For Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey, the last two years have resembled a drawn-out quarrel between members of a very large family: people squabble, agree to disagree, face the consequences and then, eventually, try to move on.
But when that “family” is one of the largest churches in Texas, diffusing conflict and picking up the pieces isn’t necessarily as simple as avoiding a Thanksgiving dinner or skipping out on the next family reunion.
After decades of struggling with ideological differences around same-sex marriage and whether members identifying as LGBTQ+ could serve as clergy, the worldwide Methodist Church split into two factions in Spring 2022.
Today, Harvey leads the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Before the split, the conference — which includes congregations in Galveston, Houston, College Station, Beaumont, Texarkana, Longview and Tyler — was comprised of more than 600 congregations and nearly 300,000 members. It’s now a little more than half that size after some members moved over to the more conservative Global Methodist Church.
“We're in a great place. There is a really a good sense of unity, not uniformity, but unity and openness to gathering everybody at the table,” Harvey recently told The Texas Newsroom.
That optimism doesn’t come without some reflection and sadness. Harvey concedes the disaffiliation has been peppered with heartache.
“There are challenges when you break covenant with your siblings that you've been in covenant with for many years. So there has been pain in all of this,” she said. “But I believe in this moment in time, we're moving toward, being in a much better place. We are healing. We have not been healed. We are healing.”
The road to disaffiliation
The split within the church wasn’t instantaneous: the issues of same-sex marriage and LGTBQ+ clergy had been sewing discord within the Methodist camp for years. In 2022, Pastor Scott J. Jones, Harvey’s predecessor, said that several bishops and conferences were deliberately disobeying the church’s prohibition against same-sex marriage and members of the LGBTQ community being in the ministry for some time.
Jones left the United Methodist Church in 2023 for the Global Methodist Church MidTexas Conference. The church did not respond to phone calls seeking comment from the pastor for this story, but at the time, he said he was “excited” about making the move.
“It is a new start that will help clergy and congregations move past the disputes of the last several years and focus on our mission,” Jones said, according to an article on the conference's website. “The Global Methodist Church represents traditional Methodism with a strong focus on reaching new people for the gospel.”
While ideological issues were a driving force behind the Global Methodist Church’s disaffiliation, Bishop Harvey said that wasn’t the only factor.
“It also really was about biblical interpretation, how we interpret the Bible, how we understand it,” she said. “Just like everybody on anything that you read, right? We can read the same story; you have a different interpretation.”
In the United States, about 7,600 churches of the United Methodists Church members’ 30,000 churches have dissociated, according to a January report by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Of the 20 conferences with at least 30% of church disaffiliations, five were in Texas.
Harvey said the split within the Methodist church reflects where the world is on some social issues and not necessarily a push to revert to more conservative principles. She pointed to the United Methodist Church voting in May to repeal its ban on LGBTQ and officiating same-sex weddings by a whopping 692 - 51.
“The legislation that we passed our general conference, passed overwhelmingly – not by the skin of your chinny, chin, chin kind of thing.” she said. “So, it's hard to say because in some areas, it is more conservative and in others it's really, I think, coming to the center, which is I think where most of them – many of us – have been for so long.”
Women and the Baptist Church
As the Methodist Church continues its transformation, the Southern Baptist Convention is taking its own steps to realign itself with what some religion scholars say is a return to more conservative ideals.
In June, the country’s largest Protestant denomination narrowly rejected an amendment to reject churches that employ female pastors. The amendment – called the Law Amendment after Mike Law, a pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia – failed to garner the two-thirds support needed to make the change. The vote to “limit ‘friendly cooperation’ with the SBC to a church that ‘affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture’” was 5,099 to 3,185, or about 61.5% to 38%, according to the Baptist Standard.
Baylor University history professor Beth Allison Barr said that even though the amendment failed, it still received a healthy swell of support.
“I think what we do see is a backlash to what many have perceived as progressive cultural values moving into the church," said Barr. “And part of this, there is also, historically, perceived a link between affirming women and moving to be more affirmative and LGBTQ.”
Last year, the SBC voted overwhelmingly to approve an amendment to clarify that women cannot serve as pastor. The change would have been permanent had the convention achieved the required two-thirds vote this June.
Though the measure didn’t pass, the Southern Baptist Convention is still able to disaffiliate from a church with female pastors, Barr said. And it did so with two churches before the convention convened, including The First Baptist Church of Alexandria, which had affirmed women can serve in any role, including as senior pastor. The church was ousted by a 6,759 to 563 vote, the Associated Press reported.
“I'm not sure if they're worried about the PR on it. They should be. It looks really, really bad,” Barr said. “But the SBC has been doing stuff like this since the early 80s, and people are only now more attuned to it.”
In the lead up to the vote, some Baptist leaders expressed concern adopting the change would alienate minority members, specifically Black women who have moved through the ranks within their congregations.
J.D. Greear, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said before the vote he was concerned about the possible change alienating minority-majority churches.
“It overturns a system that works. I don’t oppose the Law Amendment because I’m a closet moderate or soft on theological issues,” he told the Christian Post.
Barr said that there are about 4,000 Black churches that are members of the Southern Baptist Conference that are dual affiliated with historically Black Baptist denominations. She said the near miss at the convention could send the wrong message to some of those members.
“I think it's going to be a big question for these churches if they decide to remain affiliated with the SBC, which puts the women serving in their churches – I would argue – in danger,” she said.
