A New Reformation

A Nickell for Your Thoughts

by

May 25, 2024

With the exodus of many of its most conservative congregations, the United Methodist Church (UMC) has now fractured over the issue of LGBTQ+ inclusion, as did mainline Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches before them.1 The UMC fracture, however, occurred in reverse order: whereas conservative congregations departed the other denominations when they voted to ordain gays and lesbians, the departure of nearly a quarter of UMC churches erased a narrow conservative majority, and the recent UMC General Conference2 passed inclusive legislation by wide margins.

These fractures are part of a larger re-formation within Christianity, reflecting significant social change in the world at large. After seeing rights for women and African Americans expanded in the church and in society, conservatives resisted inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons as a level of change they could not accept.3 The tension between people who resisted change and those who embraced it led the church to the breaking point.

As an institution that both shapes and is shaped by the changing culture, religion is undergoing transformation on the scale of the Protestant Reformation. The late religion editor Phyllis Tickle discussesd this idea in her 2008 book The Great Emergence. Using an image from Anglican bishop Mark Bishop (yes, Bishop Bishop), she notes that every 500 years or so, the church needs to have a giant rummage sale to get rid of the things that are no longer working. Such “hinge times” in church history include the beginning of the Dark Ages in the sixth century and the Great Schism of 1054, along with the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, it seems that the church is due another clearing out.

In her 2012 book, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass suggests that this is our country’s Fourth Great Awakening. These awakenings occur when society confronts new ideas and technology, provoking both resistance to change, represented by the Religious Right, and the embrace of new more inclusive, experiential, and fluid forms of spirituality. She writes that the greatest tension between these forces occurs within religious bodies, as the splits of mainline Protestant denominations illustrate.

Harvey Cox, in The Future of Faith (2009), describes this movement as the start of a new “Age of the Spirit,” characterized by spiritual quest rather than doctrine, and a turn from patriarchy and hierarchy to leadership rooted in community. Butler Bass likewise notes that Christianity is moving from religion based on belief to a more experiential faith. Whereas the church has required that people believe certain things and behave in proscribed ways before they can belong, she proposes that a reversal of those actions is more consistent with following Jesus, for whom community came first, practices second, and belief third.

For decades, conservative Methodists focused on “beliefs” that related to a handful of scripture passages about same-sex behavior and on the “behavior” of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” to exclude LGBTQ+ persons from full “belonging” in the UMC. With their departure and the inclusive legislation passed by the recent General Conference, a spirit of hopefulness marked that gathering. The UMC seems poised to catch this wave of change, which can be seen as a sign of new life, rather than death or defeat.

As a global body, the UMC is distinct from the other mainline denominations that divided, whose membership was confined to the US. This prolonged the inevitable split as the UMC lost membership in the US, where LGBTQ+ inclusion was becoming more widely accepted, and grew in regions with more conservative cultural values. The recent General Conference addressed these differences as well, passing legislation that would allow each region to adapt church policy to their situation.

In an interesting parallel, the UMC’s ancestor, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was established at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, MD, in 1784. At that gathering, US churches severed ties with the Church of England, declaring independence from the Methodist movement in Britain and establishing the first independent Methodist denomination.

That action was echoed in the Christmas Covenant, “An Equitable Structure of Global Regionalism” crafted by United Methodists outside the US to de-center the US church and focus on the distinctive cultures of the various regions where United Methodism is found. After being aligned with similar legislation, the regionalization outlined in the Christmas Covenant was approved by the recent General Conference. As they threw off the legacy of colonialism, delegates from outside the US, especially those from Africa, reflected a variety of perspectives, instead of voting in lockstep with US conservatives.

The UMC that emerged from last month’s General Conference may become even smaller, as lay and clergy members opposed to the changes continue to leave.4 The church will need to be less bureaucratic and more flexible. Considering its reduced membership, the General Conference approved the smallest denominational budget in 40 years — one that is 40% less than the 2016 budget. However, instead of continuing to debate irreconcilable differences, the church can focus its resources on transforming itself to fit a changing religious landscape and a variety of global contexts.

We don’t know what the future church will look like, any more than 16th century Germans understood the significance of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg in 1517. We regard that now as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, but it was a crystalizing event in the midst of decades of change. The recent division of the UMC is a notable event in a similar religious reformation, but we cannot see the complete arc. Those who follow us will see where these changes led, along with which events pushed it forward, and which held it back.

  1. Following the 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, a number of congregations allied with conservative dioceses in the worldwide Anglican Communion, before coalescing in June 2009 as the Anglican Church of North America. In August 2010, theological conservatives within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) and the Canadian Lutheran Church came together as the North American Lutheran Church in response to the ELCA’s 2009 vote to allow gays and lesbians to be ordained and married. After the Presbyterian Church (USA) lifted its ban on ordaining gays and lesbians in 2010, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians formed in January 2012. For detailed discussion of the similarities and differences of these breakaway movements, see Chapters 4 and 5 of my book We Shall Not Be Moved: Methodists Debate Race, Gender, and Homosexuality. 
  2. The General Conference in Charlotte, NC, last month was officially the 2020 General Conference, since the delegates elected and legislation they considered were intended for the 2020 gathering, which was delayed because of the global pandemic. 
  3. This is the thesis of my book We Shall Not Be Moved, which uses the theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to argue that deeply rooted, unrecognized fear of change drove conservatives, rather than religious arguments. 
  4. UMC congregations were allowed to disaffiliate and retain their property through December 31, 2023, so future departures will likely be individuals rather than entire congregations. 

The Rev. Jane Ellen Nickell is a retired clergy member of the West Virginia Annual Conference.