I strongly disagree that one can judge what percentage of individual Methodists are pro or con gay clergy by how many congregations have disaffiliated.
Full disclosure, I am a member of a church that is now part of the Global Methodist Church. Leaving a congregation that I’ve been active in (albeit sometimes sporadically) for more than twenty years was an option, I suppose, but not an easy or obvious one-- especially since no one really knew what the future was going to look like at any of the other local UMC churches either. (Several big ones in my area disaffiliated, a couple did not. The people I knew best who couldn’t tolerate the GMC are actually now at a church that is more obviously pro-gay. (Er, at least, if I read their Facebook page correctely).)
I was a member of a UMC church that disaffiliated in 2023, and went to the GMC. We decided to leave that church and started attending another UMC church (a larger one) in our local area. It’s still possible that the church I"m currently attending might leave the denomination and go independent. We’ll see.
I personally didn’t like the GMC, because I thought it was building itself up by a right-wing panic type stampede, and trying to cannibalize the UMC. So, I didn’t want to join it. We’ll see if my current UMC congregation stays in the UMC or not. I live in the Southeast, so the area I’m in is more conservative than me…
I hear you on the concerns about the right wing panic stampede.
But at the end of the day, I voted for disaffiliation and then for affiliation with the GMC because that’s what my church leadership (not just the clergy) said we should do, and if we didn’t trust them to make good choices, we might as well just take ourselves to some other church.
Our church had a committee look at various options, and they ended up recommending GMC. But it was very rushed, and with not much time to truly study the matter. The GMC choice was part of the stampede (the first part was “get out of the UMC”).
We had a new pastor, less than a year with the congregation, and I was already have problems with his “leadership.”
I can respect that. My church’s pastor is relatively new, but way more than a single year, and the rest of the leadership team that was involved are people who’d been active in our church for many years, so even if one wanted to side-eye the senior pastor, if he agreed with the others, could they all be wrong? (Answer: maybe. but about a third of the congregation showed up for the vote, and 90 % of those voting voted for disaffiliation).
That’s not what I said. Czarcasm wrote that half of the churches have withdrawn from the UMC and that half have stayed. I was saying that 25% have withdrawn and 75% have stayed. I don’t know what percentage of the clergy agree with the UMC’s current stance on the issue and what percentage of the members of the UMC are O.K. with gay marriage.
Friends of mine (a married couple) are both UMC lay pastors, who served with small congregations in rural northern Indiana. The husband of the couple served at a church where the lay leadership (who were all strongly against changing the denomination’s rules on gays, and wanted to move to the GMC) forced through a scheduled-at-the-last-minute vote for disaffiliation. Not surprisingly, relatively few parishoners showed up, and the ones who did vote were the ones who were strongly in favor of leaving.
Modern conservatism, to the extent to which it stampedes, doesn’t appear to value tradition much.
Don’t get me wrong: the tradition corner of the Wesley Quadrilateral favors exclusion IMHO, just as Judaic tradition in the age of Jesus excluded tax collectors. So Christian tradition seems to have few supporters in practice IMHO.
A parish weighing the tradition plank heavily would presumably stay in in the United Methodist Church (or leave via a drawn-out process), maintain a heterosexual reverend, and refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
It was a stampede at my church. A panicked stampede, pushed by the right-wingers in my church (of which I’m sure our pastor was right-wing).
I disagree with what they did, and how they did it. But I wish them luck in the future. I’m not holding grudges. We still have friends from that church.
My main worry right now is the church I’m in. It’s remained UMC, but I think they might pull us out after the General Conference. So, potentially, “here we go again”. My current church has a long-time pastor, and he’s been very tight-lipped. He would fall into the “tradition plank” that you mentioned in your post.
To me, I don’t see why we can’t just stay in the UMC. He won’t be forced to do anything against his will. But I’m not the decider here. We haven’t “joined” the church yet. We wanted for all of this to settle out before we decided what to do on a longer-term basis.
From his POV, I imagine it’s a matter of principle: if he is opposed to acceptance of openly gay clergy, and gay marriage, he may not want to be an ordained pastor of a denomination that now supports those things.
FWIW, and I am not super-knowledgeable about these things, but my understanding is that the decision to disaffiliate from the UMC (and related votes) are supposed to be led by the congregation’s membership, and not the pastor.
Edit: Also, my understanding is that the window for UMC congregations to vote to disaffiliate from the denomination ended at the end of 2023. If your congregation is still thinking about leaving, it may be that it will be more difficult to do so now.
That is correct. However, our pastor is a long-term pastor at this church. I think the congregation will go along with his recommendation. He’s a very effective leader.
How long-term, if I may ask? At least in our UMC conference (Northern Illinois), it’s very uncommon for a particular pastor to lead a congregation for more than five years or so; the conference believes that keeping a pastor in place for a long time leads to cults of personality around a particular person, rather than the church itself. But, I’ve heard tell of UMC churches which have had the same pastors for decades.
Odd. I think you said you were in Georgia? I am, too, and my family attended a UMC church for a few years in the late eighties. At the time, the church got a new senior pastor every three or four years, regardless. The North Georgia Conference moved its clergy around regularly; I remember something about it partly being a nod the the church’s roots in circuit-riding preachers, but mainly about avoiding personality cults.
I didn’t know there was a deadline: that might justify a certain degree of stampeding, at least in 2023.
My family wasn’t particularly connected to one mainline Protestant church over another: when my parents moved they switched from Presbyterian to Episcopalian due to local reasons. Are Methodists leaving for other mainline sects? Has inflow changed?
I’ve been in leadership positions in my UMC church, and if I remember correctly, the pastors are evaluated on a yearly basis, to determine if they will remain with their current church for another year. Those evaluations include the pastor’s own assessment of whether they feel they still have work which they want to accomplish with their current church, concurrent with an assessment from the church’s lay leadership, and an assessment from the pastor’s superiors with the local/regional conference.
But, as I noted, there are certainly cases when individual pastors stay longer than usual at a particular church. I remember hearing tell of one UMC church in Ohio, which had had the same pastor for several decades.
It’s not that members are leaving one for another, for the most part; it’s members (particularly younger members) leaving organized religion as a whole, and kids who grew up in a church (because their parents were members) choosing to not become members, themselves, when they get to be adults, because they aren’t interested.
Yes, the collapse of Mainline membership is well-documented. It’s interesting to me that the SBC is now collapsing, as I remember they were strutting around like peacocks a few decades ago, poaching members from Mainline denominations. Now, they’re losing members, too.
I hate seeing the collapse in UMC numbers. But that’s been well-known for decades. And I wonder what it will take to reverse the trends we’re seeing in the Mainline. There has to be a non-zero “bottoming out” in membership & attendance with these denominations, and a place where they can start rebuilding. I hope to see it in my lifetime, but have my doubts.