Southern Methodist Church
Southern Methodist Church belongs to the Methodist family of churches.
Governance: connexional.
Southern Methodist Church reports 73 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
Not the university: a small conservative connection formed in 1940 by Southern Methodists who declined the 1939 reunion.
Heritage
When the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church united in 1939 to form The Methodist Church, a minority in the Southern church refused, fearing centralized bureaucracy and theological liberalism in the merged body. They organized to continue as the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, but the courts assigned that body's effects to the united church, so in 1940 the continuers incorporated as the Southern Methodist Church. Headquartered in Orangeburg, South Carolina, it has remained a small, conservative connection, and for decades operated Southern Methodist College there.
Theological family
Conservative Wesleyan-Arminian: the historic Methodist doctrines held with an emphasis on biblical authority and personal holiness, in deliberate contrast to the mainline trajectory it declined to join.
Who decides what
Connexional in a modest form: annual and general conferences with elected leadership rather than bishops, and congregations holding a strong local position — the founders had seen enough of centralized machinery.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor will find traditional Southern Protestant worship — hymns, prayer, and Bible-centered preaching for conversion and holy living — in small congregations across the Carolinas, Georgia and the Gulf states.
What it has always cared about
Doctrinal continuity as its founding purpose; the memory of Southern Methodism carried apart from the mergers that absorbed the rest of it; and small-church faithfulness sustained for eight decades without institutional advantages.
Its gift to the wider church
A cautionary clarity the wider church can learn from: it shows what conscientious refusal of a merger looks like when carried quietly for generations — no empire built, no bitterness institutionalized, just congregations that kept the faith as they had received it.
Commonly confused with
With Southern Methodist University first and always — SMU descends from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and relates to the United Methodist family, not to this denomination; also with the Congregational Methodist and Evangelical Methodist churches, fellow small conservative Methodist bodies of different origins.
Range of views inside it
A small and doctrinally uniform connection; congregations differ mainly in size and locale.
A note from the mapmakers: The 73-congregation figure is RCMS 2020. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Southern Methodist congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · The Southern Methodist Church — about (Southern Methodist Church) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
Where Southern Methodist Church churches are on the map
1 Southern Methodist Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.
- South Carolina — 1
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