Jane Graner first felt a call to ministry as a senior in high school in 1979. As a lesbian in the United Methodist Church, she thought the denomination would allow openly gay pastors by the time she finished seminary.
Instead, she waited 40 years for her ordination in 2019, and she believes it only happened then because she was single.
“Being open about being gay as I was going through the ordination process and as a pastor was part of what I felt like was my calling,” said Graner, now 62 and senior pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Duncanville.
Graner’s experiences are at the heart of a rift over the role of LGBTQ people in the United Methodist Church, the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination. The denomination has spent decades disagreeing on human sexuality, and, in the past few years, thousands of congregations have voted to split off. Many have joined the Global Methodist Church, a new and more conservative denomination, while others have stayed independent.
The recent conflict is largely over the United Methodist Church’s bans on same-sex marriage and clergy members in gay relationships. The prohibitions were strengthened in a plan passed by a slim majority of church delegates from around the world in 2019, though enforcement has varied in the U.S.; in North Texas, some unmarried gay clergy have been ordained. The denomination is set to vote again on the bans at a meeting April 23-May 3 in Charlotte, N.C.
“We have been fighting about LGBTQ issues since at least 1972,” said Graner, referring to when the church adopted a doctrine of social principles that said homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.
“This has been a continuing issue in our church, and it’s just been coming to a head for a long, long time,” Graner said. “Now we’re finally going to be, hopefully, dealing with it in a decisive way.”
Why have churches left the United Methodist Church?
In 2019, the United Methodist Church began allowing congregations to leave and keep their properties if they cited “reasons of conscience” regarding human sexuality before the end of 2023.
About a quarter of the nation’s approximately 30,000 United Methodist congregations left over those four years, including 53 congregations in the North Texas Conference, according to a recent report by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership. The research center is part of a United Methodist seminary in Washington, D.C.
“It [hasn’t] been since 1908 that we’ve had a very significant rift in the church like this,” said Ted Campbell, a professor of church history at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. He was referring to a previous split that resulted in the creation of the Church of the Nazarene.
Campbell said the overt reason for why congregations have left is the dispute over whether the church should ordain clergy in same-sex relationships and allow ministers to perform gay marriages.
Disagreements about the scope of the Bible’s authority and the degree of autonomy given to churches have also contributed, he said, along with increased political polarization throughout the U.S.
“It’s personal, it hurts,” Campbell said of the divide. “Dear friends of mine have decided to go the other way, and some of us still don’t quite know how to talk to each other.”
At the time of its departure in July 2023, White’s Chapel in Southlake was the second-largest United Methodist congregation in the country, with 17,000 members.
In explaining why his church left, co-pastor Todd Renner said the United Methodist Church had grown more liberal in the U.S. and was no longer a “good fit.”
John McKellar, the church’s other co-pastor, said the more liberal trajectory would have a greater impact on White’s Chapel if a “regionalization” plan is passed at the denomination’s upcoming meeting, which he believes is likely to happen.
“The shape of what the United Methodist Church will be once regionalization passes was going to put our church in an awkward, uncomfortable place,” McKellar said. “We just were trying to read the tea leaves and get ahead of that.”
Regionalization would allow the regions of the United Methodist Church to set their policies on issues including gay marriage. Current proposals would establish eight regional conferences, combining all five U.S. jurisdictions into one conference and including seven conferences outside the country.
If the U.S. voted alone, many believe it would grant LGBTQ rights. In 2022, all five U.S. jurisdictions passed resolutions calling for the church to affirm and protect LGBTQ people.
After leaving the United Methodist Church, White’s Chapel helped start a new denomination last year called the Methodist Collegiate Church, whichRenner described as a more ideologically central option than those of the United Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church. The Global Methodist Church was formed in 2022 by theologically conservative Methodists and said it had 4,336 member churches as of January 2024.
“As the [United Methodist Church] and the [Global Methodist Church] moved into their particular corners, there’s less and less room for people that are in any way in the center,” Renner said. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to imagine something new.”
The Methodist Collegiate Churchhas attracted more than 60 congregations from the U.S. and Africa. Member churches can leave at any time and are not required to pay percentages of their budgets to the denomination, as congregations do in the United Methodist and Global Methodist churches.
Ken Nelson, 72, has attended White’s Chapel for about 25 years, and he and his wife, Sharon, help lead the church’s international mission trips. “Disaffiliation would have allowed us to have more dollars that go to those mission efforts that Sharon and I have a passion for,” Nelson said. He supported his church’s decision to disaffiliate.
“When you look at the headlines, people talk about the disaffiliation being based on LG et cetera [LGBTQ] — that was not something I focused a lot on, nor did, I think, a number of other folks that I spent time talking to,” Nelson also said.
St. Andrew Methodist Church in Plano, formerly the second-largest United Methodist church in the North Texas Conference, announced its departurefrom the denomination in October 2022 in a since-deleted statement on its website that did not include any reference to LGBTQ clergy or same-sex marriage.
“The fact is, we can protect our finances, our property and our pastors by going in a new direction,” the statement read.
A representative for St. Andrew declined a recent request for comment on why the church left.
“To fulfill our desire to love all churches — those that are part of the UMC and those that are leaving for other paths — we cannot comment any further on that disaffiliation process or the UMC,” the representative told The Dallas Morning News.
How has the split impacted North Texas?
The North Texas Conference lost 19% of its churches, fewer than any other conference in the state, according to the Lewis Center report. By contrast, the Northwest Texas Conference lost 162, or 81%, of its churches, and the Central Texas Conference, which includes Arlington and Fort Worth, lost 122, or 44%.
“North Texas came out of this far better than most,” said Lovett Weems, lead author of the report and the Lewis Center’s senior consultant. “My sense is that disaffiliation never really caught on the way it did in some other Southern conferences, including some other Texas conferences.” The Central Texas Conference lost its bishop, Mike Lowry, and churches including White’s Chapel and First Methodist Houston, the oldest Methodist church in Houston.
Of its more than three dozen United Methodist congregations, Dallas lost only one. Most of the departures in the North Texas Conference were from places outside the Dallas area.
Graner said the conference’s comparatively low rate of departure reflects Dallas’ relationship with LGBTQ people. “Dallas has a long history of being more successful addressing LGBTQ issues than you would expect of any other city in the South,” she said.
She credited that success in part to LGBTQ advocacy groups and organizations, including the Black Tie Dinner, which has raised over $30 million since its start in 1982. “I think our early leaders were very realistic about how things work in the South and set up organizations that were highly effective,” Graner said.
Janis Elliott, 69, was raised United Methodist and has attended Graner’s church for about 10 years. “I think now we’re ready to have the church represent who we are,” she said of the split. “For the longest time, our slogan has been, ‘Open hearts, open minds, open doors.’ Which means we include everybody.”
Now that many churches that identify as non-affirming have left the denomination, Elliott hopes the church will vote to embrace LGBTQ people at its upcoming meeting. “We have a daughter that came out to us quite a few years ago, and she has not felt comfortable in the church and [with] some of the policies,” Elliott said. “So this is personal to me.”
Joy Ashford covers faith and religion in North Texas for The Dallas Morning News through a partnership with Report for America.