Free Republic

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...

More than 180 congregations in Georgia have filed a lawsuit after their regional body of the United Methodist Church refused to allow them to disaffiliate amid a denominational schism over homosexuality. Last week, 186 churches filed a lawsuit against the UMC North Georgia Conference in Superior Court in Cobb County over the conference's decision last December to prohibit any more congregations from leaving amid a denominational schism over homosexuality. The Wesleyan Covenant Association of North Georgia, an unofficial conservative advocacy group that helped conservative churches form the Global Methodist Church breakaway denomination, released a statement explaining that the decision to...

The leadership of a Texas megachurch has decided to leave The United Methodist Church without a congregational vote, which defies denominational rules on dismissal. St. Andrew United Methodist Church of Plano, which has approximately 6,500 members, recently announced that the church is going to disaffiliate with the UMC, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the country. "St. Andrew will disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church (UMC), but not affiliate with any other existing Methodist denomination. St. Andrew will remain Methodist with the same Wesleyan theology that we have always believed," the announcement reads. "St. Andrew will be named St. Andrew Methodist...