Methodism worldwide is usually estimated around sixty to eighty million across all bodies, and its largest single denomination has just been through the biggest Protestant separation in a generation.
The United Methodist Church spent decades in conflict over the ordination of non-celibate gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex marriages, both prohibited by its Book of Discipline. A special General Conference in 2019 voted narrowly to keep and strengthen the prohibitions; the outcome was rejected in practice by much of the American church and satisfied nobody. A route out was opened allowing congregations to leave with their property under stated financial conditions, and by the end of 2023 roughly 7,600 American congregations, about a quarter of the American total, had been approved to disaffiliate. Many joined the Global Methodist Church, launched in May 2022.
The General Conference of May 2024 then repealed the bans, removed the long-standing language declaring the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching, and adopted a regionalisation plan permitting different parts of the world church to set different rules on marriage. Reported UMC worldwide membership after the departures stands near ten million.
The African conferences complicate any simple account. They are large, growing, and mostly opposed to the 2024 changes, and they did not leave in the numbers some expected, partly because the disaffiliation mechanism was written for American congregations and partly because the regionalisation plan was designed to let them keep their own discipline. Several African conferences have since voted to depart regardless.
Outside the United Methodist orbit sit the historically Black Methodist churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its relatives, founded from the 1790s in response to segregated seating and treatment in white congregations, and the British Methodist Church, which approved same-sex marriage in 2021.