Divided Faith: The Methodist Schism and its Impact on West Texas Churches
By: Nate Ziegner, nziegner@ttu.edu
The dominance of religion in West Texas is no secret.
The region lies within within the nation’s“Bible Belt.”
But, even as the majority of residents declare themselves Christians, strife over what that means has led the faithful to branch out into different denominations.
According to Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, 67% of adults in Texas identified as Christians in 2023-24. Among that group, 27% consider themselves evangelical Protestant.
Evangelical Protestantism is a movement of Christianity that consists of the more well-known denominations.
Around 37% consider themselves Baptist, 26% are non-denominational and about 15% are Pentecostal.
Methodists are a much smaller group by comparison, representing less than 4% of the total, and they are further split into the Global Methodist Church (GMC), which disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church (UMC).
The split stemmed from positions that members of the congregation took regarding social issues, particularly toward the LGBTQ+ community.
According to the “2024 Book of Doctrines and Discipline,” the Global Methodist Church’s guidebook, followers recognize Christian Marriage as being between one man and one woman. By contrast, the United Methodist Church “2024 Book of Discipline” affirms the marriages of “an adult man and woman of consenting age or two adult persons of consenting age.”
Shera Atkinson, pastor of spiritual formation and congregational care at First United Methodist Church of Lubbock (FUMC Lubbock), said the split had been nearly 30 years in the making.
FUMC Lubbock is part of the NorthWest Texas Conference, comprising 36 churches. It is one of the larger UMC churches in the region.
According to the website of the West Plains Conference of the GMC, there are more than 160 disaffiliated churches across the Texas Panhandle and a small area of Eastern New Mexico and Northern Oklahoma.
The churches are more prominent in rural areas of West Texas, where the majority of towns have only one Methodist church and much smaller congregations.
But taken together, the Global Methodist Church has four times the number of members as the UMC in the region.
Panhandle’s Texas’ First Methodist Church (FMC Panhandle) is one of those smaller churches that opted to move to the GMC when the disaffiliation was proposed.
Robyn Thomas, FMC Panhandle's administrative assistant, remembers the initial introduction to the disaffiliation by the pastor at the time.
“After our pastor came back from the Charge Conference in Lubbock, he was excited and ready to switch to the GMC,” Thomas said. “Following town halls where he presented information, the entire congregation came together and voted to disaffiliate almost unanimously.”
The process of disaffiliation by vote and information town halls was consistent across Methodist churches in the region.
“Our job was to present all aspects of the issue,” said Atkinson, who helped officiate the disaffiliation. “One pastor would give reasons to disaffiliate. One would present reasons to stay, and my job was to be the neutral party.”
Atkinson recounted around 40 to 50 people in each of the town halls and said it turned contentious at times with strong feelings from some members on why the church should leave.
Ultimately, FUMC Lubbock’s membership voted to stay, with around two-thirds of the church in favor, Atkinson said. Today, the church houses around 2,500 members.
But for FMC Panhandle, contentious issues didn’t subside once the split was affirmed, Thomas said.
Thomas said the then-pastor presented the GMC as an entirely positive thing, but in reality, members didn’t fully understand what they were getting into.
“Once we officially moved over, we saw members leaving,” Thomas said. “There are two other churches that present competition, and members were having issues with the new workings of our conference and the pastor.”
In stark contrast to FUMC Lubbock’s congregation, FMC Panhandle’s congregation fell from around 80 members to around 30 because of disputes between members in the aftermath of the split.
One of those major disputes was the dissolution of church committees, Thomas said, “People who felt they had put their entire lives toward serving the church and being committee members for years thought, ‘I’m not needed,’” Thomas said. “There were a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of misinformation.”
Thomas now serves as the only staff member at FMC Panhandle, as congregants ultimately fired the pastor who led the disaffiliation in July 2024. Since, an interim pastor has served but no solid leader has been found.
This puts the church's future at risk as congregations of all denominations struggle to maintain membership by young people.
For both UMC and GMC churches, the largest percent of their congregation are 65 and older. For UMC the 65 and older crowd amounts to 47%. For GMC it’s a point higher at 48%..
