The United Methodist Church is one of those denominations that can’t be understood simply by reading its current statement of beliefs. Its story stretches from John Wesley’s eighteenth-century revival movement through frontier America, slavery and Civil War divisions, reunions and mergers, the Social Gospel, the civil-rights era, women in ministry, decades of conflict over sexuality, thousands of congregational departures, and one of the most consequential General Conferences in its history in 2024.
The denomination formally called The United Methodist Church, usually shortened to UMC, didn’t actually exist until 1968. Its roots, however, reach back more than two centuries. The UMC remains recognizably Wesleyan in its theology of grace, sanctification, sacraments, and connectional church government, but the modern denomination also contains considerable theological diversity. Understanding the UMC therefore requires keeping two things in view at once: the Methodist tradition it inherited and the direction the denomination has taken in recent decades.
It Started with John Wesley
John Wesley never set out to create another denomination. He was an Anglican priest who wanted to revive Christianity within the Church of England. At Oxford, John, his brother Charles, and several friends became unusually disciplined about prayer, Bible study, fasting, Communion, charitable work, and personal holiness. Other students mockingly called them Methodists because of their methodical religious habits. The insult stuck.
Wesley’s preaching eventually carried him outside conventional parish boundaries. He preached in fields and marketplaces to people who weren’t being reached effectively by established churches, organized converts into societies and small groups, trained lay preachers, and created a remarkably effective system for spiritual accountability. Methodism became a movement long before it became a denomination.
Methodism Comes to America
Methodism spread rapidly in the American colonies and exploded after the Revolution. Wesley authorized Thomas Coke to help organize American Methodists, and at the famous Christmas Conference of 1784, Francis Asbury and other leaders established the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Asbury became one of the great architects of American Methodism. Methodist circuit riders traveled enormous territories on horseback, preaching wherever people could be gathered. They planted churches in settlements that might not have had enough people, money, or buildings to attract more established clergy.
The system fit the American frontier almost perfectly. You didn’t necessarily need a cathedral, seminary graduate, pipe organ, and established parish. Sometimes you needed a preacher, a horse, a Bible, and somebody stubborn enough to ride another twenty miles in the rain. Methodism had plenty of those.
Slavery Tears the Church Apart
Methodism’s early opposition to slavery weakened as the denomination expanded into slaveholding regions. The conflict eventually became impossible to contain. In 1844, controversy surrounding Bishop James O. Andrew, who had become connected to slaveholding through marriage, helped precipitate a major division.
The result was the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1845. Northern and Southern Methodists remained separated through the Civil War and for decades afterward. The division demonstrates how thoroughly slavery fractured American Christianity. Christians who shared Wesley, Methodist doctrine, episcopal government, hymns, sacraments, and much of the same theology still couldn’t remain in the same denomination.
The major Methodist branches reunited in 1939, when the Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Methodist Protestant Church formed The Methodist Church. Unfortunately, reunion came with an ugly compromise: Black congregations were placed in a racially segregated Central Jurisdiction rather than integrated geographically with white churches.
Methodists had reunited, but not exactly as one happy family.
The United Methodist Church Is Born
The modern UMC came into existence on April 23, 1968, when The Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church at a uniting conference in Dallas. The EUB brought its own German-American pietist and Wesleyan-related heritage into the new denomination. At the time, the two merging bodies together represented more than eleven million members.
The 1968 merger also finally dismantled the segregated Central Jurisdiction. The new denomination affirmed full clergy rights for women, which The Methodist Church had granted in 1956. These changes made the birth of the UMC more than an administrative merger; they marked important changes in who could participate fully in Methodist institutional life.
Wesleyan Theology
United Methodism belongs to the Wesleyan-Arminian family of Protestant Christianity. That immediately distinguishes it from the Reformed theology we’ve encountered among Presbyterians. Wesley strongly emphasized God’s grace while rejecting the Calvinist understanding of unconditional election and limited atonement.
A particularly important Wesleyan concept is prevenient grace—God’s grace working in human beings before conversion and enabling them to respond to the gospel. Justifying grace brings forgiveness and reconciliation with God, while sanctifying grace continues God’s transforming work within the believer.
Wesley therefore refused to reduce salvation to getting sins forgiven and securing a reservation in heaven. Salvation should transform a person. Christianity is supposed to produce holiness. That’s one reason the language of sanctification became so important within Methodism and why the later Holiness and Pentecostal movements grew so naturally from Wesleyan soil.
Christian Perfection
One of Wesley’s more distinctive teachings concerned Christian perfection, sometimes called entire sanctification or perfect love. Wesley wasn’t claiming that Christians could become omniscient, incapable of mistakes, or absolutely flawless. He was describing a maturity in which love for God and neighbor governed the believer’s life.
Later Wesleyans interpreted this doctrine in different ways. The nineteenth-century Holiness Movement often developed a more sharply defined experience of entire sanctification, and Pentecostalism inherited portions of that tradition. Modern United Methodists don’t all emphasize Christian perfection with the intensity Wesley did, but sanctification remains embedded deeply within their theological inheritance.
This is one of those places where church history becomes a family tree. Wesley influenced Methodism; Methodism helped produce the Holiness Movement; the Holiness Movement helped produce Pentecostalism. The branches can look very different while still carrying some of the same theological DNA.
Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience
United Methodists often describe theological reflection through what has become known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Wesley himself didn’t invent that label, and he shouldn’t be pictured sitting at his desk drawing a four-sided theological diagram. The terminology was developed much later as a way of describing elements found in Wesley’s theological method.
Scripture remains foundational in official United Methodist doctrine, while Christian tradition, rational reflection, and human experience contribute to interpretation. The difficulty, of course, is determining what happens when those sources appear to point in different directions.
That question lies behind many of the UMC’s modern theological disputes. Conservatives have frequently argued that contemporary experience and cultural assumptions have been allowed to override Scripture, while progressives have argued that faithful biblical interpretation sometimes requires reconsidering inherited interpretations. Much of the modern UMC conflict makes more sense once we realize that the argument wasn’t merely about sexuality. It was also about how Christians determine what Scripture requires.
Baptism
United Methodists practice infant baptism as well as the baptism of converts. Like other historic Methodist churches, they understand baptism as a means of grace, not merely a public symbol of a decision someone has already made.
The UMC recognizes sprinkling, pouring, and immersion as legitimate modes of baptism. Infant baptism reflects the Methodist conviction that God’s grace acts before we’re capable of responding consciously to it. Later, the baptized child is expected to claim the faith personally through confirmation and Christian discipleship.
United Methodists ordinarily don’t rebaptize someone who has already received valid Christian baptism. God’s faithfulness to the covenant isn’t considered something that needs to be repeated because a person’s spiritual experience later becomes more meaningful. That places Methodism rather far from the Baptist understanding of baptism, even though the two traditions may sound very similar when preaching an evangelistic sermon.
Holy Communion
United Methodists recognize Baptism and Holy Communion as the two sacraments instituted by Christ. Communion isn’t transubstantiation, but neither is it supposed to be merely a symbolic memorial. Methodists understand the Lord’s Supper as a genuine means through which God communicates grace.
The UMC practices an open table. People responding to Christ’s invitation aren’t required first to become United Methodists, and the denomination teaches that Communion itself can become an occasion through which someone encounters converting, justifying, or sanctifying grace. Wesley strongly encouraged frequent Communion.
There’s also a wonderfully Methodist historical footnote here. Thomas Bramwell Welch, the man whose name eventually appeared on Welch’s grape juice, was a Methodist who developed a way of preserving unfermented grape juice partly because of Methodist concern about serving alcohol at Communion.
So somewhere between Wesleyan theology and the temperance movement, Methodists helped give America Welch’s grape juice. Church history has its moments.
Bishops and the Connection
United Methodism is episcopal, meaning it has bishops, but United Methodist bishops don’t function like Roman Catholic bishops. The denomination is also strongly connectional. Local churches belong to districts and annual conferences, annual conferences are overseen by bishops, and the worldwide denomination meets through General Conference.
The General Conference is the denomination’s highest legislative body. Clergy and lay delegates participate together, and the denomination’s governing rules are contained primarily in the Book of Discipline.
Pastors are generally appointed to congregations by bishops rather than simply hired independently by local churches. That itinerant system descends from Wesley and Asbury, when Methodist preachers were expected to go where the church sent them. A Methodist minister could historically discover that God’s call had suddenly acquired a new ZIP code.
Women in Ministry
Women have participated in Methodist ministry from the movement’s earliest generations. John Wesley eventually authorized some women to preach, although the modern system of ordination developed much later.
The Methodist Church granted women full clergy rights in 1956, and the newly created UMC continued those rights in 1968. Women today serve throughout United Methodism as pastors, district superintendents, bishops, seminary professors, and denominational leaders.
This places the UMC outside complementarian traditions that reserve pastoral or elder authority for men. Within United Methodism, however, women’s ordination hasn’t been regarded as a peripheral experiment for decades. It is now an established feature of the denomination.
Social Christianity
Methodism has a long history of connecting personal holiness with social responsibility. Wesley preached salvation but also organized assistance for the poor, visited prisoners, promoted education, addressed economic injustice, and opposed slavery.
American Methodists subsequently became heavily involved in temperance, abolition, education, hospitals, missions, labor questions, civil rights, poverty, and other social concerns. Modern United Methodism inherited this tradition through its Social Principles, which address a broad range of moral and public questions.
At its best, this reflects Wesley’s conviction that Christianity should affect the way people actually live and treat their neighbors. At its worst, critics argue, social activism can become detached from evangelism and historic Christian doctrine. That tension between personal conversion and social transformation has followed mainline Methodism for generations.
The Long Battle Over Homosexuality
No issue has shaped recent United Methodist history more dramatically than homosexuality. In 1972, General Conference added language declaring homosexual practice “incompatible with Christian teaching,” while simultaneously affirming gay people as persons of sacred worth. Over subsequent decades, additional restrictions prohibited the ordination of practicing gay clergy and the performance of same-sex unions.
Those policies became the subject of repeated battles at General Conference. Traditionalists sought to preserve or strengthen them; progressives sought their removal; some clergy openly violated them as an act of conscience. Because the UMC is a global denomination, the disagreement also exposed significant differences between American and Western European Methodists and many rapidly growing churches in Africa.
By the 2010s, the denomination seemed increasingly unable to live together under one Discipline.
The 2019 Showdown
A specially called 2019 General Conference was expected by many observers to resolve the conflict. Instead, delegates narrowly adopted the Traditional Plan, maintaining the denomination’s existing teaching on sexuality and strengthening enforcement provisions.
The result didn’t produce peace. In many American congregations and conferences, resistance intensified. Traditionalists increasingly concluded that institutional separation was inevitable, while progressives and centrists increasingly expected the denomination eventually to remove the restrictions.
A temporary provision known as Paragraph 2553 created a process through which congregations could disaffiliate from the UMC while retaining their property if specified financial and procedural requirements were met.
Then the exits began.
Thousands of Churches Leave
Between 2019 and the end of the primary disaffiliation period in 2023, thousands of American congregations left the United Methodist Church. The departures weren’t identical in motivation, and it would be simplistic to say every church left solely over homosexuality. Questions of biblical authority, denominational trust, property, finances, governance, and the expected future direction of the UMC were intertwined with the sexuality debate.
Many departing traditionalist congregations eventually joined the newly formed Global Methodist Church, while others became independent or affiliated elsewhere. The separation became one of the largest denominational disruptions in recent American Protestant history.
The special disaffiliation provision expired, and the 2024 General Conference declined to extend it. The UMC states that its Discipline now contains no general provision authorizing congregations to disaffiliate while taking church property with them.
That chapter of Methodist history is recent enough that many congregations are still living with the consequences.
The 2024 General Conference
The delayed 2024 General Conference became a watershed moment. With many traditionalist congregations already gone, delegates removed the denomination’s longstanding restrictions concerning homosexuality.
General Conference eliminated the ban on ordaining gay clergy, removed prohibitions and penalties concerning same-sex weddings, and deleted the statement that homosexual practice was incompatible with Christian teaching. The revised Discipline now defines Christian marriage as a covenant that may unite either an adult man and woman or two consenting adults. Clergy retain discretion over which marriages they perform.
The changes became fully effective by January 1, 2025. They represent a genuine change in denominational policy, not merely a change in tone or terminology.
For traditional Christians, including many former United Methodists, this represented a departure from historic Christian sexual ethics. Supporters within the UMC understood the same actions as removing discriminatory policies and extending the church’s ministry more fully to LGBTQ people.
Whatever judgment one makes about it, there is no understanding twenty-first-century United Methodism without understanding 2024.
Gender Identity and Inclusion
The UMC’s current approach to sexuality isn’t limited to same-sex relationships. Its revised policies and Social Principles address people without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity, and the denomination removed restrictions that had treated non-heterosexual clergy differently. Current ordination standards require personal faith in Christ, commitment to Christ as Savior and Lord, spiritual discipline, and patterns of holiness without the former sexuality-based prohibition.
That places the denomination significantly apart from traditionalist Methodist bodies on contemporary questions of sex and gender. At the same time, individual United Methodist congregations and pastors aren’t necessarily identical in their convictions. The denomination includes people who enthusiastically support these developments as well as others who continue to hold traditional Christian positions.
A denominational policy tells us what a church permits. It doesn’t tell us what every person sitting in every pew believes.
A Worldwide Church
One reason United Methodist disputes became so complicated is that this isn’t simply an American denomination. United Methodism developed substantial churches in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines, and international delegates participate in General Conference alongside Americans.
Those regions don’t always face the same cultural circumstances or reach the same conclusions. The denomination has therefore wrestled for years with the problem of applying one American-heavy Book of Discipline across very different societies.
That has now produced another major structural change: regionalization.
Regionalization
The 2024 General Conference approved constitutional amendments restructuring the worldwide church into regional conferences with greater authority to adapt portions of church governance and ministry to their own contexts. Those amendments subsequently received the required ratification. The UMC now describes a structure of nine regional conferences—one in the United States and eight across Africa, Europe, and the Philippines.
Regional conferences may adapt certain parts of the Discipline concerning matters such as ministry organization, membership standards, worship resources, and other contextual questions while remaining part of the same worldwide denomination. The intention is partly to make United Methodism less structurally centered on the United States.
This development may prove almost as consequential for the denomination’s future as the 2024 decisions on sexuality. United Methodism is trying to remain one global connection while giving its regions substantially greater freedom to function in very different cultures.
Worship in the UMC
Walking into a United Methodist church can be unpredictable. One congregation may have stained glass, robes, organ music, Wesley hymns, creeds, a formal liturgy, and weekly Communion. Another may have guitars, projection screens, contemporary worship music, and a service resembling a nondenominational evangelical church. Both can be thoroughly United Methodist.
Historically, Methodist worship combines evangelical preaching with sacramental and liturgical elements inherited from Anglicanism. Charles Wesley’s enormous body of hymns also gave Methodism one of Christianity’s richest traditions of congregational singing. Theology wasn’t confined to sermons; Methodists sang it.
If you’ve ever sung “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “And Can It Be,” or “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” you’ve encountered Charles Wesley whether you knew it or not.
The UMC Today
The United Methodist Church emerging from the upheavals of the 2020s is different from the denomination that entered them. Thousands of congregations have departed, longstanding restrictions concerning homosexuality have disappeared, regionalization has restructured the global connection, and the denomination is now attempting to establish its identity after decades in which internal conflict consumed enormous amounts of attention.
Yet much of the older Methodist framework remains recognizable. United Methodists still speak the language of grace, discipleship, holiness, mission, sacraments, connection, and transformation. The denomination’s official mission remains “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”
The unresolved question is what those familiar Methodist words will mean as the denomination moves farther into its new era.
Why the United Methodist Church Matters
The UMC matters because Methodism has profoundly shaped American and global Christianity. Its circuit riders carried Christianity across the frontier. Its revivalism emphasized personal conversion. Its theology of sanctification helped give birth to the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. Its churches founded schools, hospitals, missions, and charitable institutions around the world. Its hymns became part of the vocabulary of Protestant worship.
Its recent history is equally significant. The conflict that divided United Methodism wasn’t simply a fight about one sexual issue. Beneath it were deeper questions about Scripture, theological authority, church discipline, human experience, institutional unity, and how much doctrinal disagreement one denomination can contain.
John Wesley famously feared that Methodists might someday retain the form of religion while losing its spiritual power. More than two centuries later, Methodists across several different denominations still claim Wesley’s heritage while disagreeing vigorously about what faithfulness to that heritage requires.
And that makes the United Methodist Church more than another box on our denominational family tree. Its story raises a question that reaches well beyond Methodism: How much can a church change while still remaining recognizably connected to the tradition it inherited?