This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 2019, the United Methodist Church's General Conference passed the Traditional Plan by a vote of 438 to 384, upholding the denomination's existing restrictions on same sex marriage and on ordaining non celibate gay clergy. Many progressive clergy within the church declined to follow the restrictions the vote had just reaffirmed.
Congregations on the other side of the dispute, opposed to any future loosening of those restrictions, organized a new denomination in response. The Global Methodist Church launched formally on May 1, 2022, three years after the vote that set the split in motion.
The new denomination grew quickly in its first year. Roughly 3,000 congregations had joined the Global Methodist Church by July 2023, part of a much larger wave of departures from the United Methodist Church, which recorded 7,673 congregations disaffiliated in total by December 2023, not all of which joined the new denomination specifically rather than another church or independent status.
What the 2019 vote and the 2022 launch it led to changed for Methodism's spread was its newest and most recent schism, following the nineteenth century's split over slavery. A single General Conference vote produced, within three years, a new national denomination with thousands of congregations of its own.