General conference 2019 umc1/20/2024 The congregation felt like the conference did not support the church as it struggled to find and maintain good pastoral leadership. The church cited concerns over leadership as its reason for disaffiliating and paid over $120,000 to leave the Illinois Great Rivers Conference. It had to pay a $92,000 fee on the way out.Īnother church that opted to leave before the protocol vote was the United Church of Altona, now The Grove Community Church of Altona, Illinois. Leaders at Boyce firmly believed its future was not with the UMC and weren ’t sure when the protocol would be approved or what the final language would be, so the church disaffiliated under Section 2553 last September. But if churches waited until the protocol ’s approval, they could walk away with their buildings and no major fees. The annual conferences must also vote to release a church. Though not specified in Section 2553, some conferences also require churches to pay a percentage of the church’s total assets. This addendum is sometimes called Section 2553.Įven under Section 2553 disaffiliation requires churches to pay hefty financial obligations to their conferences: several years of contributions to the pension and payment of two years of aportionments, money local churches give to support the conference and denomination. To depart with property, churches can use a provision added by the 2019 special session of the General Conference, allowing churches to disaffiliate for “reasons of conscience” related to human sexuality. The move came at a cost to the East Liverpool, Ohio, church.įor centuries the denomination has maintained a trust clause, which states that churches hold property in trust for the entire denomination. The church hired its most recent pastor without the help of the annual conference, and the lay leadership led the effort to disaffiliate. “Out of the last ten pastors, there might have been three or four who fit our doctrine,” said Talkington. The decision to leave came after years of frustration with the East Ohio Conference for not valuing the church’s conservative doctrinal stance on issues such as homosexuality and not finding conservative ministers to serve the church. As far as the protocol is concerned, it ’s something that is up in the air,” said Alvin Talkington, a member of the disaffiliation team at Boyce Church, a 100-member congregation in Ohio that left the denomination last fall. “For us, we felt the Lord was leading us to go. Though the disaffiliations represent a sliver of the more than 31,000 United Methodist churches nationwide, they show that some churches are willing to take the hard way out of the UMC. Annual conference reports for 2021 show that the annual conferences have approved 38 disaffiliations so far in 2021. But the UMC has twice postponed its General Conference and won ’t meet until August 2022 to vote on the proposal, called the “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation.”Ī United Methodist News review of US annual conference reports and publicly available journals found that the 54 conferences-regional UMC governing bodies-approved at least 51 disaffiliations in 2020. Two years ago, factions in the United Methodist Church (UMC) agreed on a plan for splitting the denomination with conservative churches keeping their property as they leave. Mueller Bishop details important Way Forward questions in a document addressing the questions he has heard most often about the Commission on a Way Forward and the special 2019 General Conference.įor Church Leaders: Communicating about General Conference- This training experience will offer valuable information as we prepare for the 2019 Special Session of General Conference.Caught in a decades-long battle over LGBT issues, with a proposed denominational split delayed again by the pandemic, dozens of conservative and progressive churches are leaving the United Methodist Church (UMC) without a tidy exit plan. Seeing a Way Forward: Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey (a series of video interviews with the Louisiana Area Bishop)Īrkansas Bishop Gary E. New group pushes Simple Plan as way forward Way Forward Commission offers video resources for 2019 General Conference United Methodist News Topic: General Conference If you wish to contact the delegation via email the address is All of the Oral Arguments before the Judicial Council on the three plans (One Church Plan, the Connectional Conference Plan, and the Traditional Plan) will be on Tuesday, October 23 and will be livestreamed here (Beginning at 1:30 am): as well as via Facebook at Overview of Proposals for General Conference 2019Ĭourageous Conversation about the Way Forward
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