Leaders of Highland Park Methodist Church have spent the last week expressing shock that the bishop of their United Methodist conference filed suit against them over changes made to their governing documents four years ago but only recently made public.
At root, as explained in another BNG article, are substantive changes to the church’s governing documents that remove traditional language of affiliation with The United Methodist Church and give all rights for decision-making and property ownership to a small group of self-perpetuating church members.
Simply put, this is not the Methodist way. But it is the way of many megachurches and nondenominational churches today.
Matt Tuggle
In a message to the congregation last Sunday, Senior Pastor Matt Tuggle spoke emotionally about his own lifelong heritage as a United Methodist and denied any separation.
“I cannot express to you the grief this has caused,” he said. “I’ll speak personally. I have been a member of The United Methodist Church my entire life. I was baptized on October 11, 1981, in West Point, Ga. I was confirmed into The United Methodist Church in middle school in Richmond, Va. I was ordained in The United Methodist Church in 2014 in Richardson, Texas. I have had offers from both other Methodist denominations and nondenominational churches to leave and to join them and I did not do that.”
Both he and the 3,700-attendance congregation have been loyal to the denomination even as it has been ripped apart by schism in recent years, he said. “The amendments in question that happened in November of 2022 happened during a season of disaffiliation in The United Methodist Church that saw more than 7,600 United Methodist churches leave the denomination. Although we very well could have taken that step, we did not. We remained in the denomination, and we updated our corporate documents to ensure that we could remain who we are as a church.”
What he and his predecessor, Paul Rasmussen, did not do, however, is notify denominational officials they had changed their governing documents. That only was found out in 2025. And the fallout from that discovery has been playing out behind the scenes until the conflict went public last week due to the lawsuit.
The dispute is of national import because HPUMC is the second-largest congregation in America affiliated with the UMC and because the church has outsized influence due to its proximity to Southern Methodist University.
Paul Rasmussen
Rasmussen issued a separate statement this week extolling the virtues of the congregation at length.
“Since our inception, every member of our congregation has been received as a United Methodist. Today, we have more than 16,000 members. Every child confirmed as a youth in our church has been confirmed as a United Methodist — through United Methodist liturgy. Every child baptized in an HPUMC worship service has been welcomed into our responsibility as a congregation as a United Methodist — through United Methodist liturgy. When we sing, we use United Methodist hymnals. From 2019 to 2023, more than 7,600 churches nationwide left The United Methodist Church. HPUMC did not. We stayed. In fact, we did more than stay.”
Rasmussen then gave a 400-word accounting of the good deeds of the church that helped the UMC and its various entities.
“We put our full support behind the conference and other churches in our UMC community,” he began. “HPUMC has launched a staggering 41 United Methodist churches over the years, the most of any conference partner. We run the largest UMC youth confirmation program in the conference that is suing us. We launched a new dormitory and student center at Africa University, one of the great United Methodist universities on the continent. Our nationally renowned Belong Disability Ministry for children and adults with physical and mental disabilities, which we operate, is available to all Horizon Texas Conference churches free of charge.”
He lists all the UMC charity organizations the church supports and says in the last four years the wealthy church has provided $5.5 million in apportionments and more than $6.2 million to organizations of the UMC. In Methodist polity, churches are assessed annual dues to the denomination — called apportionments — that are based on membership numbers.
Rasmussen told how HPUMC had rescued two dying churches and brought them back to life and is preparing to do the same for a third.
What the fight is about
None of that is what the intra-denominational fight is about, though. The bishop of Horizon Texas Conference has not accused the Dallas church of failing to support the denomination’s mission but of secretly amending its governing documents to avoid being constrained by the UMC’s Book of Discipline.
Tuggle said exactly this in his message to the congregation Sunday: “This lawsuit is about governance.”
“This lawsuit is about governance.”
And while Tuggle and Rasmussen claim they and other church leaders “were caught completely off guard by the bishop’s actions,” the bishop and denominational officials counter that they, too, were caught off guard by the changes to governing documents they contend are illegal.
Unlike autonomous Baptists, for example, United Methodists have a connectional form of governance. In most cases, individual congregations do not own their property; it is held “in trust” by the denomination. And in most cases, individual congregations do not recruit or call their own pastors; clergy are assigned to churches by the regional bishops and — except in large churches like HPUMC — are moved around frequently. In United Methodist polity, clergy are not members of the churches they serve but are members of the conference.
Tuggle told congregants Sunday, “We updated our corporate documents to ensure that we could remain who we are as a church.”
Exactly what that means, he didn’t say, explaining he was forbidden by legal counsel from saying more.
What the changes mean
BNG’s analysis of the 1998 Articles of Incorporation against the 2022 Restated Certificate of Formation shows a substantial restructuring of the church’s corporate governing document. (This analysis was assisted by the use of ChatGPT.)
The biggest changes are:
- The church’s legal name changes from Highland Park United Methodist Church to Highland Park Methodist Church — removing the word “United.”
- A detailed 1998 statement tying the corporation to the North Texas Conference (now Horizon Texas Conference) and The United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline is removed.
- The church’s purposes are rewritten around a specific Christian mission statement: “To help people become deeply devoted followers of Christ.”
- The Church Council becomes explicitly the governing body of the corporation, with its size left to the bylaws rather than fixed at 21.
- The 21-person minimum Church Council provision is eliminated.
- The provisions concerning the Charge Conference, nomination of Church Council members, and their election under the Book of Discipline are deleted from the certificate. In the UMC, a Charge Conference is an assembly of UMC clergy and denominational leaders that normally ensures denominational oversight.
- A new mechanism allows action by written consent without a meeting.
- The dissolution provision changes dramatically: The 1998 document directs property to the North Texas Conference; the 2022 document instead directs the Church Council to select qualifying 501(c)(3) organizations with similar purposes.
- The procedure for amending the corporate document remains a two-thirds Church Council vote, but the 2022 version explicitly gives the Church Council exclusive power to amend or restate it.
The bishop’s position
Ruben Saenz
By some insider accounts, Bishop Ruben Saenz Jr. got the upper hand on HPUMC leadership by denying the tall-steeple church the thing it desires most: Protecting its image and avoiding controversy.
A notice on the Horizon Texas Conference website explains: “On Monday, Aug. 10, the Horizon Texas Conference filed a petition for declaratory judgment in Dallas County District Court after repeated efforts to resolve the governance concerns directly with Highland Park UMC leadership. The filing asks the court to address civil-law questions involving the church’s governing documents and longstanding property deed. The Conference remains committed to protecting the congregation, preserving Highland Park UMC’s United Methodist identity and sacred trust and seeking a faithful resolution.”
HPUMC is the kind of church with more lawyers than plumbers in the pews. Thus, the bishop has picked a fight with a church that has almost unlimited resources to defend itself. As BNG previously noted, however, there is a good chance secular courts may not intervene at all due to the ecclesial abstention doctrine.
The bishop’s position is that the conference “repeatedly sought to resolve the issue directly … to bring the articles and bylaws back into alignment with United Methodist governance.” However, “Highland Park UMC church leaders have refused to make these changes.”
The goal of the litigation, he says, is restoration. “The conference is acting to protect the congregation, Highland Park UMC’s United Methodist identity and the sacred trust of the church for current and future generations. A faithful path to resolution remains available.”
Saenz says he has a “moral responsibility” to “uphold the order of The United Methodist Church.”
Having it both ways
HPUMC leaders have amended their governing documents in a way that could allow them to break free of the UMC while maintaining they have no intention of leaving. This case will be closely followed by other Methodists amid the fracturing of the second-largest Christian denomination in the United States.
The “trust clause” that binds church property to the denomination and not to individual congregations has been a bone of contention as thousands of congregations left the UMC over the past two years over disagreements on human sexuality. And the Charge Conference that has tied congregations to the Book of Discipline also has been challenged by departing churches.
The message of HPUMC leaders today is, “Trust us. We’re the good guys.” Yet it’s easy to see why a bishop might be suspicious.
Rasmussen called the lawsuit “among the more unnecessary and egregious betrayals of a loyal ministry partnership I’ve witnessed in 26 years as a United Methodist pastor.” He called the charges in the lawsuit “outrageous and false.”
He asserts that the changes in governing documents outlined above “reflect a deep dedication to the United Methodist Church and our peer institutions in connection. This is what connectionism is all about. … To say otherwise is lunacy.”
Tuggle told the congregation Sunday, “Your pastoral leadership and your lay leadership has responded with honesty, humility, care and grace.”
Clearly, the bishop disagrees.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global.
Related:
UMC sues Dallas church for making unilateral governance changes