United Methodist Church

Heritage

American Methodism organized at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore in 1784, when Wesley's societies became the Methodist Episcopal Church under Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, and its circuit riders went on to out-travel every rival to the frontier. In 1844 the church split over slavery — a bishop who held slaves forced the question — creating the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The 1939 reunion of North, South and the Methodist Protestants was purchased partly at Black members' expense: the segregated Central Jurisdiction placed Black Methodist conferences in a race-based structure until 1968, a fact United Methodism now teaches about itself. In 1968 the merger with the Evangelical United Brethren created the United Methodist Church. Between 2019 and 2023, roughly a quarter of its US congregations departed under a negotiated disaffiliation process — most toward the Global Methodist Church or independence — over sexuality and the deeper question of how the church holds its doctrine; the 2024 General Conference then removed the disputed prohibitions. Those who left believe they kept the faith; those who stayed believe the same. Both are Methodists, and this map holds them side by side.

Theological family

Wesleyan-Arminian: grace before everything — prevenient, justifying, sanctifying — with the Articles of Religion and the EUB Confession of Faith as doctrinal standards, Scripture read with tradition, reason and experience, and a deliberately broad tolerance that now spans evangelical to progressive congregations.

Who decides what

Connexional to the bone: the General Conference alone speaks for the church; bishops appoint pastors through the itinerant system; congregations hold property in trust for the denomination; and annual conferences, boards and agencies knit the connection together. Full clergy rights for women date from 1956.

What a first-time visitor would find

A first-time visitor will most often find ordered Protestant worship — hymns (Charles Wesley's among them), prayers, Scripture, sermon — though styles run from high liturgy to contemporary bands congregation by congregation; communion, typically monthly, is served at an open table to any who seek Christ, one of the tradition's tenderest signatures.

What it has always cared about

Grace as the melody line; sanctification — the expectation that God actually changes people; hymn-singing as theology the congregation performs; and organized mercy at scale: hospitals, universities, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief, often first on the ground after disaster.

Its gift to the wider church

Wesley's hymnody and the open communion table are gifts the whole church sings and tastes; beyond them, United Methodism taught American Protestantism to organize goodness — building more hospitals, colleges and relief infrastructure than almost any Protestant body — and its itinerant system planted churches in counties no one else would staff.

Commonly confused with

With the Global Methodist Church, its recent parting, with which it shares doctrine's deep structure and disagrees about its enforcement; with the Free Methodists and The Wesleyan Church, older holiness siblings; with the AME, AME Zion and CME churches, independent Black denominations that are not and never were its subdivisions; and "United" invites confusion with the United Church of Christ, an unrelated tradition.

Range of views inside it

Wider than most denominations tolerate on purpose: congregations range from progressive to traditionalist even after the disaffiliations, from cathedral formality to camp-meeting warmth, and regional cultures — including large conferences in Africa and the Philippines — differ substantially. The connection holds them in one system of conferences.

Where United Methodist Church churches are on the map

6,562 United Methodist Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

• Pennsylvania — 575
• North Carolina — 480
• Texas — 477
• Ohio — 310
• Virginia — 295
• Indiana — 295
• South Carolina — 252
• Illinois — 246
• Michigan — 235
• New York — 220

Moments this body was part of

• 1844–1845 — Methodism breaks over slavery

  The Methodist Episcopal Church — then the largest church in America — split at its 1844 General Conference over a slaveholding bishop, James O. Andrew. The southern conferences organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South the next year. The largest Protestant family in the country had divided over slavery a decade and a half before the nation did, and observers at the time read it as an omen of the war to come.

  The wound stood open for 95 years — and it did close: the northern and southern churches reunited in 1939, and their heirs are one church today.

• 1939 — Methodism reunites — with a compromise it would repent of

  After 95 years apart, the northern and southern Methodist churches and the Methodist Protestants reunited at Kansas City in 1939 into one Methodist Church of nearly eight million members. The price of southern agreement was the Central Jurisdiction — a separate, segregated structure for Black Methodists — which the church lived with, protested, and finally abolished in the 1968 merger.

  The 1939 reunion tells both truths at once: reunion is possible after generations, and a reunion purchased by excluding someone carries its own wound. The church confessed and undid it — 29 years later.

• 1997–2009 — The healing documents

  On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

  The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

• 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.