The United Methodist Church’s experience with the disaffiliations of a number of its congregations has received widespread coverage in church media and in some secular media outlets. Because the polity of the UMC differs from that of many other denominations,…
This is a book that shouldn’t have been published
Editor’s note: As the article below indicates, BNG previously published an article the author here took extreme issue with. In fairness, we hear his perspective on the larger issue at hand. Our intent is to illustrate the great differences of…
Meddling with Methodism and domesticating the Baptists
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…