Even with the denomination’s church-exit policy winding down, The United Methodist Church’s top court faced questions about disaffiliation procedures.
The Judicial Council’s fall docket was the shortest 15 years, with just six items. But at issue in half of those items was a provision in the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s law book, that allows churches to leave with property if they meet certain financial and procedural obligations. The church law expires at the end of this year.
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But even with fewer questions before it, the Judicial Council must continue to deal with one of the biggest challenges in its more than 80-year history: trying to ensure an ongoing church split stays within the confines of church law.
For more than 200 years, The United Methodist Church and its predecessors have maintained that church property is held in trust for the entire denomination.
The provision offers congregations a limited right to exit the denomination with property. The church law was written to be only temporary, and the 2019 General Conference made it so the provision only applies in the U.S.
Since the provision took effect four years ago, more than 6,200 congregations — about 20% of U.S. churches — have received the required approvals to withdraw from The United Methodist Church.
More than 20 U.S. annual conferences have scheduled special sessions before the end of the year to vote on additional disaffiliation requests. The church law’s requirements include that departing churches receive the majority approval of their annual conference’s voters. Most of the exiting churches want to maintain bans related to homosexuality.
Since 2019, the Judicial Council has addressed multiple questions about the church law, including ruling that it is in line with the denomination’s constitution.
Still, as the recent U.S. annual conference season showed, bishops continue to deal with questions about how the provision applies under different scenarios.
At the North Carolina Annual Conference, Bishop Connie M. Shelton faced questions about the legality of the conference’s closure of Fifth Avenue United Methodist Church in Wilmington.
According to the most recent data from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration, Fifth Avenue United Methodist Church’s attendance had declined in recent years and it had an average attendance of 18 people as of 2021.
The church was seeking to vote on disaffiliation under Paragraph 2553, when the conference leaders closed the historic, downtown church instead. The North Carolina Annual Conference subsequently approved the church’s closure when it met in June.
The conference closed the church under another provision of the Discipline, Paragraph 2549.3.b. The provision says that any time between annual conference sessions, the bishop and other conference leaders “may, in their sole discretion, declare that exigent circumstances exist that require immediate protection of the local church’s property, for the benefit of the denomination.”
At the California-Pacific Annual Conference, a pastor made a motion that the conference board of trustees negotiate with disaffiliating churches “a more equitable and reasonable formula for disaffiliation than the current Guidelines specify.” Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank ruled the motion out of order, and the pastor subsequently requested a ruling of law.
Paragraph 2553 allows annual conferences to develop additional standard terms that are not inconsistent with the disaffiliation provision. The California-Pacific Annual Conference is among a handful of conferences that is asking departing churches to pay a portion of its property value. In the California-Pacific Conference’s case, churches are asked to pay 50% of that value — a standard term added before Escobedo-Frank became the conference’s bishop this year.
excerpt from a story by Heather Hahn, assistant news editor for UM News.
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