One of the nation’s largest and most affluent Methodist churches is being sued by its denomination for previously unreported changes made to its governing documents four years ago.
The Horizon Texas Conference — previously known as the North Texas Conference of The United Methodist Church — is suing Highland Park United Methodist Church claiming the church improperly removed oversight by the denomination and its own congregants.
Amid the chaos of challenges and changes facing the UMC from 2020 to 2025 — largely stemming from disagreements about LGBTQ inclusion and exacerbated by the pandemic — Highland Park’s Church Council quietly amended the church’s articles of incorporation and bylaws.
Conference leadership only learned of those changes in October 2025.
SMU campus in Dallas
These changes were made while another lawsuit was simmering between Southern Methodist University and the South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the UMC. This is relevant because Highland Park UMC sits on the SMU campus and is the church most closely aligned with the university and its divinity school.
The SMU lawsuit was resolved March 18 of this year, ending a seven-year battle over who owns the core property of the SMU campus. UMC leaders and SMU leaders reached an out-of-court agreement that preserves the school’s historic and ongoing relationship with the South Central Jurisdictional Conference.
SMU trustees had made the changes, they said, to protect the university from the volatile environment of the UMC.
Matt Tuggle
Highland Park UMC is the second-largest church in the denomination. It is one of the most affluent congregations in Dallas and draws more than 3,700 in-person worshipers to a variety of services every Sunday.
The congregation still identifies as United Methodist, but the changes to governing documents do not reflect that. The changes give the church a level of autonomy familiar to Baptists but unheard of among Methodists.
Among the changes:
- The “charge conference” no longer chooses church council members, but the church council itself chooses its roster. The charge conference is a much larger assembly of UMC clergy and denominational leaders.
- The church council solely names the Pastoral Relations Committee, which has sole authority in appointing, employing and supervising the church’s pastors with no oversight by the bishop.
- The church council alone determines the mission, ministry and pastoral messaging.
- The church council determines the church’s denominational affiliation and connections with other institutions — without consultation of the members.
Everything about these changes challenges the way the UMC’s connectional governance model is supposed to work.
In short, both the denomination and the people in the pew have been cut out of congregational governance.
This is not dissimilar to recent changes in governing documents made at Second Baptist Church in Houston — a Southern Baptist congregation — where all authority was vested in a five-person leadership team named by the senior pastor.
Upset church members filed suit against church leaders, but a Texas business court recently ruled it could not adjudicate the dispute because of the ecclesial abstention doctrine. That doctrine says secular courts may not interfere in internal church governance debates that involve theology.
The Horizon Texas Conference case against HPUMC could face the same challenge.
“Our purpose is restoration — bringing the original governance structure back into alignment with the Book of Discipline so this church can move forward faithfully,” said Horizon Texas Conference Bishop Rubén Saenz Jr., who is also president of the denomination’s Council of Bishops.
But Senior Minister Matt Tuggle — who was in a different role at HPUMC when the changes were made — said the church remains faithfully United Methodist.
“For the Horizon Texas Conference of The United Methodist Church to file a meritless lawsuit against our church is both bewildering and disappointing,” he said. “While we continue to engage with the conference on its allegations, we will remain focused on being who we are as a church — which means ministering to our congregation just as we have over the past 110 years.”
UM News reports: “Among other changes, the church council altered the corporation’s name to Highland Park Methodist Church and removed all references to The United Methodist Church, the conference and the (Book of) Discipline from its governing documents.”
Bishop Saenz said via video: “As your bishop, I have a moral responsibility to the Highland Park congregation and the wider United Methodist Church to uphold the order of The United Methodist Church and to protect the sacred trust that generations of United Methodists have entrusted to this congregation.”