“Not a Real Schism”: Four Years Later, UMC Exodus Less a Gush, More a Trickle
Yonat Shimron and Emily McFarlan Miller of Religion News Service report that only 6.1 percent of United Methodist congregations have left the denomination since it approved a disaffiliation plan in 2019. Four years ago, the UMC’s internal disagreements over LGBT rights had seemed likely to create a schism in the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination. “You think of a schism as 50% or even 35% (split),” Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, told Shimron and McFarlan Miller. “This is not a real schism.”