Today's post is by Rev. Dr. Kirk Sims. Rev. Dr. Sims is a United Methodist missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries, serving as a consultant and theological educator based in Prague. He is an ordained elder in the North Georgia Annual Conference.
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Each annual conference has had its own process for allowing churches to disaffiliate from the UMC under the provisions set forth by ¶ 2553, which are set to expire at the end of 2023. Although this season is far from complete, we are able to see a major trend emerging when we overlay the locations of disaffiliating churches with a map of the 2020 presidential election results.
Annual conferences with large numbers of disaffiliations have tended to be in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The major outliers are the conferences in Georgia, a state that gave Joe Biden a 0.26% margin of victory over Trump. Georgia also has a disproportionately large number of United Methodists compared to some other parts of the US. For instance, according to the 2018 membership statistics, the two Georgia conferences had 61% more members than the entire Western Jurisdiction.
The correlation between disaffiliations and Trump voters will likely be reinforced as this process is resolved later this year. Some conferences anticipating higher numbers of departures include:
- The Florida Conference, where 106 congregations have filed a lawsuit to disaffiliate. The state of Florida cast its 29 electoral votes for Trump in 2020.
- The Western Pennsylvania Conference, where 260 out of 800 churches will likely disaffiliate. Although Pennsylvania voted for Biden, all but two of the counties in the area of the Western Pennsylvania Conference voted for Trump.
- North Georgia has issued a “pause” on its disaffiliation process. 71 congregations have left so far, and others had begun the process before the pause. Since this "pause," one high-profile congregation has filed a lawsuit in February, which was followed by the collective legal action of 186 additional churches in early April.
- In South Carolina, 50 congregations have voted for disaffiliation. However, they are waiting on annual conference approval.
Correlation is not causation. However, this correlation does raise a question for our church: to what extent does the political environment around us shape our theology?
