The chart below shows UM News’ count of how many churches disaffiliations have been approved by annual conferences. The tally comes from a UM News review of U.S. annual conference reports, publicly available journals and reports of the 17 special annual conference sessions this year. The General Council on Finance and Administration, the denomination’s finance agency, is collecting the official data on disaffiliations and church closures. But the finance agency’s count of disaffiliations lags behind UM News’ data because it must wait for annual conferences to submit official reports.
Editor's Note: This chart shows how many of the approximately 30,500 congregations in the United States have requested to leave the United Methodist Church. Counts are not yet available from regions outside the United States. Some churches that have expressed an interest in leaving, such as First UMC in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas, didn't achieve the required two-thirds vote of membership required by Paragraph 2553 of the Book of Discipline. Therefore the disaffiliation did not proceed.
Disaffiliation chart
Chart compiled by United Methodist Insight from screenshots taken from UM News.
Insight Editor Cynthia B. Astle contributed to this report.