On Tuesday, a conference within the UMC, the United Methodist Church in the Ivory Coast, voted to cut ties with the U.S.-based United Methodist Church – or what's left of it – over liberal orthodoxy that permits open homosexuality in the pulpit.
That vote from Africa comes after UMC delegates convened in early May and cast a lopsided vote, 692-51, to strip a rule about “practicing homosexuals” from the Book of Discipline.
During that General Conference, African delegates were among the outnumbered minority who warned liberal brethren they were choosing the culture and sin over the Bible.
“Today we have a majority General Conference, characterized by liberals and progressives, who are doing everything to change the Bible to something else,” Jerry Kulah, a UMC delegate from Liberia, warned fellow delegates while holding up a Bible.
Mark Tooley, of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, tells AFN the Ivory Coast conference has 1.2 million members which makes it the largest single conference in the UMC.
Tooley, himself a UMC member, says there are another 4 to 7 million United Methodists on the African continent, where the vast majority of them theologically conservative.
Going back decades, Tooley and the IRD have documented how the slow rot of liberal orthodoxy has divided and decimated the United Methodist denomination. The roots of the UMC denomination can be traced back to 1968, when it affirmed women as clergy. The first openly lesbian bishop, Karen Oliveto, came out in 2019.
Over the last several years 7,700 U.S. congregations have left the UMC over its new sexual theology, taking with them about one and a half million church members who refused to follow progressive Christianity.
“As the sexual agenda of the U.S. church becomes more and more pronounced, it will be almost politically impossible for the Africans to stay in the United Methodist Church,” Tooley predicts. “Ultimately, nearly all of Africa is going to depart.”
That decision will be a “bumpy” one for many UMC congregations in Africa, he adds, because they are losing the denomination's financial security if they leave.
Ivory Coast, a former French colony known as "Côte d'Ivoire," is home to 28 million. Approximately 40% of the country's population lives in poverty.
