June Fulton felt weird sitting within the third pew.
At every service since she joined the choir when she was 12 years old—her whole life, mainly—she has sat with them on the stage behind the pulpit at Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church (UMC), in Trinity, North Carolina.
But there was no singing on the disaffiliation vote. So Fulton, now one among the matriarchs at Mt. Vernon, took a spot within the pew next to a friend.
“Everybody filled out their piece of paper, a ballot, and so they needed to sign it,” Fulton told CT. “Every person went up and put their paper within the basket after which we sat there quietly. So quietly. It was so strange to sit down there so quietly as we waited.”
Representatives from the denomination collected the ballots. They went right into a back room and counted the votes to see whether the small rural church could be one among the hundreds to exit the UMC over LGBTQ affirmation, fidelity to traditional Christian teachings on sexuality, the authority of the Book of Discipline, and years of bruising ecclesial conflict.
Fulton leaned over to her friend and said how sad all of it was. She said this was not something you ever desired to do.
Her friend said, “I just wonder what it’s going to be like. I believe we’ve made the precise decision. But I just wonder what it’s going to be like,” Fulton recalled.
Fulton wondered that too. She hoped the congregation would soon put all of it behind them—the debates; the acrimony and the load of it; the sorrow; and the limitless, complex strategy of disaffiliation.
“We can go forward,” she said, “and return to doing the things we all the time did do: caring for people, taking care of people, and being the church.”
Mt. Vernon did vote to depart. Today, almost a 12 months later, there are only a number of remaining indications that this congregation was once a part of the mainline church that was one among the most important, strongest, and most influential Protestant groups within the US. A beat-up road sign a few mile down the agricultural highway has the denomination’s name and logo and directions to the church. The hymnals within the pew still say United Methodist.
But Mt. Vernon, like 7,630 other churches, is freed from the UMC. Thirty-three percent of the denomination’s congregations in Western North Carolina have left, together with greater than half of those in Texas, 38 percent in Pennsylvania, 35 percent in Ohio, and nearly a 3rd in Indiana.
Across the country, the newly separated Methodists are hoping for, praying for, and pursuing renewal. They are, as Fulton hoped, moving forward and going back.
Ten miles away from Trinity, at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in High Point, North Carolina, Brenda Radner was one among about 300 individuals who attended a two-day seminar on Methodist identity in February, with lectures on Wesleyan history, theology, ethics, and hermeneutics. She began attending Wesley Memorial 56 years ago, when she was just 19. But the congregation’s recent exit from the UMC has made her wish to dig deeper into Wesleyanism and learn more in regards to the distinctives of her faith tradition.
It’s exciting, Radner told CT, to take into consideration what might occur next.
“I might like to see revival. And I believe it would come. I might like to see it start right here in High Point,” she said.
Revival is one among the specific goals of the School of Methodism, placed on by The John Wesley Institute. The first two-day event was held at Wesley Memorial, and there are half a dozen more being planned at other churches this spring and summer, in keeping with director Ryan Danker.
The first one began with a call to worship. Hundreds of Methodists stood within the neo-gothic church to sing the good Charles Wesley hymn, “O for a Thousand Tongues.”
Before Communion, the assembled believers lifted their voices again with one other classic from the cofounder of Methodism, singing out an invite to latest life.
“Come all of the world! Come, sinner, thou! All things in Christ are ready now,” they sang. “Come all ye souls by sin oppressed, ye restless wanderers after rest.”
The event was attended by many North Carolinian members of the brand new Global Methodist Church, which is within the strategy of forming out of a split with the UMC. But it was also attended by members of UMC congregations, in addition to people from the Anglican Church in North America, some as-yet-unaffiliated congregations, and maybe a number of people from the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church, and the Free Methodist Church.
Danker talked about their common history in his opening lecture within the High Point sanctuary. He pointed them back to their original ethos, formed within the 18th-century Methodist revival fires that swept through Great Britain, the US, and the world.
“I’ve noticed recently, wherever I’m going—I speak to all types of Methodists—there’s a desire for the vibrancy of early Methodism,” he said. “What I need to do with my time here is provide something of a blueprint for Methodist revival.”
Danker urged all Methodists to look to that history for the fireplace pit, dry wood, and kindling that the Holy Spirit can set aflame.
The next day, Asbury University professor Suzanne Nicholson talked about recovering John Wesley’s approach to reading Scripture. Too many individuals, she told the gathered Methodists, have been led astray and distracted by debates about technical terms in hermeneutics, forgetting what the Bible is definitely for.
“John Wesley was saying that God wants to remodel us, and Scripture will transform us,” Nicholson said. “Scripture is the trustworthy revelation of the mind of God.”
The traditional Methodist approach to the Bible is literalist, in keeping with Nicholson, but that doesn’t mean Wesley or other early Methodists like Peter Cartwright and Francis Asbury read all the things literally. Instead, they accepted the plain meaning of the text, which involves an assessment of the genre of writing, the literary and historical contexts, and the larger story of Scripture, moving from original sin to justification by faith, latest birth, and inward and outward holiness.
Methodists should read commentaries alongside Scripture, Nicholson said, and pray and ask for illumination from the Spirit. They also needs to look back to Wesley’s historic Bible-reading practices.
“One of the things we discover with Wesley’s sermons is that they’re just dripping with Scripture,” she said.
Several women attending the School of Methodism said they thought the best hope for Wesleyan renewal and revitalization would come from the deep commitment to the Bible that Nicholson talked about.
“We’ve form of got to immerse ourselves and be within the Word,” said Catherine Fulcher, who attends Wesley Memorial.
Her friend Angie Fary agrees. As someone who grew up Baptist before joining the UMC 20 years ago, Fary appreciates learning more in regards to the history and tradition of John Wesley and early Methodism. But she said she was especially encouraged, on this time of transition, to listen to the speakers pointing Methodists back to the Bible.
“We’re going to remain the course in God’s Word,” Fary told CT.
Some Global Methodist leaders have also been directing numerous energy toward prayer. They say they need the brand new denomination to be sure together less by bureaucracy and legal arrangements and more by intercession.
Laura Ballinger, an Indiana pastor on the Global Methodist’s prayer steering committee, said representatives from the brand new denomination’s different regions gather every month to hope. There are also groups in each region which can be praying, and more on the local level. The church encourages each congregation to appoint a “prayer point person.”
The people within the pews of Global Methodist churches are urged to keep in mind that they’re depending on God and that this latest, fresh expression of Methodism will need his enabling, empowering, and sustaining grace.
“We want Jesus to be Lord, so we have now to hearken to him, and pray to him, and ask for empowerment,” Ballinger told CT. “We wish to be a church—truly be a church—that’s connected to one another and the Lord through prayer.”
Many people fasted and prayed for weeks prior to the convening conferences that formalized the regional organization of the Global Methodists. According to Ballinger, the meetings have been marked by prolonged times of prayer and an overflow of the fruit of the Spirit, especially love and joy.
“I saw people weeping with intense joy,” Ballinger said. “At a business meeting.”
The prayer requests ahead of the convening conference of the Great Lakes region focused mainly on practical concerns. Methodists were asked to hope that the conference would go easily, that registration could be orderly and efficient, and that all the things spoken onstage would edify the church.
But the people on the prayer list were also asked to ask God for an outpouring of the Spirit and for everybody present to be “alert to the Lord.”
Carol Perry, a member of Grace Methodist Church in Decatur, Illinois, said that as she drove home, she considered how every face seemed stuffed with joy and the way there was a lot love, even from people she didn’t know. It was a robust religious experience.
“I believe a part of the enjoyment got here from the liberty we have now … because we’re truly following Jesus and the church he’s constructing,” Perry wrote. “I actually have only been following Jesus for about nine years. Freedom in Christ is a phrase I’ve heard lots but really haven’t experience in such a profound way.”
The regional conference form of seemed, within the words of one other Methodist hymn author, like “a foretaste of glory divine.”
Back in Trinity, North Carolina, the brand new Global Methodist pastor was preaching on that theme on a rainy February morning. Caroline Franks told the Mt. Vernon congregation a few recent meeting she’d had with people desirous about being ordained within the Global Methodist Church.
“They’ve heard what God is doing amongst us, this remnant movement,” she said.
The denomination remains to be being formed, in keeping with Franks, and the renewal of Methodism is just beginning to take hold. But if they give the impression of being now, the Mt. Vernon congregation can just catch sight of the good work God is doing. Franks compared it to the experience of the disciples who saw Jesus transfigured on a mountaintop.
“This is a preview, a sneak peak, a glimmer of what God goes to meet,” she said. “It’s a glimpse of God’s glory. A glimpse of what grace really is.”
Back within the choir on the piano side of the stage, June Fulton believed this. She thought it felt right. So that is what it’s like, she thought. She couldn’t wait to see more of the brand new life this renewal would bring to the Methodist congregation she has belonged to since she was born.
“We really don’t know all of the ins and outs of what’s going to occur,” Fulton told CT. “But we’re united again, and I hope we are going to grow. We are wanting to construct a latest fellowship hall and in fact we’re wanting to succeed in out into the community. We’ll should see what’s going to occur—however it’s exciting.”
