More than 650,000 churchgoers in the U.S. now call a GMC congregation home, meeting in about 4,500 churches, and the numbers are expected to continue to grow.
Buddy Smith, Vice President Emeritus of American Family Association, is a newly appointed presiding elder of Global Methodist. He says that stands in stark contrast to the UMC, which for the last several decades has been sliding into heresy.
“What happened was the seminaries, all of a sudden, began to teach this so-called progressive or regressive – we might better label it – theology, which basically just means they forgot their Bible. They lost their Bible,” says Smith.
He says that the heresy spread from the seminaries to the denominational leadership to the pulpit and, finally, to the point where there's no going back.
“We've got these lawbreakers in the church that are just ordaining homosexuals. There was no one to reel them in,” Smith states.
A special general conference was held in 2019, after years of internal debate in the UMC, which passed a policy that a congregation could vote on whether or not to leave the church. In 2022, the denomination was officially split. The thousands of congregations that chose to leave formed Global Methodist.
But Smith says it didn't happen without labor pains.
“They said, 'well, okay. You want to leave? We'll let you leave, but you're not leaving without writing a check because we own the property,'" Smith recounts.
Now, Smith says God is doing a work in the GMC.
“There's just a new and a fresh wind of the Holy Spirit blowing through this denomination. I can't begin to tell you the excitement,” says Smith.
Meanwhile, Pew Research shows that the 5.1% of U.S. population being UMC members in 2007 has now dropped to 2.7%, due in part to the church’s split.
Editor's Note: American Family News is a division of American Family Association.
