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US Annual Conferences Can’t Just Leave the United Methodist Church, Rules Top Court

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Attendees of the Kentucky Annual Conference raise their arms in prayer during a morning session on June 13, 2017, at the Sloan Convention Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Photo by Kathleen Barry/UM News

(RNS) — No, an annual conference in the United States can’t just up and leave the United Methodist Church. At least not yet.

While the denomination’s Book of Discipline has provisions for individual churches wishing to leave the United Methodist Church with their properties, there’s nothing within church law that would allow an annual conference — one of the United Methodist Church’s 53 regional networks of churches and ministries within the United States — to do the same, according to the denomination’s Judicial Council.

The Judicial Council ruled Tuesday (May 10) that only the General Conference, the denomination’s global decision-making body, can determine the process and conditions for annual conferences to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church.

And the General Conference hasn’t done that.

“There is no basis in Church law for any annual conference to adopt stopgap policies, pass resolutions, take a vote, or act unilaterally for the purpose of removing itself from The United Methodist Church,” Decision 1444 reads.

The decision by the Judicial Council, the denomination’s top court, comes just over a week after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a new denomination formed by theologically conservative Methodists.

The name and logo of the new "Global Methodist Church,” which is splitting from the United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of the Global Methodist Church

The name and logo of the Global Methodist Church. Image courtesy of Global Methodist Church

It also comes ahead of annual conferences’ yearly meetings, which take place in May and June.

At least two annual conferences — Northwest Texas and South Georgia — were set to consider resolutions to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church at their meetings this summer, the Judicial Council noted in its decision. The Northwest Texas Annual Conference also approved a nonbinding resolution last year indicating it planned to leave the United Methodist Church for a conservative denomination should the General Conference pass a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, according to United Methodist News Service.

And the Bulgaria-Romania Provisional Annual Conference already has voted to leave and join the Global Methodist Church over its bishop’s objections, according to United Methodist News Service.

Bulgaria-Romania Bishop Patrick Streiff has requested the Judicial Council rule on whether an annual conference in one of the denomination’s central conferences — including those in Europe, Africa and the Philippines — has the authority to vote to separate from the United Methodist Church. That question remains on the council’s spring docket.

Keith Boyette, who chairs the Transitional Leadership Council of the Global Methodist Church and will step into the role of its chief executive next month, told Religion News Service he was “very disappointed” by the Judicial Council decision.

The Cross and Flame is the official logo of the United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of the United Methodist Church

The Cross and Flame is the official logo of the United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of United Methodist Church

The ruling, he said, will lead to the kind of litigation the 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders who negotiated a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation — including Boyette — had hoped to avoid. Now churches and annual conferences potentially will challenge the denomination’s trust clause, which maintains that the denomination — not the churches or their conferences — own church properties, he said.