United Methodist Church (U.S.)

The United Methodist Church (UMC) is a worldwide Mainline Protestant Christian denomination based in Africa, the Philippines, Europe, and the United States claiming 10 million members, and is a major part of Methodism. In the 19th century, its main predecessor, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was a leader in evangelicalism. The present denomination was founded in 1968 in Dallas by union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and is shaped by the voluntary separation of 25% of the United States churches leading up to the delayed 2020 General Conference held in 2024. The UMC traces its roots back to the revival movement of John and Charles Wesley in England, as well as the Great Awakening in the United States. As such, the church's theological orientation is decidedly Wesleyan. It embraces liturgical worship, holiness, and evangelical elements. According to its Book of Discipline, "The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." The United Methodist Church has a connectional polity, a typical feature of a number of Methodist denominations. It is organized into conferences. The highest level is called the General Conference and is the only organization which may speak officially for the UMC. The church is a member of the World Council of Churches, the World Methodist Council, and other religious associations. Between 1968 and 2022, the UMC's membership has declined from 11 million to 5,424,175 members and 29,746 churches in the United States. As of 2022, it had 9,984,925 members and 39,460 churches worldwide. In 2025, the Pew Research Center estimated that 3 percent of the U.S. population, or approximately 8 million adult adherents, identified with the United Methodist Church, revealing a larger number of adherents than registered members. On January 3, 2020, a group of Methodist leaders proposed a plan to split the United Methodist Church over issues of sexual orientation (particularly ordination of clergy in same-sex marriage) and create a new traditionalist Methodist denomination; the Global Methodist Church was formed in 2022. As of December 30, 2023, the number of UMC churches in the United States that were approved for disaffiliation stood at 7,660. This figure represented approximately one-quarter of the UMC churches in the United States. In May 2024, the United Methodist Church General Conference repealed bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage. In November 2025, the United Methodist Church ratified Worldwide Regionalization, a series of Constitutional Amendments passed at the 2024 General Conference to restructure the UMC designed to give equal autonomy to various regions of the church, renaming former Central (non-US) Conferences to Regional Conferences and the creation of a U.S. Regional Conference on an equal basis, which many United Methodists believe would help decolonize the church and aid global unity.