A NEW METHODISM

 

The 2020 United Methodist General Conference, delayed four years, finally happened.  From 2019 to today, the narrative of this denomination has been stunning in multiple ways. Historian Erik Larson could spin quite the page-turner if he ever decided to tackle this story.  (Which he won’t!)

Among the facts:

1. After a long period of relative stability in weekly participation levels, the UMC began to plummet around 2001. Three million worshippers a week for over thirty years has now become less than a million a week in house, the best I can tell.  The stats, once easy to look up, are hard to trace now.

2. A global pandemic sped up the decline in two ways: (A) Hundreds of thousands of United Methodists got out of the church habit and have not returned. (B) it delayed General Conference long enough that the right wing of the denomination lost patience and decided en masse to take the exit plan they had created for the progressives.  25% of the US congregations exited in 2022-23.

3. Though the 25% US loss amounts only to 12-13% globally, the instigators of the crisis mostly were missing in Charlotte. Votes on easing restrictive and pejorative language on human sexuality that had failed to change the status quo 45-55% over many years, suddenly shifted to 90-10.  Few saw this coming.

4. General Conference’s approval of Regionalization is really the bigger story as the UMC moves beyond two and one half centuries as a North American majority church. We may be now on our way to a situation where four different regions can consider certain questions of church life regionally (4 global regions) as opposed to one Book of Discipline for all.

5. In the USA, with the loss of so many churches on the evangelical end of the UM spectrum, the southern US is no longer the cultural center - and the new Methodism is now far more progressive in its core instincts.  We did not just turn into the UCC, but we probably moved about half way from where we were toward that sort of liberal vibe.  This is a tectonic shift.

6. Now that we have moved through this wormhole, our future is different than anything we previously imagined. But we will soon discover the old Methodist DNA reemerging, even in a very new context: the primacy of grace, a passion for serving our neighbors, and a renewed joyfulness in our common life.  And amazing potlucks!

Participation in traditional ministries and gatherings will likely continue to decline, even as a subset of congregations grows and “fresh expressions of church” grow quite significantly.  We can expect smaller, passionate and focused core communities, less worship-centric, less building-centric and less clergy-centric than in the past.  The models of how we belong will move beyond the traditional membership paradigm.

The heart of our emerging brand is that “we are among you as those who serve” and we are reliable allies for justice and for good.  “Those United Methodists, they roll up their sleeves, they move beyond the talk: they do something about it.”