The Global Methodist Church Will Meet in Costa Rica. Sexuality Is Not on the Agenda.

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Religion News Service | Sept. 18, 2024

Sexuality won’t be on the agenda when members of the nascent Global Methodist Church convene for the first time Sept. 20-26 in San Jose, Costa Rica.

The breakaway denomination established by departing United Methodist churches two years ago will instead adopt a constitution and iron out its governance structure. The wrangling over sexuality has, for now, been settled.

The new denomination’s rule book spells out that “human sexuality is a gift of God that is to be affirmed as it is exercised within the legal and spiritual covenant of a loving and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman.”

It was mostly the issue of sexuality that led some 7,600 U.S.-based United Methodist churches (about 25% of all U.S. congregations in the denomination) to break away, fearing the United Methodist Church was about to lift its LGBTQ+ bans on ordination and marriage. It did so at its General Conference in April, freeing queer members and clergy from all previous restrictions.

Some 3,700 formerly U.S.-based United Methodist churches joined the newly formed Global Methodist Church, which promised them it would resist the push to liberalize on the issue. The new denomination now has a total of 4,715 congregations, including many abroad, and it expects dramatic growth over the next two years, particularly from African congregations.

The estimated 350 delegates who will descend on the Costa Rica Convention Center beginning Friday will approve a rule book called the Book of Doctrines and Discipline and drop the “transitional” label from many of its documents and job titles. Delegates will also debate and vote on how to govern and structure the denomination's 36 geographic regions, called conferences.

“We've been operating with extremely wet cement for 2.5 years,” said the Rev. Keith Boyette, the denomination’s transitional connectional officer. “It's got a little more consistency now, but it's not dry yet.”

Aside from approving a constitution, delegates to the conference will choose from two plans for selecting bishops. Under one plan, six part-time bishops will join three full-time bishops to proclaim and defend the church’s teachings. These bishops will not be tied down to particular geographic conferences as in the United Methodist model. Instead, administration of church conferences will be handled by conference superintendents.

“The bishops would be in a teaching role where they would make sure that in each of the conferences our doctrine is being taught and they're holding clergy accountable for upholding the doctrine,” said Cara Nicklas, an Oklahoma lawyer who has served as chair of the transitional leadership council.

This model of episcopacy is envisioned as a corrective to the United Methodist model, where bishops served more as administrators. After two openly gay and married pastors were elected bishops to the United Methodist Church beginning in 2016 (both in western U.S. conferences), there were no mechanisms to discipline them to them to abide by church teachings, which at the time did not allow for the ordination of people in same-sex marriages.

Under another model being presented to delegates, sometimes called the residential model, the denomination would elect 36 bishops each to govern the denomination’s 36 conferences, much as in the United Methodist Church.

The Global Methodist Church intends to have a much lighter institutional footprint than the United Methodist Church. At its conference, it will select what it calls “connectional commissions” staffed by volunteer clergy and lay members. Unlike the United Methodist Church, which has fully funded agencies that oversee finances, administration, higher education and global ministries, the plan envisions commissions.

“One of the overarching values has been to try to keep the church lean and not top heavy and to empower local churches to do the ministry without being burdened by supporting infrastructure,” said Boyette.

The Global Methodist Church will also collect far less money from its churches for the larger mission of denomination. Churches in the Global Methodist Church will be expected to contribute 1% of their operating budget annually to the denomination, and no more than 5% to the geographic conference they are a part of.

In the United Methodist Church, by comparison, each church contributes what’s called an apportionment of between 12% and 15% of its budget to support the work of the denomination beyond the local church.

In addition, the Global Methodist Church will not own church buildings in a trust clause as the United Methodist Church does. (That trust clause was lifted for a five-year period to allow churches to disaffiliate with their buildings.)

Neither will bishops appoint pastors to churches on an annual basis. Instead, pastors will remain at a church until a church decides it no longer wants them or the pastor asks to be appointed elsewhere.

“What they're doing is they're responding to those things that churches have often been the most critical of — paying too much in apportionments, getting a pastor they didn’t like and, of course, the trust clause,” said Lovett Weems, director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at the United Methodist-affiliated Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. “Conservatives who have joined, when they see that, they'll say, ‘Oh, good. It’s about time.’”

The denomination plans to hold another general conference in 2026, when it expects to have a larger contingent of overseas churches. After 2026 it expects to hold general conferences every six years.

But Boyette, who served for the past two years as chief operating officer and visionary, will be retiring. He will be replaced by the Rev. Mike Schafer of Lubbock, Texas, who will serve as the denomination’s top leader — a position for which there is no corollary in the United Methodist Church.

In 2026, when the Global Methodist Church next meets, it will most likely be again abroad.

“We felt it was very important to make a statement that we were not a U.S.-centric church,” Boyette said. By comparison, he added, “The United Methodist Church has never had a general conference outside the United States.”

Yonat Shimron is a senior editor at RNS and a North Carolina-based reporter covering Judaism, the South's changing religious landscape and the growing nonreligious divide. She joined RNS in April 2011 and became managing editor in 2013.