The UMC recently split off from the more bible believing congregations, because those congregations would not agree that what's evil is good.

Post split, who's there to stop the UMC from making it even more open and obvious that it's not christian?

They pushed out anyone who restrained them. Now they will go into full blow cancer mode and destroy what's left.

The church I attended split with the United Methodists as well.

I quit going 20 years ago when I was shunned for being divorced.

The Lutherans aren't any better down here. Gay pride shit flags are on a few of the churches.

Yep.

Folks still involved in all this as these churches officially reject the Bible are in for some really bad reaping.

Separating and finding another place to worship is best.

If you can't let go of a building or position. Then you weren't really in it because you believed in God and the Bible.

The OPC and john knox and calvin would like to have a word with you about your bad categorizations here. There are probably also at least a few of the global methodist congregations around that would be utterly repulsed at being associated with such.

In Smalltown, Alabama, it is a complete trainwreck.

New (relatively) pastor uses the words "young teens are confused about their sexuality" in the Easter sermon, and that's after the church already lost a dozen or more members over this....now committees are forming...the flock is getting angry, scapegoats are surfacing...

It all looks terrible to me. I told my In-laws after the easter sermon that their pastor was in their face about it and they couldn't even see it. I am disgusted.  I'm not a church member though, I just go on Easter and xmas to make my MIL happy.

I wish I could say I was surprised.

We saw dirty tricks like this when gresham machen and many others left the than obviously defunct PCUS and formed what would later become the OPC.

Theological leftists pull every dirty trick in the book. It's almost like they don't believe in any of the commandments or the biblical text.

All religion is gay.

The Reformed Church in America (RCA), the oldest denomination formed in the US (1628) began the splitting up process about three-four years ago, over the same issues. Currently the RCA has bled off almost half of its churches with more entering the process all the time. The RCA will soon fade away.
The new denomination, The Alliance of Reformed Churches (ARC), formed two years ago and is receiving more than 90% of those churches leaving the RCA. Similar issues (as discussed above) over bricks and mortar and real-estate exist, but are hardly insurmountable. My church in SW MI, voted to leave (more than 90%) last year and we are receiving new worshipers and members all the time; partially due to our (the ARC's) published beliefs and stand on Scriptural principles. This includes not performing SSM and homosexual ordinations, as discussed above.

The leaders of the liberal mainline Protestant churches have said openly that they don’t believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  They have been saying it longer than I have been alive.  Why anyone who does believe it is just now looking to leave is beyond me.

Our church left the UMC and went Global Methodist a year or so ago.  The vote by the congregation was something like 170:1 to leave.

Looked it up, only Methodist church in town closed down last March.  Facebook page shows they had a white-hair female "pastor" that spoke about something called eco-ministry.  

Why would any man wish to attend such a thing?

100% agree

If a majority of the church don't like the required changes why did they leave the physical church and congregation?  Why not just leave the Methodist Church organization and carry on?  Does the Methodist Church own the physical building like the Catholic Church does for many parishes?

It's going to get worse before it gets better.  It's not the first time the Christian faith has had a split due to church doctrine.

The mainlines are social clubs for theological leftists and adjacents who aren't quite comfortable with the secularistic or outright pagan revivals.

Baptist here...my church broke away from the SBC...we're independent. Small congregation with God's word holding it together. No fancy shows to bring in more people. When they are called, like I was, they will come.

IDK how it works in methodist denoms, but in presby denoms the denomination tends to have control of the building and property.

When the OPC split from the PCUS there was exactly one congregation that got to keep their building, they had to go to court to fight it out, and the only reason the court let them keep it is because the building was 100% paid for by the congregants.

Everyone else lost their property.

when this started going down a few years ago our long time pastor (a lefty) retired. He was obviously a lefty but he never let it leak into his preaching so me and the wife stayed. Once he left tho we also left in search of a global church and haven't really found one.
there is a youtube channel for some church in ohio that was a GMC church, they live stream their sunday services, but we never went back physically to our local church.

It is a rural chuch so itll be interested to see how it voted. I know the congregation would vote to leave, but with the new pastor not even graduated seminary school when he was moved to our church, i could see him going along with the once who gave him his job, UMC.

Many conservatives fought the good fight within the UMC for a very long time.  In October of 2022, my Methodist church voted 99% to join the Global Methodist Church.  (The GMC despite the "global" in the name is a very conservative orthodox Protestant Christian church.)   All in all before the General Conference this year about 25% of all the UMC churches left the domination.  A LOT more would have if it were not for significant barriers and penalties to churches disaffiliating.  This month the UMC made new woke policies official and the next wave of the decline in the UMC is about to begin.  More churches that took a wait and see will begin to exit but that will be very difficult because of new church policies on leaving and US law.  The majority of those that do leave will be foreign churches because they are outside of US law.  Within the US, most of the future decline will be individual families departing for the GMC or other non-UMC churches.  Although some US churches will fight for their assets in court.  (In a manner similar to the Catholic church, the UMC owns local church assets.)

Now for my personal take/opinion.  I grew up and spent my young adulthood in BMA and SBC churches.  I'm very conservative in my Christian views.  I joined a UMC church when I got married because it was a good balance for my wife and I.  However, in the 20+ years of our membership in the UMC the woke disease had spread rapidly within the UMC hierarchy.  This occurred because the United Methodist tried very hard not to lean too heavy on condemnation of things and liked to focus on outreach and help of their communities.  Their aversion to conflict caused a lack of church discipline within their own administrative structure and made them vulnerable to a takeover by leftist.  Increasingly the top of the structure was radically misaligned with the base of the structure.  Over a very long time, the conservatives within the church finally had to acknowledge that the cancer had spread too far and begin leaving as individuals and later as groups.  This sped up the decline by allowing liberals to become a greater percentage of the whole.  Basically the old UMC has ended this month with the General Conference of 2024.  The new even more radical UMC is currently forming.

For a good breakdown of the changes this month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbwIxBM1-0Q

I see some of the previous posts answered my questions.  Congregation had to bring a vote, if allowed by local higher ups, then had to vote with a 57%? to leave,  then most had to buy building, land, parsonage, and pay preacher.  I don't know the time line to buy but doesn't sound like a 20 year loan.

Several of the different denominational churches where I grew up were independently owned by the local church and not the greater church organization.  I'd guess many did that because of past splits from a Church when it turned away from the congregations beliefs.

The Catholic Church stopped services, placing priest,and support of a lot of rural churches because the congregation was too small.  They were told to drive to the nearest one remaining open.  Most of the older people can not drive to the next church and they can not go to their old one to see their church family they grew up with.   Rural fly over country is left to rot a bit more.

This is the inevitable result of letting subversives promote dissension and heresy on the theory that Jesus wanted you to be nice to dangerous people spewing damnable bullshit.

That very thing has happened with the majority of the Methodist churches in my area.  It's costing them to get out, but they are getting out.  I thought all Methodist churches were voting to stay or go, so the ones in OP's area must have elected to stay.  

I'm not Methodist but have several friends who are.

Edit:  I now see that OP said that some congregations didn't have the opportunity to vote.  Trainwreck is the proper description.

Look up essentially any of the church organizations who are bringing "refugees" into the country as fast as they possibly can.

Every one of them is subversive and dedicated to the destruction of our nation.

...and so the objective of the subversives was achieved.

Religious folks generally aren't going to do a 180 with their because someone conned someone into saying so.

I know alot of religious folks that don't go to church anymore.

Pretty much this.

Unfortunately the Baptists are being subjected to the same thing......

The UMC has been off the rails for decades.

Yes they're all retarded and you are smarter. We know. Amazing

Yep, need some of that old time religion, with a lot less turning the other cheek. Adoption of the Scofield shit was the real turning point.

The left has done its' job on organized religion.

I'm in SW Georgia.  Our church is Southern Baptist but I have many Methodist friends.  The United Methodist Churches are allowed to vote on whether to stay in or disafilliate from the UMC.  All of the UMC churches in our area voted to disafilliate.

It's a divisive issue at the national level but our local Methodist churches are still operating normally so far.  

Sad days when Churches are being infiltrated by the LGBTQ cult.

We haven't seen any of the local United Methodist Churches leave the national yet.

We have one Church downtown, beautiful building, it's not United Methodist and it hangs a rainbow flag outside of it. Now, we're in a very rural farm community and so it's surprising. What's really odd though is that the year that Church put up the rainbow flag the steeple was struck by lightening and caught on fire.

The Catholic Church is like fragmenting, there are people now attending quasi-underground Latin Masses and go more hardcore pre-Vatican II to avoid some of the liberalness of the modern Catholic Church.   In fact, they are the ones the FBI did that memo about last year labeling RTC, "Radical Traditional Catholics."  Of course, I couldn't believe that the FBI was actually viewing Catholics that prefer the Latin Mass as "radicals" that warranted the FBI's attention, but truth is stranger than fiction I guess.

The cult of LBTQ is in everything, it's infiltrated the schools, churches, Disney, you name it and there seems to be no real will from the American people to put a stop to this nonsense.    

What this stuff is doing is pealing away the people who are actually faithful and don't just attend Church for social reasons or out of tradition.  The "true belivers" are being pushed into smaller groups separated from the rest so that they can be targeted.

This. 1975 was the year. The UMC has been super liberal since the late 60’s.

Good.

Always happy to see an apostate church close if they refuse to repent.

Yep. A bit less centralized than the Catholic Church but way to controlled.

Sounds like there are going to be a bunch of former Methodist buildings headed to a fire sale.

Not talking about arson.

I was reading an article the other day about the recent conservative movement within the American Catholic Church that was interesting. Essentialy, the article claimed that the majority of men that choose the priesthood in the 1960's and 1970's did so to advance "social justice" causes, civil rights, anti-war, and so forth, but the young men going into the priesthood now are doing so seeking a more traditional religious path.  These two competing motivations have kind of caused a generational split between the Boomer priests and the young priests.  

I wonder if somthing like that hasn't happened with Protestant denominations?

I'll be interested to see if the UMC tries to hold on to them or sells them. I can't imagine they can hold onto them for long.

My family have been Methodists since John and Charles Wesley came to America. My late father was a UMC pastor for 43 years, and retired 20 years ago. He passed away recently, and In a way, I’m glad he wasn’t here to see what the General Conference of the UMC has done.

I’m old enough to remember when the UMC was started in 1968. Sadly, it has devolved into another “woke” business, in it for the money, not for saving souls. And as I have learned through experience over the years, the UMC is more crooked than the US gubment, in so many ways.

Right now, my wife and I are sort of living in the “Twilight Zone”, in regards to church.

We have been members of a small UMC church in central Alabama for over 27 years. That church was in the middle of disaffiliation last year, when Annual Conference changed the disaffiliation rules by a quick vote (known only to a few key players), which in itself, violated several clauses of the Discipline. So, our church, along with some other current UMC churches, is currently in a lawsuit to be allowed to continue with our disaffiliation. Right now, we are waiting for a hearing with the Alabama Supreme Court.

On the other hand, due to a job change, we moved about 90 miles away from our home church in late 2022. So we have been attending a local Methodist church, in another Conference from our home church, which disaffiliated from the UMC about 3 months after we started. It is now a Global Methodist Church. Aside from a hymnal change, the service hasn’t really been different. This GMC church initially lost an Associate, who was left-leaning, and about 20% of its membership, but has quickly regained the lost membership, and then some. We have tried to learn some things since the change to the GMC, to take back to our home church.

There will be a reckoning for this heresy eventually.

I grew up going to a Methodist church.  My parents, grandparents, and great grandparents all went to Methodist churches.  Things started changing in the church in the late 1980's and early 1990's.  I didn't care for the things I saw and heard.  The direction they were heading did not align with the beliefs and teachings from my childhood, so I quit going.  It's been over 30 years ago since I attended church.  I am still religious, but I don't belong to any particular denomination.

tl;dr: The church left me, I didn't leave the church.  

Maybe their new pansexual, transgender, devil-worshipping and atheist members can keep the UMC afloat, but probably not.

You gonna stay in the Methodist church?

In our city, we are the most conservative UMC in terms of the congregation, so conservative that apparently we have run off the more progressive members because of our collective disdain for leftist values. Our pastor is actually from Africa, and is more conservative than most of the congregation. Our pastor preaches straight from the Bible every Sunday and doesn't mention politics or social issues unless it is to ask for prayers to help heal the nation. So far, everything is basically status quo, but there are several people who have expressed concern for the direction that eventually we will be forced to take from the conference.

Can confirm in Virginia. Mississippi is on its way there.

That is sad, but that is by design. Separate and isolate the true believers.

Yeah, I don't know how somone stands in a Church with a rainbow flag and listens to a priest with rainbow stole on or whatever and doesn't realize they're basically worshipping the Devil at that point.  It's like some creepy cult like thing that would make my skin crawl, like some bad 1970's horror movie.  

In my opinion, good riddance to the "progressives."  

If they want to worship LGBTQ then they're free to attend a Joe Biden campaign rally, but Church is clearly not for them.

American churches have been becoming more and more progressive for decades now and yet Church attendance in this country has never been lower. I believe firmly the overwhelming number of people want the stability and comfort of traditional Christian teachings more now than ever.  

I'd rather attend Church with three good Christians than 300 LGBTQ cultists.

We live in a small year round community on the coast of Maine that blossoms into a 2x+ times community in the summer time.
There were once three Methodist Churches in the general local area though separate localities. Now, they seem to have problems finding Pastors or what ever they are called in Methodist Churches. (I'm not a Methodist though I don't have any feelings against them) Around here we are being taken over by retirees from other places, mostly east coast liberals who strangely don't want to retire to the utopias they have created through their voting habits. All the churches are going woke. All loyal democrat run boards/ deacons. The coast of Maine is becoming Florida in average age of population but the politics of the people coming here are mostly leftist or just dumb people angling towards who's got the coolest boomer dinner parties.
My wife goes to the Congregational Church, or used to. Before that, she used to go to the very local Methodist church on our island. Both are over run with leftists democrats using the churches to canonize their personal politics. The party is trying to overtake religion and become the new religion via infiltration.

Whell, your Iphone now has the GHEY.  Yup, built in pride lgbtqwtfbbq walpaper built right in the new update.

We had a family with several young children that attended for a while, but stopped coming for at least several months. Shortly thereafter, the father started transitioning into a woman and they started attending again. People were nice to them, but we obviously didn't give them the attention they craved, so they stopped coming all together. The pastor at the time was former military and law enforcement. He was amazing. Our new pastor, like I mentioned, is from Africa, and seemingly, even stronger in their faith. When my dad suffered a catastrophic stroke in December, the pastor asked if they could come to the hospital and anoint him with oil and lay hands on him. We didn't know the extent of the damage the stroke had done at that point, but we learned soon after that he was technically brain dead. From that point on, I am the pastor's biggest advocate and truly believe our church will flourish under their direction, in spite of the new rule changes from the General Conference.