churches.
In other words you should expect more apostasy at the remaining UMC churches.
Just for information purposes, there are close to 30,000 U.S. UMC congregations.
However, the global strenth of the “disuniting” UMC congregations is greater than the global strength of the UMC. It was the combination of traditionalists both outside the U.S. and in the U.S., together, that made for a majority not willing to “go along just to get along”.
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