Global Methodist Church

The mechanism mattered as much as the disagreement. Methodist polity vests the property of a local church in trust for the denomination, so a congregation cannot simply leave and take its building. In 2019 a special General Conference of the United Methodist Church added a provision to the Book of Discipline allowing a congregation to disaffiliate over the questions of ordination and marriage, subject to conference approval and to payment of pension liabilities and apportionments, with the window closing at the end of 2023.

Several thousand United States congregations used it, and the resulting departures were concentrated in the south and midwest. Outside the United States the picture was different again, because annual conferences in Africa, Europe and the Philippines faced separate legal and constitutional situations and moved at different speeds and in different directions.

The Global Methodist Church launched on the first of May 2022 as a destination for congregations and clergy taking that route, having been prepared for several years by an association of traditionalist Methodists. It operated under a transitional book of doctrines and discipline until its convening General Conference, held in Costa Rica in September 2024, which adopted its permanent structure. Both bodies continue, both describe themselves as Methodist and hold the Wesleyan standards, and the atlas records what each teaches rather than adjudicating the separation.

The doctrinal standards are the inherited Methodist ones: the Articles of Religion, the Confession of Faith that came into Methodism through the Evangelical United Brethren, the standard sermons of John Wesley and his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. On the questions that produced the separation the church teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman and that clergy are to be celibate in singleness and faithful in marriage so defined.

The structural choices are where the new church deliberately differs from the old one. It provides for far fewer general agencies and boards, keeping money and decision-making closer to the annual conference and the congregation. It ended the guaranteed appointment, under which an ordained elder in good standing was assured of a pastoral charge, which supporters describe as accountability and which changes the position of clergy considerably. Bishops are elected to terms rather than for life. Local churches hold their own property rather than holding it in trust for the denomination, which removes the mechanism that made the separation itself so complicated.

It ordains women, which was not in dispute in the separation and which distinguishes it from some other traditionalist Methodist bodies. As a denomination assembled within a few years from congregations on several continents, a good deal about its structure and its ministry is still being settled by its own conferences.