4 Cy-Fair churches vote to break away from

At least four UMC congregations in the Cy-Fair area have voted to leave the influential denomination. Image: Edwin Andrade|Unsplash

At least four Cy-Fair area churches have voted to break away from the United Methodist Church fold over disagreements with how the leadership handles fundamental church teachings.

A report by Community Impact says the four churches have met the required two-thirds vote of their members to leave the UMC.

Cy-Fair Churches Vote To Disaffiliate from UMC

The Community Impact report said several UMC congregations in the area have finally thrown the towel in desperation over the ongoing rift between the denomination's progressive and traditionalist factions.

The report said Cornerstone Methodist Church, Cypress United Methodist Church, Lakewood United Methodist Church, and Good Shepherd Methodist Church had passed their respective votes to leave the UMC.

They are set to transfer to the Global Methodist Church, the breakaway group that launched in May 2022. The Rev. Walter Fenton, an Elder from New Jersey, serves as the GMC's Transitional Leadership Council Secretary.

Meanwhile, The Foundry Church opted to leave the UMC to join a different group instead.

"The United Methodist Church is theologically very broad, and over the years it's become more and more broad theologically. It's so large now that orthodox Christian faith is becoming less and less a prevailing voice within the United Methodist Church," Community Impact quoted Heather Sims saying.

Simms is the lead pastor at Cornerstone Methodist Church.

The news outlet disclosed that an overwhelming 82% majority of her church voted to leave the UMC and jump ship to GMC. The pastor explained that GMC maintains similar core beliefs as UMC but without the restrictive bureaucracy that UMC has, thus allowing for more wiggle room for member churches.

The UMC's Annual Texas Conference requires a two-thirds majority vote of any UMC congregation for a move to separate from the UMC to become valid. The report said the same voting number is needed if the vote is for the congregation to remain with the United States' largest Protestant denomination.

Reasons for Leaving the UMC

The same report said local UMC leaders point to the UMC leadership's failure to make its clergy accountable for adhering to long-held Methodist tenets.

One example was the election in 2016 of Karen Oliveto, the UMC's first openly lesbian bishop, to hold the position.

The report noted that the UMC website mentions a debate about its position on homosexuality as early as four years after its founding.

"Elsewhere in its Book of Discipline, The United Methodist Church bans the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals," and it forbids the performance of same-gender unions in the denomination's sanctuaries and by its clergy in any setting," an article in the UMC website says.

The Foundry UMC's lead pastor Ray Hughes explained that UMC's laws clearly state that no practicing homosexuals should hold clergy positions.

"What we're talking about here is not just fundamentally can we disagree doctrinally, but this is a breakdown of discipline. If we agree as a church that there are certain ways of life and certain things that we believe, then when people disagree with those... at a high level, they should not be in church leadership or they should be disciplined," Hughes emphatically explained in a Sept. 18, 2022, YouTube clip.