One of the most consequential rulings on clergy sexual abuse in the entire history of American jurisprudence has received virtually no media attention. Its defendant? The United Methodist Church.
In a 2024 ruling in Chestnut v. United Methodist Church, the Second Department of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division held that the UMC is not a “jural entity” and thus cannot be sued in a court of law.
This despite the fact that the UMC in the United States holds an estimated $60 billion in property, cash and other resources across its 51 annual conferences, supervised by 32 bishops in 38 episcopal areas. The denomination’s general agencies collectively hold an additional $589 million, including $86 million in liquid assets.
The ruling turns on a provision in the UMC’s own governing document, the Book of Discipline. Its “trust clause” states that “all real and personal, tangible and intangible property held at jurisdictional, annual, or district conference levels, or by a local church or charge, or by an agency or institution of the Church, shall be held in trust for The United Methodist Church.”
The denomination simultaneously owns everything and nothing.
“The denomination simultaneously owns everything and nothing.”
The “UMC” as such is, in the law’s eyes, merely the sum of its constituent parts and does not “own” anything directly — although it has vigorously pursued litigation against congregations and institutions that attempt to disaffiliate, despite its own courtroom arguments and its own Discipline asserting it cannot and does not hold assets directly.
The implications for sexual abuse survivors are manifold and serious. Survivors are effectively limited to pursuing claims at the local parish or conference level, restricting access to the “deep pockets” that larger institutional defendants typically offer.
Further, because the denomination technically has no employees or direct assets, the ruling dissolves what is known as the “agency relationship” in liability claims, which is the legal thread that would ordinarily connect an employer to the acts of those it deploys. Critics have taken to calling this the “legal phantom” defense.
This defense has not yet been pressed to its logical extreme, but the trajectory is not difficult to trace. Consider a hypothetical that closely mirrors the Chestnut facts: A woman has been sexually preyed upon by her UMC pastor. She sues the local church and the annual conference, citing the Discipline and arguing that prior complaints should have flagged the conference’s board of ordained ministry. Perhaps she even submitted a formal report to her district superintendent or wrote directly to her bishop with no result.
But the UMC will argue her pastor never was technically “hired.” He was appointed by the bishop through the annual conference’s cabinet. The local church pays him but did not select him. The annual conference credentialed him, but the local pastor-parish relations committee supervised him day-to-day.
This elaborate diffusion of institutional responsibility — genuinely rooted in Methodist polity — means no single entity straightforwardly “employed” an abuser.
“This elaborate diffusion of institutional responsibility means no single entity straightforwardly ’employed’ an abuser.”
This is not far from the facts alleged in Chestnut itself. The alleged abuser was a youth group leader at a UMC parish in Woodbury, N.Y. — the son of the pastor-in-charge, employed in that capacity by his family’s church. The alleged abuse occurred from 1983 to 1986, during which time the plaintiff was between 4 and 7 years old. The local church was most directly connected to the abuser but is among the least resourced defendants. The annual conference credentialed and appointed clergy, but this abuser was not clergy. He was a lay youth worker, which renders the conference’s supervisory relationship legally murky. The staff-parish relations committee, which the Discipline assigns supervisory responsibility over local church personnel, is not itself an incorporated entity capable of being independently sued. It is a committee within the local church structure, meaning any liability it carries flows to the local church.
This circular web of relationships ensures that accountability can always be deflected to the nearest connectional link.
Is this good or bad?
UMC clergy and apologists have long maintained the denomination’s “connectional” model is a structural safeguard against clergy sexual abuse — that the system’s built-in accountability mechanisms, including sexual misconduct as a “chargeable offense” under the Discipline, make the UMC a model for other denominations.
Legal realities and available data suggest otherwise.
In 2016, the UMC’s Response Team Ministry for Sexual Misconduct reported the UMC averages between 140 and 500 known cases of clergy sexual misconduct per year.
Additionally, research indicates about 3% of women who attend religious services monthly report experiencing a sexual advance from a member of the clergy. It is well established that formal complaints represent a fraction of actual incidents, given the institutional and emotional barriers survivors face in churches. Compounding this, the UMC Discipline first listed sexual harassment and misconduct not involving children as a separate chargeable offense only in its 1996 revision and includes a six-year statute of limitations for adult complainants — although no statute of limitations applies to allegations involving children.
For the average survivor, the trauma of an abusive encounter with a member of the clergy, compounded by the UMC’s procedurally complex Discipline and opaque investigation process, is itself a deterrent to reporting. This is likely further compounded by the denomination’s connectional, hierarchical structure, in which bishops exercise supervisory authority over clergy, and local response teams from a district or conference tend toward “just resolution” rather than formal discipline, suspension or removal.
In the UMC, “just resolution” is an administrative process nominally focused on “repairing harm,” typically employed as a supervisory response from a bishop that forecloses a formal church trial. Despite its aspirational name, survivors and advocates have identified several serious problems with the process. It closely resembles mediation, a process that assumes rough parity between parties.
Research consistently shows mediation-style processes are retraumatizing for survivors of abuse and sexual violence. Just resolution proceedings are typically confidential and involve nondisclosure agreements, which advocates argue are routinely weaponized to protect predators and the institutions that enabled them. Perhaps most significantly, just resolutions are final dispositions — once entered, no further relief may be sought.
Jesus: Friend of sinners … and Epstein?
In March of this year, the UMC was thrust into the national spotlight following revelations that one of its ordained elders, Stephanie Remington, had extensive associations with the late convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In late 2018, Remington relocated to the U.S. Virgin Islands to serve in one of Epstein’s administrative roles, acting as property manager for the infamous Little St. James Island from January through May 2019. Following the release of the so-called “Epstein Files,” it was reported that Remington’s name appeared nearly 2,000 times across the documents.
Stephanie Remington
Writing under the pseudonym “Jerusha Moon,” Remington sought to justify her employment by the convicted trafficker by appealing to Jesus’ ministry among sinners and social outcasts.
The Remington case exposes a structural vulnerability in the UMC’s connectional polity. The Discipline permits ordained clergy to serve outside their home annual conferences provided they submit written annual reports to their bishops and boards of ordained ministry. The Missouri Conference, where Remington had been ordained, maintains it had no knowledge of her assignment, despite the apparent absence of those required reports.
Bishop Robert Farr of the Missouri Annual Conference has suspended Remington from ordained ministry for 90 days while an investiggation into her conduct and breach of the Discipline proceeds.
Whether the fallout from the Remington case will prompt any serious reevaluation of the extension ministry provision — and of the UMC’s broader accountability architecture — remains to be seen.
Weaponizing Wesley
In 1787, John Wesley wrote: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case, unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit and discipline with which they first set out.”
Wesley’s fear was primarily related to individual spirituality, but his diagnosis applies with equal force to institutional accountability. A church can maintain every external form of religion (connectional polity, chargeable offenses, just resolution processes, episcopal oversight) while the actual power to protect the vulnerable drains quietly away through procedural seams no one deliberately engineered but everyone with institutional interest has reason to leave intact.
The UMC now faces a genuine inflection point. The Remington scandal, the ongoing litigation spawned by mass disaffiliation and the legal exposure increasingly concentrated at the conference and agency level all suggest the denomination’s structural ambiguity is becoming untenable — morally, institutionally and, in time, perhaps legally.
As stories of clergy sexual abuse have rippled through the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and nondenominational megachurches, there’s a reason we haven’t seen many charges brought against UMC clergy — the governing structure makes such charges more difficult than in other churches.
Wesley feared a church that retained the form of religion but had lost its power. What he could not have anticipated is that the form itself — the polity, the Discipline, the connectional architecture — might one day become the instrument by which the powerful evade accountability to the powerless.
That is the dead sect he warned against, dressed in the language of connection and mission.
David Bumgardner
David Bumgardner is a writer, theologian and educator living in Columbus, Ohio. He is a former BNG Clemons Fellow and a graduate of Texas Baptist College at Southwestern Seminary. He is a licensed commissioned pastor and holds an evangelism license through the Anglican Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Diocese of Boga, and Missio Mosaic, an ecumenical missional society and religious order. He is awaiting the conferral of his master of arts in practical theology degree from Winebrenner Theological Seminary.