Coronavirus has forced the United Methodist Church to postpone its quadrennial governing General Conference, originally scheduled for next month, delaying by at least a year the church’s anticipated, and widely supported, schism between the denomination’s traditionalists and progressives.
The schism plan most likely to be approved would ask Methodist congregations to decide by majority vote whether to join a new traditional denomination or stick with a liberal United Methodism that allows same-sex couples to be married in the church and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. For 47 years United Methodists, with 6.7 million members in America and another nearly 6 million overseas, have fought over sexuality. The schism was to settle our differences at long last by going our separate ways.
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