Lay and clergy representatives of the Global Methodist Church (GMC) spent a busy week in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the newly created denomination’s second General Conference.
Delegates to the General Conference of the Global Methodist Church worship together in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Priorities included electing eight new bishops to replace the interim episcopal structure established at the 2024 Convening General Conference, adopting Articles of Faith, considering 451 petitions on various topics, approving an “ecumenical covenant” with the Korean Methodist Church, hosting an evening celebration of African culture, participating in local service projects and holding prayer and worship services.
“The spiritual DNA we hope to carry forward into the next six years is exactly what we experienced in Johannesburg — a culture of high trust, high transparency, a high view of scripture, a firm theological foundation, and a revived commitment to making disciples of Jesus Christ and spreading scriptural holiness across the globe,” wrote the newly elected Assembly of Bishops in a Sept. 5 press release.
The GMC formed in 2022 as a traditionalist offshoot of the United Methodist Church (UMC). While the GMC remains significantly smaller than the UMC, growth has been rapid. According to the GMC website, when the denomination launched on May 1, 2022, it consisted of “approximately two dozen local churches in the Bulgaria Provisional Annual Conference, and a newly forming church plant in the Philippines.”
Since its 2024 conference, the church has grown from 36 to 55 Annual Conferences, and from 4,700 congregations to 7,252. A GMC spokesperson told MinistryWatch she was “unable to pull membership numbers,” so it is unclear how many individual members those churches represent. The UMC, officially created in 1968, says it has more than 11 million members across more than 40,000 churches worldwide.
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One of its biggest priorities was to elect eight bishops who will make up the denomination’s Assembly of Bishops. These “general superintendents of the Church” — who represent the GMC’s eight episcopal areas — were consecrated on the last day of the conference and will serve from 2026-2032.
Delegates at the annual conference also adopted the denomination’s Articles of Faith, which “articulate clearly what it believes about God, Scripture, humanity, salvation, the Church, the sacraments and the Christian life — and to do so in a way faithful to the historic Christian faith and the Wesleyan tradition while speaking clearly to a worldwide Church.”
Along with its Articles of Faith, the GMC will release a record of adopted legislation and other official actions following a final review and certification, according to its press release.
Clergy gather for the selection of eight new GMC bishops to serve leadership terms from 2026 to 2032.
Global membership and outreach are points of emphasis for the GMC, which notes that the majority of its Annual Conferences are outside the United States. Of the 7,252 GMC churches, 4,342 are in the United States, 2,000 are in Africa and 679 are in Asia, with much smaller numbers spread across the Philippines, Europe, Eurasia and Latin America. The Sept. 5 press release says the GMC seeks to be defined “not by any one nation, language or culture, but by the shared Wesleyan conviction that God calls His people to holiness of heart and life and sends them into the world for the sake of the Gospel.”
What Differentiates the GMC from the UMC?
The GMC is more theologically and socially conservative than the UMC. At the 2024 General Conference, the UMC voted to allow clergy to be in same-sex relationships, perform (or decline to perform) same-sex wedding ceremonies, and remove a requirement for celibacy in singleness — a 1984 addition to the Book of Discipline that was directed at candidates for ministry who identified as LGBTQ.
The GMC’s Book of Doctrine and Discipline defines marriage as the “legal and spiritual covenant of a loving and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman.” Dissenting views on sexuality was a major component of the 2022 split that gave rise to the GMC.
On other contentious social and doctrinal issues, the distinctions are not always as clear. Both the UMC and GMC ordain women, and the GMC website states that women “are entitled to serve at all levels of the Global Methodist Church.” Both churches discourage abortion. The UMC says it is “reluctant to condone abortion” but believes that “tragic conflicts of life with life may justify decisions to terminate the life of a fetus.” The GMC uses similar language in the Book of Doctrine and Discipline, which says “[t]he sacredness of all life compels us to resist the practice of abortion except in the cases of tragic conflicts of life against life when the well-being of the mother and the child are at stake.”
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