Like other religious denominations have done in the past decades, the United Methodist Church is undergoing a reformation.
The shift could play out next year at a long-delayed general conference in North Carolina.
In the meantime, United Methodist churches around the country are voting to disaffiliate from the large Protestant denomination over a fundamental approach to human sexuality.
Bishop Karen Oliveto is the leader of the United Methodist Church’s Mountain Sky Conference covering Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Yellowstone Public Radio’s Kay Erickson spoke with Oliveto about the motivation for congregations leaving the denomination.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kay Erickson: Many faiths are undergoing or have undergone reformations in the past decades. Is it fair to say the United Methodist Church is in that process, a debate on how best to be a church that includes all people, a more fundamental approach to inclusivity?
Bishop Karen Oliveto: It’s interesting to see how many in the South, the southeast, south-central areas are disaffiliating and how few in the Northeast, the north-central and the West. I think that there are some different understandings of how we do church. There have been a narrowing I think I some parts of the United Methodist Church in the breadth of theology that we have typically held. And we have seen relatively few disaffiliations in the West. And I think that because we already live with an understanding of the richness that diversity brings to communities.
I think what more at work for us in the West is the ethos of independence. There is the independent spirit in the West, I can do it better on my own, that runs counter to the United Methodist Church [where] no congregation stands alone. We have what’s called the connectional system of polity where we pool our resources, we deploy our pastors so that our churches are part of something bigger than just the community church on the corner.
Are there members of the Mountain Sky Conference that have voted to disaffiliate?
In October we approved the disaffiliation of six congregations, a couple in Wyoming and the rest in Colorado. And most of them are going independent and not joining what’s called the Global Methodist Church, which is really basing their membership on the exclusion of LGBTQ people.
Are there members of the Mountain-Sky Conference that a vote is pending?
So we’ve been giving a window to, actually a church can move towards disaffiliation at any time. But there’s this particular window that was created in 2019 to allow churches to disaffiliate over human sexuality, and specifically over LGBTQ people. And so that window ends in December of [2023]. So we have other churches looking at disaffiliation, the implications for them and their ministry and their community and their witness. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing to ask oneself. Who is God calling us to be? How is God calling us to serve our community? And so we have a few, but it will be interesting. In June we'll (the Mountain Sky Conference) take another vote. So they have their internal process to go through along with some requirements that we have because it’s a legal separation. So it will be interesting to see which churches decide to go through with it. I’m really not sure what that number will be, but I know it will be relatively small.
What does the next year look like for the Church ahead of general conference 2024?
I think especially in other conferences that are seeing massive disaffiliation, it’s going to be, how do we restructure ourselves? Do the systems that we have approved fit now that we are a different organization and that we don’t have the same numbers? So I think it’s going to be a lot of ... I see it as an opportunity because we spent so much time infighting that we not been able to build the structures that enable us to have the outward facing witness and hands on in the world around us.
