Evangelical leaders within the 10.2-million-member United Methodist Church on Thursday morning launched a campaign to split their church, the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States, in the wake of several decades of agonizing debate over gay rights.
The legal battle to separate the church is likely to play out over most of a decade, and many moderate church leaders are expected to oppose the split, said the Rev. Bill Hinson of Alabama, a leader of the coalition. However, evangelicals are determined to use grassroots pressure nationwide, especially across the South and in growing African churches, to force a division.
The long-running struggle over gay rights, which has dominated international conferences of the church's leaders since the early 1970s, shows that “the gulf between us is so wide that, despite our own best efforts and prayers, we cannot bridge that gulf,’’ said Hinson.
The call for a split stunned many bishops, clergy and lay people at the church’s General Conference in Pittsburgh. Evangelical groups already had prevailed this week in heated legislative battles to retain the church’s staunch condemnation of homosexuality.
Those legislative victories at the conference were not enough, Hinson said. Evangelical members want to end the debate decisively by forming a new denomination that will agree on a traditional opposition to gay rights.
“This is a tragic, tragic, tragic day,’’ said the Rev. William K. Quick, who was the pastor of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Detroit from 1974 to 1998 and who now is associate general secretary of the World Methodist Council, an organization of 78 Methodist denominations around the world.
“We have seen this tragedy before, most recently in the New Zealand Methodist Church, where they divided over the issue of homosexuality in the late 1990s,’’ said Quick, who also teaches at Duke University Seminary in Durham, N.C. “It breaks my heart to see this at a time in Christianity when the church needs to come together to serve the world. Instead, the body of Christ will be broken further by this action.’’
Among the major divisions in Methodism in the past, Quick recalled, were a schism in the church in 1830 in a struggle over how much authority lay people should have in the church and a larger split over slavery in 1844 that broke along North-South lines. Those groups were reunited in 1939 to form the nationwide denomination now known as the United Methodist Church.