Global Methodist Church

Heritage

After decades of dispute within the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and ordination — and beneath those, over how binding the church's doctrine and discipline are — the Global Methodist Church launched on May 1, 2022. It received thousands of congregations, most of them formerly United Methodist, through a negotiated disaffiliation process that ran until the end of 2023. Its convening General Conference met in San José, Costa Rica in September 2024 and adopted a Book of Doctrines and Discipline holding the historic Wesleyan standards. Members would say they did not leave Methodism but stayed with it as they received it; United Methodists grieve the parting differently and remain Methodist too. Both things belong in the record, and this project declines to referee between them.

Theological family

Wesleyan orthodoxy: the ecumenical creeds, the Articles of Religion and the Evangelical United Brethren Confession of Faith retained, salvation by grace, entire sanctification taught, and marriage defined as between one man and one woman — with doctrinal accountability treated as a feature, not a threat.

Who decides what

Connexional but deliberately lighter than what it left: bishops are elected for terms rather than consecrated for life, congregations hold their own property with no trust clause, and the general structure is kept intentionally small, with authority pushed toward annual conferences and local churches.

What a first-time visitor would find

Inherited breadth: congregations came in with the worship they already had, so a visitor may find traditional liturgy and Charles Wesley hymns in one church and a contemporary band in the next — with an open communion table and Wesleyan preaching in both.

What it has always cared about

Doctrine held as a living trust; the local congregation's standing secured in property and call; global partnership — a substantial share of the new connection is outside the United States; and catechesis, taken up with the energy of a body that has just paid a real price for its convictions.

Its gift to the wider church

Together with the church it left, the demonstration that a vast and painful Protestant separation can be conducted by negotiated process — congregation by congregation, with votes and settlements rather than only lawsuits — and a renewed insistence, audible far beyond Methodism, that doctrine is meant to be believed and practiced, not merely archived.

Commonly confused with

With the United Methodist Church constantly, since most GMC congregations were United Methodist within living memory and many kept their buildings and their people; also with the Free Methodists and The Wesleyan Church, older bodies whose separations came in earlier centuries over different questions.

Range of views inside it

Real range within a shared doctrinal frame: worship style, congregational size and culture, and views on how much structure the new connection should build all vary; the body is young enough that some of its patterns are still setting.

Where Global Methodist Church churches are on the map

382 Global Methodist Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 36 states.

• Texas — 55
• North Carolina — 40
• Ohio — 29
• Alabama — 29
• Pennsylvania — 27
• Georgia — 23
• Florida — 21
• Indiana — 19
• South Carolina — 16
• Michigan — 14

Moments this body was part of

• 2019–2023 — The Methodist parting of 2022

  The United Methodist Church's long dispute over sexuality ended in structured separation: about a quarter of its US congregations — more than 7,600 — disaffiliated between 2019 and 2023, many joining the Global Methodist Church launched in May 2022. Both bodies carry the Wesleyan inheritance forward; the parting was grievous and, unusually, largely orderly, with property questions settled by negotiated process rather than by decades of litigation.

  The newest wound in the story. It is recorded here the way the 1844 split is: honestly, and with the long record showing that Methodist wounds have closed before.