Attendees stand for singing and prayer at the Wesleyan Covenant Association’s Global Gathering, held at Frazer Memorial United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Photo by Sam Hodges, UM News.

By Sam Hodges —

The Wesleyan Covenant Association met in person and online April 30-May 1, continuing to plan for a new, traditionalist Methodist denomination and passing a resolution criticizing three United Methodist bishops for recent appointment-making decisions.

Many at the WCA’s fifth Global Gathering were clearly excited at the prospect of leaving the big tent of The United Methodist Church for a denomination they say will stress evangelism, scriptural authority, historic Methodist practices and a traditional understanding of marriage as between one man and one woman.

But the meeting, held at Frazer Memorial United Methodist Church in Montgomery, also had an air of frustration. COVID-19 has pushed back to 2022 the United Methodist General Conference at which a proposed separation will be considered.

“I get discouraged at times,” the Rev. Keith Boyette, WCA president, said during his May 1 address. “But I’ve learned God does amazing work while we’re waiting.”

The WCA formed in 2016, and while strongly aligned with older traditionalist groups in The United Methodist Church, such as Good News and the Confessing Movement, it has become the incubator for a planned new denomination recently given the name Global Methodist Church.

Boyette joined a diverse group of church leaders in negotiating the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation, aimed at dealing with decades of division in The United Methodist Church over how accepting to be of homosexuality. Traditionalist churches would, under the proposal, be able to leave with their properties and form their own denomination, getting $25 million to start.

But the protocol was unveiled in January 2020, and General Conference has been rescheduled twice since then due to COVID-19, with the current dates set for Aug. 29-Sept. 6, 2022, in Minneapolis.

To read the entire UMNS report, click HERE

1 Comment

  1. This is; The One Thing Needed!

    A ready team of lawyers are quickly needed to challenge what is going on in some Conferences with outlaw Bishops implicitly aided by a conciliar silence from the rest. Bishops and and their appointed Cabinets now are able to act beyond any restraint.

    What needs to be the FIRST and for now, the TOP priority of WCA, is getting a team of lawyers at the ready to immediately issue legal challenges and ask for stays. This needs to be done in the arenas of both canon and civil law and is imperative. Local churches and pastors simply cannot fight this purge on their own. They are thus being demoralized and destroyed in detail. Rest assured that the Progressives (sic) and the institutionalists have long since counted the votes and are now acting accordingly.

    Assuming the current purge can in fact be restrained and some new denomination does somehow happen, then the entire notion of an Episcopacy ought to be re-imagined. A return to the office of Bishop as found in II Timothy seems in order. The current Gregorian ideas of such an office must be forever abandoned. It is now obvious that power yet corrupts even those who might otherwise have the best intentions. Sinful propensity remains alive and well in us all!

    More and more I believe Voltaire was right in his disdained for Bishops. They are fast showing themselves to be naught but a medieval anachronism of ecclesiastic excess. It would be well to restore the Biblical idea of that office and let the current Gregorian notions of Bishops walk the same lonely road once trod by Kings ,Queens and dinosaurs.

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