CHARLOTTE, N.C. — United Methodists lifted a 40-year ban on gay clergy Wednesday in a major step toward greater LGBTQ+ inclusion in the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination.

The vote to remove the ban was the latest decision by the United Methodist Church's top legislative assembly here this week toward rolling back what many progressive and centrists Methodists view as overly restrictive policies. Other proposals to remove restrictions on same-sex unions and change the disciplinary consequences for dissent are also up for debate.

The UMC General Conference’s decisions are aimed at reversing a series of policies that traditionalists worked for decades to pass and protect. Beyond the legislative implications, the decisions are critical to ushering in a new chapter for the UMC as it moves beyond a splintering in which 7,500-plus U.S. churches left following disputes over church policy and theology, including dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.

As the UMC General Conference voted to lift the ban, a large crowd spontaneously broke out in celebration. Many in the crowd teared up and embraced each other, even across a fence between delegates and observers.

“Today, our Church made the right choice,” Reconciling Ministries Network, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the UMC, said in a statement. “Those who have committed their time, ministries, and lives to the expansion of inclusion are too many to number. Over fifty years of persistent hope.”

For Ohio pastor Rev. Angie Cox, there are immediate and tangible implications with the newly lifted ban on ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy. Cox, a lesbian and married, has sought to take the first step toward UMC ordination, called commissioning, six times in the past five years. Each time, the West Ohio Conference’s board of ordained ministry has rejected her candidacy.

“I know I’m called to ministry and know I’m called to be here,” Cox said in an interview. The decision to remove the ban on LGBTQ+ ordination is “an affirmation of the call by our official policies,” Cox said.

Cox already pastors a church in Columbus, but her inability to receive ordination credentials is both a symbolic gesture against her personhood and a limit on her participation in United Methodist life. For example, she's unable to serve as a clergy delegate in the regional legislative assembly or at the UMC General Conference.

The West Ohio Conference board of ordained ministry could reconsider supporting Cox's commissioning as early as May, potentially positioning her for commissioning in June. Similar to her situation, Cox knows others who have waited to pursue ordination until the UMC removed the ordination ban.

Church delegates take on series of decisions on LGBTQ+ rights

Removing anti-LGBTQ+ restrictions is one of the most high-profile legislative decisions facing this UMC General Conference in Charlotte, a worldwide assembly that typically meets every four years but hasn’t gathered for a regular session in eight years.

The UMC General Conference met for an abbreviated special session in 2019 when delegates narrowly approved a conservative policy plan that strengthened the church's prohibitions on "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from ordination as well as same-sex marriage.

The added policies in that so-called “Traditional Plan” are some of the restrictions that progressives and many centrists are targeting this year — in addition to other major policies the denomination passed in earlier decades.

There are several major categories of LGBTQ+ inclusion-related proposals, called petitions, before the UMC General Conference this week. Those are:

• A prohibition on the use of church funds to “promote the acceptance of homosexuality,” also known as the “funding ban." Two petitions seeking to remove that prohibition received approval Tuesday.
• A ban on and penalties for ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy. The main petition seeking to remove that ban received approval early Wednesday.
• A prohibition against and penalties for UMC clergy or churches that bless same-sex unions. The penalties were removed Wednesday morning and the main petition seeking to remove the prohibition is set for debate later Wednesday or early Thursday.
• A new version of the UMC Revised Social Principles — a set of declarations of United Methodist’s social values — that would supersede a 52-year-old provision calling homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The section of the new revised social principles dealing with human sexuality was set for debate Wednesday afternoon.

These decisions will have other indirect effects, such securing a deeper relationship between the United Methodist and Episcopal churches. The UMC General Conference approved a resolution Tuesday affirming its full communion with the Episcopal Church following years of negotiations between the two mainline denominations — a conversation that previously reached an impasse due to the UMC’s policy positions on LGBTQ+ rights.

Deviation from history of traditionalist wins

Still, some traditionalist groups were critical of the decisions made in Charlotte.

“The General Conference has, as expected, rolled back not just decades of United Methodist policies but centuries of Christian teaching,” Mark Tooley, president of The Institute on Religion & Democracy, a group that long advocated for traditionalist policies in the UMC, said in a statement. “Methodism was built on catholicity and holiness. United Methodism has become something else.”

Traditionalists had successfully backed for decades more conservative policies on sexuality and marriage partly due to a coalition with the growing African delegation to the UMC General Conference, a contingent that is on average more conservative than its U.S. counterparts. But the recent exodus of mostly conservative churches in the U.S. depleted that delegation.

The UMC General Conference also approved proposals called “regionalization,” which aims to restructure the denomination’s system of regional oversight. The plan gives regional United Methodist leadership outside the U.S. more autonomy. For example, while the U.S. church can move in a more LGBTQ-affirming direction, regional bodies outside the U.S. can adopt more traditionalist policies on issues such as marriage and sexuality.

The fight over LGBTQ+ rights in the United Methodist Church has consumed the UMC General Conference at most previous gatherings for decades, but this year it looked drastically different.

Petitions such as removing the funding ban and prohibition on LGBTQ+ clergy received approval with zero debate among the 700-plus delegates, who swiftly passed those items in votes on consent calendars.

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.