Upon reading John Tures’ “Intel From the Ivory Tower: United Methodists, Better Together”, I was surprised to see that Mr. Tures seems to include erroneous statistics concerning disaffiliated United Methodist churches.
Mr. Tures claims, “There have been 3,933 disaffiliations from the United Methodist Church,…” and “That’s 84% of the churches in the UMC electing to remain and resist the siren song of disaffiliation.”
These stats are simply incorrect.
To date, over 6,000 US congregations have chosen to disaffiliate from the UMC, which constitutes 20% of the denomination in the U.S. (before a disaffiliation plan was approved, there were roughly 30,000 UMC congregations in the U.S.) See the denomination’s own news agency’s (UMNews) link tracking disaffiliations here:
https://www.umnews.org/en/news/disaffiliations-approved-by-annual-conferences
Moreover, there are 20+ special sessions of the Annual Conferences, scheduled throughout the rest of 2023, where more churches are expected to disaffiliate from the UMC. While difficult to predict, it’s possible that by the end of 2023, upwards of 7,000 congregations in the U.S. will have disaffiliated from the UMC.
None of the numbers mentioned include local congregations that are involved in litigation efforts against their Annual Conferences across the UM connection.
My assumption is that Mr. Tures was simply working from dated statistics. and not intentionally misrepresenting the numbers.
Dale Thomas
Annapolis, MD
Columnist John Tures responds:
I’ve seen the disaffiliations cited as 2,000 (“Methodist split is sad hour for worldwide organization”) or 6,000 (“Former United Methodist church adjusting after disaffiliation”). Either way, it appears that the majority of the 30,000 United Methodist Churches have chosen to remain united.