The Un-Tying of The United Methodist Church, Part 1
This is Part 1 of a three-part series by the Rev. Dr. Ted A. Campbell on the events that have led to the pending division of The United Methodist Church. Parts 2 and 3 will appear on July 6 and 13, respectively.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels depict a far-future scenario in which a galactic empire is falling apart and political hacks circle like vultures to snatch whatever bits and pieces they can assimilate into their own little realms. United Methodists today have the haunting fear that the denomination faces a similar situation, and they may wonder what remains worth holding together while the vultures circle for the kill.
For decades now the joke has gone around about unintentionally typing “The Untied Methodist Church” in place of “The United Methodist Church.” Spell checkers didn’t notice “Untied,” and most United Methodists didn’t notice just how untied they had become until the early 2000s. “Untied” also signals something we have lost: the distinct culture of the Evangelical United Brethren Church from whom the word “United” was incorporated into the name of The United Methodist Church. United is not what we are now. We are untied, waiting for a post-pandemic assembly to sort out what remains. How did we come to this point?
I’m a historian. I look on with a historian’s fascination to see this happening before my eyes. I hear multiple misleading narratives about the present situation of The United Methodist Church, narratives used all too handily to justify diverging trajectories in the church.
I’m a lifelong, multi-generational Methodist. I look on with a sense of growing tragedy and loss.
I’m an ecumenically engaged Christian. I want to understand the current predicament of the UMC against a broad canvas of history and inter-Christian relationships. What’s happening in The United Methodist Church parallels contemporary developments within US-based Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Baptist denominations. There is a distinctly Methodist nuance to what is happening now, but it’s worth trying to tell the story in the presence of angels and archangels and Baptists and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo folks and Blessed Virgin Mary and all the company of heaven. We need some company to give a broader scope to our understanding.
Here’s an account of how The United Methodist Church, at least in the United States, came to its present untiedness, for the sake of United Methodists and other Christians alike.
Glory and Reality
Evangelical United Brethren and Methodists walked into Dallas’s Memorial Auditorium on the morning of Monday, April 23, 1968. They solemnly prayed, “Lord of the Church, we are united in thee, in thy Church, and now in The United Methodist Church.” They walked out as United Methodists. With about eleven million members in the United States, the newly united church was the second largest Protestant denomination in the US, as it has remained since then. Those numbers reflected a remarkable trajectory of expansion that led its Methodist predecessor bodies from about 65,000 constituents in the USA around the year 1800 to about 4.1 million a century later in 1900 (Harmon, 1974, p. 2712). In 1968 the Methodist Church brought more than 10 million US members to the union of that year, and they united with more than 700,000 members from the Evangelical United Brethren Church (Yearbook of American Churches, 1941, p. 29, and 1970, p. 71).
Outwardly the new denomination appeared splendidly poised to move forward with this trajectory of relentless expansion. But four years later, Dean M. Kelley’s study, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, began to reveal serious underlying problems with anticipated growth in what he called “ecumenical churches” including The United Methodist Church. After an initially scornful reception from old-line church officials in the US, Kelley’s thesis was thoroughly vindicated over the next three decades as membership figures in old-line American churches, including The United Methodist Church, steadily declined. Some even went so far as to extrapolate an apocalyptic meltdown of older Protestant denominations, fueled by the false narrative that Americans had been actively and overwhelmingly members of Protestant churches since the nineteenth century.
The less spectacular truth laid out by Kevin M. Kruse in One Nation Under God (2016) is that there had been a sudden, anomalous rise in old-line church memberships between the 1940s and the 1960s as Protestant denominations expanded into burgeoning American suburbs following the Second World War (p. xv). Some pastors adapted Billy Graham’s revival techniques to bring people into their congregations on very easy terms: just walk up the aisle at the end of the service.
That proved to be a problematic approach to evangelization. Despite all the new congregations that were organized, the easy new Methodist members of the 1950s and 1960s turned out to be a fickle bunch. As a young assistant pastor, I was sent out to visit inactive members of Sunset United Methodist Church in Pasadena, Texas, in the hot summer of 1976. I met wonderful, friendly folks who had joined the congregation when their baby-boomer kids were in elementary school. They shared lovely memories of former pastors and church picnics, and they had no interest in returning to church. And they didn’t, except in a few cases for their own funerals.
The dying-off of this fluff membership was at the heart of declining church membership numbers of old-line churches in the 1980s and 90s. It made little difference in the congregations, who hadn’t seen these folks for thirty years. An anomalous rise in old-line church membership numbers was followed by an almost equal and opposite decline, leaving the core memberships of older Protestant churches by the 1990s just about where they had been at the end of the Second World War — or maybe just a little better, but it felt dreadful after the illusion of rapid growth (Campbell, Sky Is Falling, pp. 17-35).
One of the most damaging effects of this misleading narrative about decline in membership numbers and the presumed decline in church vitality was a decades-long blame-game in which church leaders and members, unaware of the anomalous nature of this decline, tried to pin the blame on each other, their theological perspectives, their institutions, and very often on the church’s bishops and general-church boards and agencies. Up to about 1972, Methodists had loved talking about membership numbers as a key indicator of their vitality, perhaps an indicator of divine approval of their American mission. Then it became embarrassing as the narrative of decline sifted out to popular media and other churches as well. The anger and accusations surfacing in the blame-game about church decline would move readily into attempts to talk about sexuality.
“Let All Our Hearts Agree”
What had held Methodism and Methodist churches together? Methodism had originated as a religious movement bound together by a set of “General Rules” for Christian observance enforced by lay leaders in small classes in which seekers and believers were methodically held accountable for their behavior. John Wesley’s published sermons became a standard within the movement for teaching about the “Way of Salvation,” describing the process by which divine grace leads seekers and believers to holiness. John Wesley also edited a collection of his brother Charles Wesley’s hymns and organized them following the same pattern of the “Way of Salvation.” The “General Rules,” John Wesley’s sermons, and the Collection of Hymns defined the essential platform of Methodism as a religious movement.
The American Revolution and its disestablishment of the Church of England within the United States provoked a crisis for Anglicans, including Methodists. American Methodists formed a church separate from other Anglicans, defined in 1784 by 1) a liturgy that John Wesley had edited from the Book of Common Prayer, 2) a set of 24 Articles of Religion condensed from the Church of England’s 39 Articles, augmented by a further Article on allegiance to the government of the USA, and 3) a set of minutes that minimally specified the nascent denomination’s church governance.
The Articles of Religion reinforced the liturgies, calling for public rebuke of any who failed to keep the rites of their church (Article 22; UMC Discipline 2016, p. 71). The Sunday Service was originally published as a separate book, but from 1792 it was included — shorn of its lectionary and its services for Morning and Evening Prayer — as a section of Ritual in the denomination’s Doctrines and Discipline, which included the Articles of Religion and the minutes specifying the denomination’s structure. This needs to be stated because another common and misleading Methodist narrative is the claim that Methodists abandoned liturgical observance because the Sunday Service was not reprinted as a book. The truth is that it was placed in a much more accessible and portable format in the handy little Doctrines and Discipline. So, the Collection of Hymns, John Wesley’s sermons, the General Rules, and then the Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, including the Ritual and Articles of Religion, defined early American Methodism as a religious movement that had become a church.
Those standards of doctrine (Articles), ethics and observance (General Rules), worship (Ritual and Hymns), and polity (the minutes incorporated into the Doctrines and Discipline) held Methodist denominations together, including the predecessor denominations of the Methodist Church (1939-1968). The Articles of Religion and General Rules had been declared constitutionally protected from 1808, and the same protection was extended to the Confession of Faith that came from the Evangelical United Brethren Church from the time of the 1968 union. But as Kevin M. Watson has written, the union of 1968 led to a decades-long period of ambiguity about the new denomination’s central doctrinal affirmations (Watson, “Methodism Dividing”). That was going to make discussions of sexuality even more difficult.
A theological study commission authorized by the 1968 uniting conference was originally tasked with combining the Methodist Articles and the EUB Confession into a unified doctrinal statement. But the commission, led by Professor Albert C. Outler, decided to let the two existing documents stand and to create a contemporary theological statement, “Our Theological Task.” To their surprise, the church’s Judicial Council ruled that the new statement would not be constitutionally protected as the Articles, Confession, and General Rules were and remain (related to me in a personal conversation ca. 1982).
The statement of “Our Theological Task” was overwhelmingly approved in 1972, but it became the center of debate about what the denomination stood for. It included a new statement of guidelines for emerging theological and ethical issues, focused on a “quadrilateral” of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The quadrilateral came to be attributed in Methodist folk culture to John Wesley himself, “the Wesleyan quadrilateral,” as if John Wesley had authored it, although the statement of “Our Theological Task” never claimed that (Campbell, “Wesleyan Quadrilateral”). But did the United Methodist quadrilateral imply that some combination of other authorities could overturn the authority of scripture? That would contradict the statements on biblical authority in the United Methodist Confession of Faith and Articles of Religion. And was there anything in the known universe that could not be justified by some combination of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience?
Adding further to the sense of doctrinal uncertainty, the statement explicitly endorsed “theological pluralism,” and it decreed that doctrinal statements — including those protected by the denomination’s constitution — were “not to be construed literally and juridically.” Believe it or not, some folks construed literally and juridically the statement that doctrinal statements were “not to be construed literally and juridically.” That was a problem: which statements really were to be construed literally and juridically, and which ones… what? poetically? figuratively?
It looked like everything could be up for grabs, except for the inconvenient fact that the statement of “Our Theological Task” itself lacked the constitutional authority granted to the Articles, Confession, and General Rules. The statement would be significantly revised in 1988, making clearer the primacy of scripture in relation to other authorities, removing the endorsement of theological pluralism and the statement that doctrinal statements were not to be understood “literally and juridically.” But confusion about what the denomination professed as a church had been firmly planted and remains.
And if doctrinal confusion remained, consensus in worship suffered even more in the ensuing decades. The liturgies that Wesley had bequeathed to Methodists, pared and potted in the Disciplines from 1792 and in subsequent approved hymnals, continued to be used in the parts of Sunday morning services celebrating the Lord’s Supper and baptism, but also in weddings, funerals, and ordinations apart from Sunday services (MEC Doctrines and Discipline, 1792, section X, pp. 228-264). Services employing the official hymnal and liturgy were often complemented by other church gatherings in which popular Gospel songs and more informal, entertainment-oriented styles were used. But seldom on Sunday mornings.
Right up to the union of 1968, Methodist Sunday services had used the 1935 Methodist Hymnal and then the 1964 Methodist Hymnal soon to be rebranded as the United Methodist Book of Hymns. Most Methodist churches used an order of service roughly like the one in the front of the hymnals, with the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed or perhaps a more contemporary creed, responsive readings of the Psalms followed by the Gloria Patri, the Thomas Ken doxology (“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow…”) following the offering, and at least three hymns from the Hymnal. The congregation generally worshiped as the denomination had ordered worship, and they sang the hymns approved by the denomination’s general conferences. They sensed that they were singing and praising together, not just by themselves or their own congregation, but with the denomination and with the saints from past ages. The hymnals with their embedded orders of services and rituals were the outward and visible sign of their connection to other Methodists and to the wider Christian community, the “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Historically Black Methodist congregations had remained closer to older Wesleyan worship traditions in several ways: many Black Methodist and UMC congregations preferred the hallowed language of the older rituals that was inherited from Wesley and is now included in Word and Table Service IV (United Methodist Hymnal 1989, pp. 26-31). This was not unique to congregations of the Methodist Church or the UMC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner convinced the AME Church in the 1880s to adopt John Wesley’s Sunday Service as The Liturgy of the AME Church (1880), and AME Methodists had come to favor the older Prayer-Book rituals. Preaching and singing styles and other ways of expressing emotion in African American Methodist services had more resonance with earlier Wesleyan and Methodist patterns than in white Methodist and UMC congregations that had largely abandoned the older preaching style Wesley used, involving oral phrases (periods) punctuated by pauses (caesurae; Campbell, “John Wesley’s Preaching Performance Style”). But despite these differences in styles of preaching and singing performance, congregations on Sunday mornings followed the patterns of worship described in the denominational hymnals.
This common pattern of worship had parallel forms in the United Brethren Church and was replicated in global Methodism that followed American Methodist patterns. When I have preached at the Methodist Church of la Santísima Trinidad (Most Holy Trinity) in Gante Square in Mexico City, or at the Chungdong First Methodist Church in Seoul, I participate in liturgies very similar to those described here even though the Mexican and Korean Methodist churches had become independent from American Methodist denominations in 1930.
From about 1972 when the denomination first approved what is now its service of Word and Table (I-III), two paths in worship began to diverge within the UMC. One was the trend shared by old-line Protestants and Catholics following Vatican II towards reappropriating ancient Christian liturgies, reflected in newer UMC liturgies that have been formally adopted since that time. These liturgies made stronger commitments for new members than had prevailed in the past, for example, asking new members and confirmands for an explicit renunciation of evil and a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed along with a congregation. This replaced the weak question asked earlier, “Do you receive and profess the Christian faith as contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments?” The new liturgies utilized an explicitly Trinitarian form of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving for the Lord’s Supper, and above all, placed the emphasis on the role of the congregation in all aspects of the liturgy (United Methodist Hymnal 1989, pp. 34-35 and 9-11, 13-14, 15-16).
Perhaps it was those 1960s hippy liberals who began messing with worship, adding their own groovy riffs like singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun.” But if liberals started us down a path away from consensus and tradition in worship, a second major trend in worship grounded in camp meetings and revivals has been massively embraced by United Methodists who call themselves “traditionalists” today. They have largely set aside the denomination’s consensus in worship and replaced it with the output of music-marketing companies whose revenue streams favor professional performers issuing a one-way stream of recently-composed words, tunes, arrangements, and recorded performances under copyright protection. In this trajectory of worship, music-marketing companies have displaced the role of denominations in establishing not only musical styles but forms (orders) of worship as well. Preachers and musicians are the actors; their audiences are asked to do little but listen and watch the professional performers on the stage, hauntingly like the sideline role of congregations in medieval Catholicism.
The crucial problem this raises for United Methodist unity is not with new styles of worship or music. Although the rumor about Charles Wesley writing religious lyrics for “bar-room tunes” is another misleading narrative, hymns from Watts and Wesley were new and controversial expressions of worship in their age, but their texts (at least) were authorized by the Methodist publication of the Collection of Hymns and its successor hymnals. Methodist denominations have embraced multiple new musical styles, including spirituals and Gospel music, and have authorized indigenous forms of music as well as indigenous liturgies.
The growing lack of consensus in worship presents a more subtle problem than lack of doctrinal clarity: younger United Methodists have no memory of a time when stronger consensus in worship prevailed in Methodist and then United Methodist churches. They may be tempted to believe a misleading narrative that United Methodists and their predecessors did whatever they pleased in worship with no sense of responsibility to the denomination. Added to a lack of clarity about doctrine, a growing lack of consensus in worship contributed to the sense that the denomination itself had no moorings beyond what a pastor or worship leader chose.
In addition to growing lack of doctrinal and worship consensus, the huge amount of verbiage officially endorsed by the denomination contributed to a general lack of clarity. Early Methodists had a small discipline and a relatively small hymnal on which there was strong consensus. Over the years the United Methodist Book of Discipline grew from 530 pages in 1968 to 819 pages in 2016, and the denomination’s Book of Resolutions ballooned from 124 pages in 1972 to more than seven times that size in 2004, with 954 pages. We ended up with a ton of words and little sense of what was important or central within them. That, I believe, encouraged individuals and local communities to pick and choose.
Charles Wesley wrote, “Touched by the lodestone of thy love, let all our hearts agree…” (United Methodist Hymnal 1989, p. 561). That’s difficult now. There’s a hackneyed old joke that says that wherever you find eight United Methodists, you’ll find a dozen opinions between them on any issue. But doctrine and worship are not about individual opinions. They are about what a church believes and practices together as a community. Unity in doctrine, ethics, polity, and worship seems to be slipping away from us. And as The United Methodist Church began to consider highly polarizing issues related to gay people, that lack of a sense of central teachings and practices and worship and priorities would bedevil the denomination.
Ted A. Campbell is the Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University.
Works cited:
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church
The Liturgy of the A.M.E. Church. Philadelphia: AME Publishing House, 1892.
Campbell, Ted A.
“John Wesley’s Preaching Performance Style,” a video presentation available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/VwOAYRJUOrg.
"The 'Wesleyan Quadrilateral': The Story of a Modern Methodist Myth" in Methodist History 29:2 (January 1991): 87-95.
The Sky Is Falling, The Church Is Dying, and Other False Alarms. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
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Kruse, Kevin M.
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2015.
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The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2016. Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 2016.
The United Methodist Hymnal: Book of United Methodist Worship. Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 1989.
Watson, Kevin M.
“Methodism Dividing,” in First Things, May 2020; online edition: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/05/methodism-dividing, accessed 20 June 2021.
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