Methodists move to undo LGBTQ restrictions, embrace liberalized views on sexual practices

The United Methodist Church’s business session Tuesday voted to end a ban on using church funds to advocate for gay rights, a prelude to action expected later this week that would drop the denomination’s official restrictions on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage.

The financial, clerical, and marriage restrictions were enhanced at a special legislative meeting held in 2019. The vote on how funds are used relative to LGBTQ issues is a first step toward overturning those policies.

The shift to more LGBTQ-friendly policies comes after four years of turmoil that saw 25% of the group’s U.S. congregations and members exit the denomination, many in anticipation of the liberalization of rules on sexual issues. 

UMC finances dropped concurrently, prompting a four-year denominational budget proposal this week that is 42% lower than the last voted budget. In separate debates Tuesday, delegates pondered how to finance a church hierarchy following those massive losses.

But the proposed changes to several policies related to LGBTQ issues took center stage at the long-postponed General Conference meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. The session had been planned for 2020, but the global pandemic and visa issues for overseas delegates in ensuing years delayed the assembly.

Along with canceling the gay advocacy funding ban, delegates eliminated a requirement that the church enforce the measure. Instead, the UMC’s financial office should make sure that no monies go to programs that reject LGBTQ individuals or “limits the response to the HIV epidemic,” according to a report from the church’s UM News service.

Also eliminated are requirements that church ordination panels must first determine whether candidates for ministry are “self-avowed practicing” homosexuals, as well as a requirement that bishops deem such candidates unqualified for ministry. Now, gay clergy in good standing can be appointed across the boundaries of an annual conference — equivalent to a diocese — if an appointment within that district is unavailable.

Delegates approved additional changes striking a mandatory penalty of a minimum one-year suspension without pay for clergy found guilty of performing ceremonies for a same-sex union or wedding. Voters placed a moratorium on judicial proceedings relative to the same-sex wedding ban or the ordination of gay clergy.

Additional measures that would overturn long-standing bans on gays in the church, as well as a 1972 declaration that homosexual practice is “incompatible with Christian teaching,” are due for votes later this week.

The Rev. David Meredith, a retired UMC elder and board chair of the pro-inclusion UMC group Reconciling Ministries Network, told UM News he was pleased with the Tuesday outcomes, which were approved in one unified “consent agenda” vote.

“With the approvals and acceptance of the things today by the General Conference, we’re beginning to see the unwinding, unraveling, dismantling of the heterosexism, the homophobia, the hurt and the harm of The United Methodist Church,” he said.

Mark D. Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy and a United Methodist, said the Tuesday votes — and further anticipated actions — signal “a great turning of the page in American religion.”

The UMC, he said, “is almost the last [of] the great historic mainline Protestant denominations officially to liberalize on sexuality and Methodism has been a central part of American civil society from the very start.”

He said the mainline denominations, “especially the Methodists, really were pillars of American democracy and civil society and pulled people together from various classes and races and political perspectives, and what’s replacing them in some cases are more segregated religious communities and certainly more polarized segregated online communities.”