American religious historian Nathan Hatch famously argued that when you scratch beneath the surface of piety and polity that distinguishes them, Baptists and Methodists are actually more alike than they appear because the same cultural forces of democratic populism shaped…
One quarter of U.S. United Methodist churches have disaffiliated
Final statistics for churches exiting The United Methodist Church show more similarities than differences between congregations that left the denomination and those that stayed, along with sustained identity trends among 7,600 departing churches — 25% of the UMC’s 30,000 churches…