Months after schism, United Methodist churches in Western Pennsylvania reexamine their future

Like many Methodist pastors, he leads not just the Hill Top congregation in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood but a charge of churches including Spencer and Fairhaven. Each building is within about 5 miles of the other on the south side of the Monongahela River. They comprise the South Hills Partnership of churches.

A single pastor caring for a geographically disparate flock is nothing particularly new among Methodists, but who they are and how they are led has most certainly changed in this 2023 Advent season.

This year marks the first Christmas since almost 40% of churches in the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church officially disaffiliated from the denomination. Debates and disagreements over same-sex marriage and ordaining gay pastors, as well as the creation of a more conservative Global Methodist Church branch in mid-2022, accelerated the momentum of congregations voting to disaffiliate this year across the United Methodist denomination.

In June, 298 Western Pennsylvania churches made their split official at the annual conference in Erie. Since then, the 442 that remained have been picking up the pieces and reexamining their connection to their faith. Western Pennsylvania Conference membership in 2021 was approximately 138,000. Based on that number, current membership minus the disaffiliated churches is estimated to be approximately 83,600, according to spokesperson Liz Lennox. Ten years ago, in 2013, the conference included 171,000 members; 15 years ago, in 2008, the conference included 186,000, according to conference statistical documents.

For the past three years, the South Hills Partnership has created a festive charity Christmas market, in which churchgoers donate money and gifts to stock a holiday shop for families in need. The tradition was inspired by the home church of Parson’s wife, Harmony-Zelienople United Methodist in Butler County. That church disaffiliated this year to join the Global Methodist Church, and Parson knows many other people and churches who left, including about half of the churches he worked with while training as a pastor in North Carolina.

In the wake of disaffiliation, the holiday market is one thing that reminds Parson of community. His churches were not interested in leaving, and Fairhaven has become a Lighthouse Congregation, a church that welcomes people who are looking for a new UMC home after their home church disaffiliated. “There’s an enormous amount of unity and a sense of shared mission around this, which I think is something that is easy to lose track of, especially in churches that have been consumed by infighting for years now,” he said. “This is like the opposite of that, and that’s a good thing.”

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