Theological schisms are by no means fairly. The United Methodist Church—America’s third-largest non secular physique, with over 6.2 million members—is within the thick of its personal over its teachings on sexuality. A whole bunch of congregations have voted to go away the denomination, which had 13 million members world-wide as of 2020, and hundreds extra seemingly will. On Aug. 7, United Methodism’s second- and seventh-largest church buildings by attendance, each within the Houston space, voted to give up the denomination.
What introduced United Methodism to this divide was its decision-making physique’s 2019 “Conventional Plan”—a doc that affirmed its ban on same-sex marriage and mandated that each one clergy be celibate if single and monogamous if married. That units the church aside from almost each different mainline Protestant denomination. The traditionalists received due to votes from conservative African delegates, whose church buildings have grown by hundreds of thousands even because the U.S. has declined by almost the identical magnitude.