Christ Church Memphis has voted overwhelmingly to join the Global Methodist Church, a fast-growing splinter group of former United Methodist Church congregations loyal to the denomination’s teachings but unwilling to live with its inconsistencies.

Among them is that the denomination’s book of discipline calls for actions against clergy who ordain or marry LGBTQ+ people. For years, critics say, leadership in the UMC in the United States has essentially looked the other way.

Christ Church votes overwhelmingly to leave United Methodist Church

Under the new mantle of more conservative thought and leadership, churches in the network are recommitting themselves to ministry and adding more churches.

“Local churches are free to plant new churches without being bogged down in denominational process. There’s a lot of broadband and capacity to be very creative in moving forward,” said Rev. Paul Lawler, senior pastor at Christ Church for less than a year of one of the most tumultuous years in its history.

The vote, done in person and online, opened Saturday evening, June 3, and closed Monday, June 5.

Results were released Wednesday.

More than 99% (620 people) voted for Global Methodist Church over The Foundry Network (6 votes), a group of about 20 large Methodist churches that voted to disaffiliate in the past year.

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“Everyone didn’t participate in the vote,” Lawler said. “We believe it’s because they felt the GMC was a foregone conclusion.”

Christ Church has 4,809 members.

Both the GMC and The Foundry Network were created slightly over a year ago to offer the breakaway congregations landing places.

GMC, growing at a rate of 75 to 100 new churches a week, is by far the largest.

“We’ve gone from obviously zero congregations to in excess of 2,600 at this point, and from zero clergy persons to in excess of 2,900,” said Rev. Keith Boyette, chief executive and administrative officer of the denomination, now a loosely structured organization with 10 staff around the world.

He is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Boyette expects several thousand of UMC congregations will join before the year is over as more separations are approved in the U.S. and abroad, where the process has moved more slowly but will soon escalate.

“How I see that and what I feel strongly about is that none of us have all the answers. Diversity in all its forms is a good thing. I don’t remember exactly who said this, but God’s goodness is bigger than our badness, and God’s ability to forgive is bigger than our ability to sin.”

Dr. Scott Morris

The global network, he says, is preferable because it preserves the tie across individual churches and regions, a core part of UMC governance. 

“An important value for Methodists is a notion called connectionalism. That is, we don’t operate in a vacuum by ourselves, but we have strong ties across our body,” Boyette said.

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The ties hold churches accountable, he said. They also provide resources that allow churches to do more together than they could individually.

“It provides vetting for pastors; it provides benefit programs that will be hard for individual churches to get on their own, and it binds us together in ministry and mission,” Boyette said.

The perks, including benefit programs, are the work of an organization that saw the writing on the wall several years ago and went to work building what it hopes will be the default gathering place for the disaffiliating UMC churches.

“We’ve been working on this for a while,” Boyette said. “Before I was connectional officer for the Global Methodist Church, I was president of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, which was an organization of theologically conservative clergy and churches and laypeople that sought to encourage the United Methodist Church to be true to its traditional teachings and prepare for the future,” he said.

He also was a member of the 16-person team that came up with a protocol for amicable separation that would have launched the GMC in May 2020.

It was delayed by the pandemic.

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In 2019, a motion was offered from the floor at the Annual Conference meeting to allow UMC congregations to leave with their property if they agreed to pension and apportionment payments and had a two-thirds majority vote.

Christ Church will pay $2.9 million for its share of denominational expenses for the remainder of the year. It will leave the UMC denomination with property at 4488 Poplar Ave. valued at more than $15 million.

The provision for churches to leave with their property went into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, and is valid through the end of the year. If necessary, the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference will meet again in November to approve another slate of disaffiliations.

Part of the unspoken discontent within UMC is the cost of connectionalism and decades of hierarchy. Christ Church paid roughly 10% of its budget to the denomination for services, including curriculum, and pension support for retired clergy.

GMC will charge 1%, allowing many disaffiliating congregations to keep significant shares of their budgets at home.

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“What had happened within the United Methodist Church was the realization that the local church was not benefiting from participating in connectionalism within the United Methodist Church,” Lawler said.

“So much of that framework had been something that was effective in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, but as we moved more into the Information Age ... the local church simply was not, for lack of better terms, getting good support in light of its connectional giving,” he said.

“There is so much more I could say about that,” Lawler said, noting that past is no longer relevant. 

“An important value for Methodists is a notion called connectionalism. That is, we don’t operate in a vacuum by ourselves, but we have strong ties across our body.”

Rev. Keith Boyette

The presenting issue in the UMC legal documents for separation was the divide over sexuality, but the issues are more nuanced and include disagreements over the Bible and its authority.

“The global Methodist Church is committed to the Christian faith as it has been historically practiced down through the centuries,” Boyette said.

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“The perception of many is that the United Methodist Church is moving away from historic observation of the Christian faith.”

Dr. Scott Morris has been a member of the UMC all his life and an ordained member of its clergy. Part of the attraction for him is diversity of thought or doctrinal pluralism.

“How I see that and what I feel strongly about is that none of us have all the answers. Diversity in all its forms is a good thing. I don’t remember exactly who said this, but God’s goodness is bigger than our badness, and God’s ability to forgive is bigger than our ability to sin.

“I want to live in a church that is wide and broad and deep,” Morris said, noting that he did not know much about the GMC.

“I am sure I will have the opportunity to learn more in the future,” he said.

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Christ Church studied its options for several months. Its leaders, including the church council, recommended the church join the GMC.

“It offers them a like-minded group of conservative churches to focus on doing ministry together instead of denominational in-fighting,” said Rev. Tom Fuerst, minister at Memphis First United Methodist Church and former member of the clergy at Christ Church.

He was fired over differences in practice and theology.

“It also provides newness and energy. What it doesn’t provide is the essential diversity necessary for a full vision of Christ’s body. It will be largely white. And exclusive of gay folks,” Fuerst said.

Lawler is excited about the possibilities, including the synergy of like-minded believers moving in the same direction, which he hopes will recreate the “movement feel” the Methodist Church once had in the U.S. when there was a Methodist church plant in all but nine unpopulated counties, he said.

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He is also quick to say that fervor is not to be misinterpreted as the evangelism that has parallels in politics.

“We’re 1,000 miles from that. What I’m referring to is Christ Church has a legacy with serving the city of Memphis with SOS (Service Over Self), the Binghampton Development Corporation, Cornerstone Schools and our relationship with World Relief, caring for refugees in our city and in building bridges with the African-American community. I mean, there’s a long legacy.”

Christ Church’s new affiliation is expected to be approved by the GMC in several weeks.

The name was chosen to express the global body of the Methodist Church, Boyette said.

“The United Methodist Church has been dominated by leadership here in the U.S., and it often makes decisions that one might describe as being U.S.-centric.

“We’re working very hard to say the United States is just one part of the world. It’s part of the body of Christ and that our leadership and membership need to draw from all nations, cultures and ethnicities around the world.”