All published articles in this series may be found here.
The 2019 special called General Conference approved, by a narrow margin, the addition of a temporary paragraph to the 2016 Book of Discipline that offered a pathway for churches to disaffiliate from The United Methodist Church.
Paragraph 2553 granted a limited right for local congregations to gain release from The United Methodist Church’s centuries-old trust clause, which states that church property is held in trust for the benefit of the entire denomination.
This paragraph allowed U.S. congregations to exit with property for “reasons of conscience” regarding changes made to legislation relating to homosexuality by the 2019 General Conference. It also set minimum monetary conditions that must be met and called for each conference’s board of trustees to decide the specific terms that must be met for congregations making such requests. The paragraph expired Dec. 31, 2023.
The Judicial Council, ruling upon whether Paragraph 2553 was constitutional, determined that it was — provided that the final authority for determining whether a congregation could disaffiliate was its annual conference, not the local church itself.
The result was a variety of different sets of terms for disaffiliation in effect across the United States. Some conferences added additional costs or other requirements. Some allowed congregations to request disaffiliation even if their reasons did not involve disagreeing with the changes made at the 2019 General Conference. Some required discernment periods before a request for a special called church conference could be made. And some specified the content of the materials and the nature of the presenters that could or could not be involved in that process.
The Judicial Council was frequently asked to weigh in on whether such variations from the minimum standards set by the Discipline were allowable. The church court consistently ruled that the language of Paragraph 2553 gave full discretion to the conference board of trustees to set terms as they saw fit, provided the minimum standards set by the Discipline were met.
While the adoption of Paragraph 2553 was one of the final actions of the 2019 General Conference, its very first action was to approve a proposal from the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters that no subsequent actions of that General Conference could go into effect in the central conferences until one year after the close of the regular 2020 session of the General Conference. With the 2020 session of the legislative assembly postponed until 2024, Paragraph 2553 expired before it could ever apply outside the United States.
Across all of the different ways Paragraph 2553 was implemented, the result of the adoption of that paragraph was the disaffiliation of more than 7,600 United Methodist congregations in the United States — about 26% of its congregations and about 24% of its members.
2024 General Conference action
The 2024 General Conference was asked to consider nearly 30 proposals seeking to extend or amend the provisions of Paragraph 2553, all with the effect of permitting some form of disaffiliation to continue.
The overwhelming consensus of the subcommittee that first processed this legislation was to reject all of it in a bundle in favor of a briefer petition, #21087, which read “Delete ¶2553 from the Book of Discipline.” The vote of the entire conferences legislative committee 62-12, two votes shy of appearing on a consent calendar. The final vote in plenary was 519-203.
With Paragraph 2553 already expired, disaffiliation, as such, will not be continued in The United Methodist Church through the coming quadrennium (2025-2028).
After disaffiliation, what?
While disaffiliation is over, “separation,” “disassociation” or “departure” on terms quite similar to Paragraph 2553 have continued in some conferences.
These conferences repurposed the policies their trustees had developed for implementing Paragraph 2553 by either directly or with some further modifications applying them to how the trustees would manage transfer and closure under Paragraph 2549. Ask The UMC is aware of at least seven annual conferences that had previously announced plans to proceed in this way after the expiration of Paragraph 2553: South Georgia, Alabama-West Florida, Rio Texas, Illinois Great Rivers, Mississippi, South Carolina and Holston. One other conference, Kentucky, approved a plan to do so at its annual conference in 2024.
However, two of these annual conferences — Kentucky and Alabama-West Florida — have also brought questions to the Judicial Council about whether or how Paragraph 2549 may be used in this way given the action of the General Conference to remove disaffiliation entirely from the Discipline. The Judicial Council will take up their questions as part of its fall 2024 docket when it meets in late October 2024.
These two conferences and the Holston Conference have announced they will not process requests for departure or disassociation until after the Judicial Council rules on the matter. South Georgia appears poised to move ahead with processing a final round of departures on Aug. 17, 2024. Illinois Great Rivers and Rio Texas have not, to date, stated publicly how they will proceed. Mississippi and South Carolina will not be finalizing departures until their 2025 annual conference.
Disaffiliation is ended. Whether or how further separations may be processed remains to be seen.
Burton Edwards is director of Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.
