More Than 100 Florida Churches File Suit to Leave United Methodist Church

More than 100 churches have sued the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church to leave the denomination immediately. The lawsuit was filed Thursday, July 14, in Bradford County, Florida, by the National Center for Life and Liberty. The suit covers 106 churches, which allege that the requirements for disaffiliation approved by a special session of the United Methodist General Conference are “onerous, and in many cases, prohibitive.”

The departures are part of a slow-moving schism in the United Methodist Church over its stance on biblical sexuality and the ordination and marriage of members who identify as LGBTQ. The disaffiliation plan, added to the Book of Discipline by General Conference delegates in 2019, allows churches that wish to leave over this issue to take their properties with them through 2023, after paying apportionments and pension liabilities. The same year, delegates also approved the Traditional Plan, which strengthened the denomination’s language barring the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ United Methodists.

According to the suit, the annual conference is using the disaffiliation plan and the denomination’s trust clause to “hold for ransom Plaintiff Churches’ real and personal property.” The plaintiffs argue that previously existing provisions in the Book of Discipline allow churches to deed their properties to other evangelical denominations.

The suit also alleges that the Council of Bishops, and its past president, Bishop Ken Carter, who heads both the Florida and Western North Carolina conferences, are not abiding by the same Book of Discipline. Among other things, it says they took no action when the California-Nevada Annual Conference elected the denomination’s first openly LGBTQ bishop, when the Illinois Great Rivers Conference certified its first drag queen as a candidate for ministry, and when the Western Jurisdiction declared itself a “safe harbor” for LGBTQ clergy. These are the suit’s allegations.

In a written statement responding to the lawsuit, Carter said the Florida Annual Conference was “deeply grieved by this, as we seek to be a church united in love and in mission.” According to the conference’s bishop, the Florida Annual Conference is committed to the “gracious exit” provided in the Book of Discipline and has tried to engage churches in that process. He wrote that leaving abruptly without making the payments required under the 2019 plan could damage benefits and pensions for retired pastors. He noted that apportionments support camps, campus ministries, natural disaster responses, missions abroad, and the United Methodist Children’s Home.

“We ask that, despite their haste, these groups seeking to break away live up to the responsibilities established by the General Conference in 2019, and that they not cause pain, damage or disparage other United Methodist churches, other members in their churches or other pastors, or the Conference,” Carter wrote. He called for this conduct as part of a call to peace in a divided church (Romans 12:18).

The Florida case has become an early example of what the schism may look like. Days after the Global Methodist Church launched in May, the Wesleyan Covenant Association’s Florida chapter announced that 107 churches were disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church and planning to join the new denomination. The WCA has confirmed that most of those churches are participating in the lawsuit. Separately, delegates at this summer’s Florida Annual Conference meeting reportedly rejected a slate of 16 people on track to become ordained elders or deacons because two of them were openly gay.

Keith Boyette, transitional connectional coordinating officer of the conservative Global Methodist Church, described the lawsuit as the first of what he expects may be a number of similar suits. He said he expects more churches to leave this fall, when a number of United Methodist annual conferences are scheduled to hold special sessions on disaffiliations. “Most of those churches are making their way to the Global Methodist Church,” he said.

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