Two churches provide case studies that reveal what the separatists want is disaffiliation by any means necessary, no matter the harm done to the local church when those votes fail.
Leadership: Needed
During the pandemic, my local church had a controversial vote about COVID-19 restrictions and our worship services. Our church council debated it and finally called for a vote on it. It passed by one vote, a bit higher than the minimum percentage.
But then our worship chair, who had brought it forth and prevailed said he was withdrawing it, that we obviously weren’t of one mind and that margin of success wasn’t convincing enough. We talked to other leaders, retooled it, and when it passed a month later, it was nearly unanimous.
The lesson that my worship chair knew–and I’ve learned from the various churches I’ve served–is that passing with the bare minimum means that we haven’t provided the leadership for a topic that was needed, and that we should listen to the people more so that we can come together.
It turns out two churches in my native state of Oklahoma are finding this truth out the hard way.
Mixed Experience at Church of the Servant
My childhood church was Church of the Servant in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was an urban church plant (began in 1968) and my parents took our family there in the 1980s as it grew rapidly. I thrived in the Sunday School program, was confirmed at that altar with the wicker fish that the children put their family’s offerings into, and each Sunday I walked by the trash can with the flower growing out of it in the narthex, a symbol of renewal. I can still sing “The Creed and the Gloria” which the music director wrote for the congregation.
Then in my teen years, Church of the Servant relocated to the suburbs and away from more urban ministry in 1993. Our drive took a lot longer, and it was then I experienced “the shift” in church. While I enjoyed the worship services and their longtime youth pastor was amazing, the congregation changed and my middle-class self started to not fit in with the new high society youth with designer clothes. I started not to want to attend church anymore, and I really wrestled with how Christian youth could be so snooty. At the same time, there was a new conservative bent to the congregational leadership and pastor that started to rub my parents the wrong way. When we moved across Oklahoma in 1995, it was a chance for a new church with a mission focus that we thrived in.
It is from this personal mixed experience of the Church of the Servant that I totally get why their disaffiliation vote went the way it did on September 11th, 2022.
Result: “They Finally Asked Me”
Church of the Servant, like many large churches that want to “go their own way” in this season of Methodism, held congregational meetings and conversations leading up to their disaffiliation vote. The congregational meetings that were led by Servant’s pastors were heavily promoting disaffiliation and included example videos from Separatist Rev. Rob Renfroe that unfairly malign the UMC (which have been discredited by UMC pastor Rev. Adam Hamilton) and allege outliers as normative within the UMC.
However, the conference was invited to lead one session, which included extensive Q&A, and the tone was markedly different. You can watch that meeting here. Interesting!
The day of the vote, it failed to reach the disaffiliation threshold by 2%. Then someone who said they voted in the prevailing side called for a reconsideration (which hasn’t been done before, to my knowledge). There was a re-registering of the voters (the separatists waited until some people had left), and the final vote was even closer, just a fraction of a percentage, two votes. Almost 800 people voted that day, and the conference ended with a $20 million church property still in the Oklahoma Annual Conference’s rightful hands. You can read the vote totals here and a paywalled article here.
A couple who attended the vote and voted against disaffiliation reportedly said to a colleague “This was the first time we were asked our opinion. Up until now, leadership made decisions for us.” It seems the pastoral and congregational leadership has a strong disconnect with the people in the pew.
With such a huge sum on the table, I’m sure the separatists will keep calling for votes until they’ve squeaked out a win. But until then, we know they haven’t done the leadership required or listened to their people enough, and now they will have to wait until at least May 2023 to fully disaffiliate if that’s their goal–or they can now calm down as cooler heads have prevailed.
Disaffiliation Vote Divides McAlester UMC and exits their Pastor
“The churches I’ve seen who have the will and desire to walk through the pain of disaffiliation, they have generally higher numbers…at least 80, 85, even 90% is what I would have seen–personally–as the alignment and will to walk through that very difficult and brutal process.”
Former UM Pastor Dr. Matt Judkins, August 21st, 2022
The other example is a sad story–and it didn’t have to be.
McAlester First UMC in rural SE Oklahoma held a straw poll of their members to see if they would consider disaffiliation from The UMC. The results were shared during worship on August 21st, 2022. 75% of the members said they would support disaffiliation, a smaller percentage of non-members said they would support it. Their pastor, who was commissioned a class year ahead of me in the Oklahoma Annual Conference, shared the above quote as to why he was uncomfortable leading the church through that kind of struggle.
But then Dr. Judkins, who has been their pastor since 2014 and had seen his church lose about half its worship attendees during the pandemic, also shared from the pulpit “I’m no longer called to be a pastor in The United Methodist Church” and announced the next Sunday would be his last Sunday. At the time, I applauded his integrity at stepping down from a congregation that wasn’t aligned with him.
But then, two weeks after his final Sunday, a new church plant launched in McAlester, just 8 minutes down the road and on the main drag of McAlester in a chapel owned by the Presbyterian Church: Renewal Church, an independent Christian church led by…Dr. Matthew Judkins!
While I don’t know how many of Renewal’s attendees came directly from McAlester First UMC, I can say from viewing McAlester First UMC’s streams that there is a marked difference between the two Sundays. Judkins’ announcement Sunday, people were shoulder to shoulder–and two weeks later on the launch Sunday for Renewal, people were much more spread out, missing about 25-40% of the people there on previous weeks. The following week it looks like their tech person is out too, as I didn’t get a clear view of the congregation. Time will tell if things will stabilize after McAlester First gets an appointed pastor.
Dr. Judkins is correct: there needs to be much more alignment to move forward with disaffiliation. Holding votes that are too close divides the congregation and leads them into contention that they wouldn’t have otherwise. All that said, I would also turn the mirror back to Dr. Judkins and say resigning the pastorate midcycle after all the intentional appointments are done and taking a sizable chunk of the congregation with him to a new church plant 8 minutes away is a pretty jerk move, to put it mildly. Pastors can do incredible harm to their congregation by calling for these type of votes, official or otherwise.
Disaffiliation Gut-Punches that aren’t required
Churches do not have to vote on leaving United Methodism. Disaffiliation is not a required vote by any church.
So it’s important to know that churches are being recruited by the disaffiliation forces (the WCA and discontent local church members) and the disaffiliation forces do not have what is good for the church on their minds. They want the people and the properties to leave United Methodism at all costs. In the above cases, the costs of their stature and enthusiasm will weigh heavily on the local churches, while the WCA hasn’t batted an eye and can take their locust swarm to devour the next town.
My prayer is that local churches that are less than 85% take a breath and learn to breathe together again in a season when the WCA wants to gut-punch United Methodism into submission.
And given the examples above, if you are a lay member of a local church and you think all is lost, think again: these entire churches have changed their directions based on a handful of votes. Be that handful! Vote!
Your Turn
Thoughts?
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Two churches in one town in Central Texas had failed votes to disaffiliate a couple of weeks apart. Majorities were in favor of disaffiliation, but shy of 2/3rds. Devastating and extremely poor leadership. One of the pastors who led his charge to the vote has resigned as clergy and begun a new church start in the same city (all in about a month’s time). I saw a post earlier this week from a church looking to disaffiliate requiring members to RSVP in order to vote in the conference, making it harder to vote.
It is a myth to think that congregation can just ignore this and it will go away. Each church needs to determine whether they want enter a discernment process. Each church has to listen to each other and communicate. They need to pray. They need to listen to all sides so they can determine for themselves where they want to be and handle this very difficult situation in a healthy manner. Hiding from the pain and the grief and the life altering change is not an option.
Jeremy, how can the members of Church of the Servant go into the world as a church singing “To be alive…” shackled by 34%? The majority of the church wants to do Kingdom work in a different way, but the minority is now able to fetter them to a broken model of ministry. That is not a positive action for the Kingdom, it is the acts of obstructionist crossing guards. Maybe that’s why the obstructionist wing of United Methodist churches are declining. We can do better as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Just so you know, COS has not sung To Be Alive in several years. The third, and current minister, decided not to continue singing it at the end of the service each week, to the sadness of many, including myself.
McAlester First is going to be the model of the many UMC churches that remain. When the vote is majority but not 2/3, expect the majority to simply leave the church building behind and find (or start) a church that aligns with their personal beliefs. The question will be how does the new UMC support/grow/close these churches that have a mass exodus of membership.
You need to keep these churches as a case study and see what they look like in 3, 5, 10 years.
“This was the first time we were asked our opinion. Up until now, leadership made decisions for us.” This is wrong when the leadership is for disaffiliation, and it is just as wrong when the leadership is pro-UMC. Always, let the people vote!
My church has 3,000 nominal members but only around 600 attending regularly. Other than a brief, largely neutral paragraph in the Church Newsletter about 2 years ago, the gay ministry/ordination debate has not been mentioned officially in the church. As an involved lay person with my ear to the ground, I have heard very little conversation about this. There will be no votes at Duluth First UMC. And there will certainly be no Renfro videos shown. 70 churches dissafiliated at our 2022 AC out of 800. All but 2 of these had less than 100 members; one had only 3. Most of them are in rural Northwest Georgia which is Margery Taylor Greene country. A resolution to add a special disaffiliation period and a called AC in 2022 was defeated at AC by 75%. The disaffiliation rate in North Georgia will fall well below the estimated 20%. As the largest conference in the US, this is good news. Our Bishop and 300 clergy signed a full page statement in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution following the 2019 Special AC apologizing to our gay community and members for the Traditional Plan. My guess: this period will be viewed in the future as a tempest in a teapot, and the United Methodist Church will move on as a fully inclusive denomination continuing to lead the Seven Sisters of mainline Protestantism in the US.
I’m not even going to comment on my position and why I feel the way I do. I’ve spent a year explaining it and nobody listens to anyone else anyway. We say the holy spirt will lead us through 40 days of discernment while we take straw polls, the pastors are openly divided, and things get ugly amongst lay leaders. Our church’s vote will be close, most likely to stay. Over half of the large church said in their straw poll that they will leave the church if they lose. I’m not so sure this is bad. Let God sort out which churches thrive and which don’t. I am fatalistic about it at this point. I can only listen to people cry so much. The most immediate reaction in my area will likely be half the local churches leaving UMC and half staying. The people will all just switch to the local churches most similar to their views. I understand that option is not available for some – elderly immobile and rural folks who have few realistic options, and that makes me sad. I will say that before people blame the lay leadership for disaffiliation votes, years of squabbling and name calling by bishops with underhanded tactics on both sides has led to people taking things in their own hands. The situation is a failure of UMC leadership to reach a solution that a majority of leadership can agree to.
It would be great if the hundred or so “no” voters were actually in attendance on Sunday at COS. I’m very familiar with the morning worship crowd and there was a large group, all sitting together, that haven’t attended in years. I haven’t seen any of them since the vote either. This points to a flaw in how UMC counts “members”. One may attend another church, but leave the membership at COS. Then return for one afternoon just to skew the vote. Very sad tactics indeed.
I attended COS X 51 years & have hung in there through changes which drew positive & negative comments in the community. COS has always been an affirming church which welcomed people from all walks of life. When the current minister made it clear that we would become inclusive, and not welcome those of same sex anymore, it became apparent the church mission had changed. In fact, the pastor, told our Sunday school class that he actually asked the same sex couple to leave the church! Shortly after this announcement, Covid happened and many of those same-sex people. “disappeared”.
I proudly say that I voted “No” for disaffiliation and I was in church every Sunday prior to and after the vote. It wasn’t until one person in my Sunday school made me and others feel unwelcome that several of us from that Sunday school defected to another church which has been welcoming and does not judge. It is sad how this vote has put such a wedge between the people of COS! Our members are scattered all over the city now. But that’s what the devil does; he separates those that are strong in unity and scatters them. The devil won this and the devil won COS. It is extremely sad.
Lastly, I’m sure longtime members of COS were hopeful that they could get their church back to the way it was intended, so they held onto their membership in hopes of doing that. There are many previous members from COS at the church, I attend, and all of them are hurting from their loss, but happy at where they are now. For people to assume that those people were trying to skew the results, is just immature!
What I don’t appreciate is people that call themselves Christians trying to make me and others feel bad for wanting to love our neighbors as ourselves and welcome all of those that want to worship God into our church as equals! The greatest of the commandments is to love one another! Remember, Jesus hung with the least of the least and the least desirable, and brought them to the Lord. COS is now “exclusive”. and you have to be close minded to be a member there. It is sad how one leader, actually two, have led the sheep to the edge of the cliff, just to watch them jump at their command by poisoning, their minds with unfound videos, which were taken out of context. I pray for my friends that are still members there, and believe that they are doing the right thing. As for me and
this house, we shall remain united Methodist.
As a now non-active member of cos, welcoming everyone and treating all with equal Grace does not mean that you should incorporate actions and celebrate lifestyles that are incompatible with the inerrant inspired word of God.
Jeremy has written a thoughtful essay. I share his judgment of the Rob Renfroe videos. If people are going to watch those videos, they ought also to watch Adam Hamilton’s replies. All of these videos are on YouTube. Only after viewing and weighing these videos should we engage in dialogue. Facts and truth should always be our guides.
God and his son Jesus preach love, WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION, love is the cornerstone of the Christian religion, “love thy neighbor “ NOWHERE IN THE BIBLE DOES IT SAY “ unless he’s gay” wake up people, love thy neighbor, they are Gods people also. I would welcome a gay to my home before a thief, liar or murderer. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Is that you?
I just read this today and found it fascinating. Our church had a meeting in September 2022, where the displeasure of remaining United methodist was voiced extensively. We went through a period of discernment and listening as as our newly created leadership board,July 2022, tried to figure out what the best path. There were strong voices to hold a vote from a vocal few. Afterward listening and discerning for 2 months at the end of November, The Leadership Board decided to remain United Methodist and work through our differences within that structure. 5 weeks later, a former retired pastor, just affiliating with the GMC , was beloved by the congregation, started a new church
with 100 of our members, holding the values of the Global Methodist church but starting independant. Many people have left, and yet, even as a smaller congregation with a large mortgage there is a positive spirit without their presence.
My church in west central Ohio did a straw poll and it was 45-45 with the remaining 10% unsure. The “discernment” team pushed and pushed and pushed to disaffiliate and it failed and split the church, which had been worshipping 450. Several members of the discernment team knew it would not pass and still they pulled horrible antics. For most people that voted to disaffiliate, it was not about homosexuality, it was and still is about power and money. A bill of the group that left have formed a new church that live streams another church. It is a sad state of affairs for all involved.
I wish the best of those wishing to remain in the UMC, but after seeing the agenda put forth and approved at the 2024 Convention I am so happy we disaffilliated