'The birth of a movement': Area churches join Global Methodist conference as it launches

LUBBOCK — For the first time, hundreds of clergy and laypeople from dozens of churches in West Texas gathered Friday and Saturday as Global Methodists, ushering in a new era for Methodism in the region after leaving the United Methodist Church last year.

The West Plains Provisional Annual Conference of the Global Methodist Church officially launched at its convening gathering over the weekend, just the second regional conference in the fledgling denomination to do so. The Waco-based Mid-Texas Conference convened the prior week.

"Now, if you thought you were here for the launch of a new denomination, I'm sorry to disappoint you," Lyndol Loyd, lead pastor of LakeRidge Methodist Church said as he welcomed those gathered at his church. "You are here for the birth of a movement — a movement of the Holy Spirit."

Unlike the previous two gatherings of many of these same people, this weekend's meetings were brimming with an attitude of hope and opportunity. When these folks last gathered as the Northwest Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in December 2022, they were finalizing their departure from that conference and denomination.

Under a process adopted last June, an individual church can opt to disaffiliate by a 2/3 vote of its professing members in a churchwide meeting. The UMC conference must allow the church to disaffiliate by a simple majority vote at an annual conference session.

Of the about 200 churches in the UMC's Northwest Texas Conference, 145 — close to 75% — voted to disaffiliate from the UMC last year amid a schism arising mostly out of disagreements over gay marriage and sexuality, according to previous reporting.

Most of those 145 Northwest Texas Conference churches that left the UMC opted to join the GMC West Plains Conference, which geographically stretches from the top of the Panhandle down into the Big Country.

It was the leaders of these churches who gathered at LakeRidge this weekend to launch the new conference, which will be led by Bishop Mark Webb. During the gathering, the Global Methodist mission statement was repeated time and again: "To make disciples of Jesus Christ who worship passionately, love extravagantly and witness boldly."

Jessica LaGrone, a pastor, author and professor who serves as dean of the chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and is part of the GMC's Transitional Leadership Council, spoke Friday afternoon to welcome those gathered to the new denomination. LaGrone said she hopes this opportunity for a fresh start will revive what it means to be Methodist, hearkening back to the movement's 18th-century founders, John and Charles Wesley, who sought revival in their Church of England.

"We love Jesus, we love his church, and we believe that God isn't done with the people called Methodists, and that the best years of the Christian movement began by the Wesleys are still, in fact, ahead of us," LaGrone said.

"The challenges of the Wesleys in their day included watching the church that they love become sicker and sicker, all the while having within reach the very thing that would offer help and hope," she said. "Their longing was not to offer some new invention of doctrine, but to bring out that the old treatment that Christ had offered on the cross, the one that the church had seemingly forgotten they had available to give.

"And I believe that when our history is written and told, the same will be said of the church in our day."