Texas Supreme Court to decide if Southern Methodist U. can break from the United Methodist Church
The Texas college wants to cut ties with the religious denomination that founded it
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The Texas Supreme Court will soon hear a case that decides the fate of a religious school when the religion itself is breaking apart at the seams.
It involves the United Methodist Church, once the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States with more than 12 million members. Several years ago, they considered splitting up over the question of whether individual UMC churches should be allowed to ordain LGBTQ members as ministers and perform same-sex marriages.
While the majority of UMC churches in the United States supported that kind of a la carte option, many in other parts of the world actively opposed that idea. In 2019, 53% of UMC delegates voted on a plan that basically rejected LGBTQ inclusion for everyone formally affiliated with the church. That meant pro-inclusion churches had to figure out their next steps: Should they accept the new rules and say goodbye to LGBTQ leaders in relationships and those who wanted to perform same-sex unions—along with all those younger people who would never voluntarily join such a bigoted denomination—or make a break and try to run a church with no support from a larger body?
At the same time, after a number of relatively liberal churches said they simply wouldn’t enforce those rules, a bunch of conservative churches vowed to leave if the UMC didn’t enforce their ban.
It was incredible that this issue was the hill on which UMC members chose to die. In fact, of the roughly 30,000 UMC churches across the country that existed in 2019, 7,658 of them—roughly 25% of the UMC—were gone by the end of 2023, likely because of this controversy.
And then, last May, the UMC officially got rid of its ban on gay clergy, reversing that decision from 2019. They also voted during their General Conference to ban any punishments for clergy who performed same-sex ceremonies. There was no debate and it wasn’t even a close vote; those measures were among several items lumped together in a package, and the vote to approve that package was 692-51. The reason it was so lopsided is that a lot of conservative churches had already walked away by then, many of them joining the more openly anti-LGBTQ “Global Methodist Church.”
So that’s where we’re at. The UMC is now technically an LGBTQ-inclusive organization, albeit a shell of what it used to be. Membership now stands at just over 4.2 million people.
Which means if you’re running the UMC, and you’re watching this well run dry, you’re going to do everything you can to hold on to your most valuable assets.
And one of the UMC’s most valuable assets is Southern Methodist University, the Texas-based school founded by the UMC in 1911.
When it was founded, its governing documents said it was to be “forever owned, maintained and controlled” by the UMC and those documents couldn’t be amended without approval from UMC leaders.
In 1996, that relationship was affirmed by SMU when trustees updated the articles of incorporation.
In 2019, when the UMC was considering what to do about those LGBTQ issues, SMU was trying to figure out its own future. It never received much financial support from the UMC and it was worried about how this religious schism might interfere with its own policies and programs, including how they ran the Perkins School of Theology, which was one of the UMC’s 13 seminaries.
(Southern Methodist has non-Christian and non-religious students. They also have non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students. If the UMC was on the verge of taking an anti-LGBTQ turn, which is exactly what they did, SMU didn’t want it impacting students.)
So despite the paperwork from a century ago, school officials voted 34-1 to amend their documents of incorporation to say the school’s board of trustees—not the UMC—had final say over the school’s direction. In other words, they voted to ignore the articles they adopted in 1996.
In response, however, the United Methodist Church’s South Central Jurisdictional Conference (which oversees SMU) sued the school, basically arguing SMU had no right to break free from them and asking the courts to nullify those amendments.
A district judge sided with the school in 2021, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in 2023, writing:
“In this case of first impression, we must determine whether a nonprofit corporation like SMU, whose governing documents provide that it is to be ‘forever owned, maintained and controlled’ by the conference and that no amendments to said articles ‘shall ever be made’ without the conference’s prior approval, can unilaterally amend the articles to remove these provisions and all other references to the conference,” the July 2023 opinion stated.
That means the school, at least for now, is still under the UMC’s control.
The irony is that both groups are now mostly in alignment when it comes to LGBTQ issues, yet they’re now arguing over something completely different: Who controls SMU?
School officials insist that they don’t want the school to break away from its UMC heritage; they just want autonomy and the ability to control their own destiny.
“Through the continuation of our name, Southern Methodist University, the church’s continued relationship with [the Perkins School of Theology], and Methodist representation on the board, the church will continue to be part of the university,” [SMU President R. Gerald Turner] said.
But as for the issue that bedevils his Methodist brethren, Turner was adamant. “We do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. We’ve resolved that issue — we don’t discriminate against anybody. That can’t change.”
That case is now headed to the Texas Supreme Court, with oral arguments set for January 15.
SMU wants a divorce, but they signed up for a covenant marriage with UMC.
The Texas Supreme Court will make them both turn Baptist.