WILMORE, Ky. (BP) – Proponents of biblical Christian orthodoxy are no longer welcome in the ‘big tent’ of the United Methodist Church (UMC). That is the message sent by the removal of Asbury Theological Seminary from the UMC’s list of schools approved to train United Methodist clergy.
A UMC news release said the decision came after Asbury affirmed its belief in traditional marriage and objected to the UMC’s 2024 elimination of church teachings against homosexuality.
The 2023 Revival
Some of you may remember the 2023 Asbury University revival, a spontaneous religious event that caught the American mainstream completely off guard. Within forty-eight hours, the highway leading into Wilmore, Kentucky, was backed up for miles. Students were repenting and weeping in the aisles, while others sat in stunned, palpable silence.
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Asbury’s delisting was an attempt “to ensure that United Methodist candidates for ministry are formed in settings clearly aligned with United Methodist teachings, theology, leadership and values,” according to the release. Translation: They must be Woke LGBTQ+ affirming feminist leftoids.
Timothy Tennent, who served as Asbury president from 2009-24, said United Methodist teachings are no longer aligned with Scripture.
“The United Methodist Church left the big tent talking point, and they became much more leftists in their thinking,” Tennent told Baptist Press.
Asbury, a century-old conservative Wesleyan seminary in Wilmore, Ky., announced the disaffiliation in a June 25 news release. The UMC’s stances on sexuality “are not aligned with Asbury Theological Seminary’s institutional ethos and the historic witness of the Christian faith,” current Asbury President David Watson said.
The delisting of Asbury was the latest step in a years-long leftward drift in the UMC. Nearly 8,000 conservative churches left the denomination from 2019-2023, according to the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a group that monitors mainline Protestant denominations. That translates to approximately a quarter of United Methodist congregations.
The disaffiliation with Asbury “proves the United Methodist Church is not going to be as inclusive as it claimed it would be,” IRD President Mark Tooley told BP. “And it confirms that Asbury will be servicing other Wesleyan communities but not the United Methodist Church any longer—even though until relatively recently, it was graduating more United Methodists than any other school.”
Asbury is America’s eighth-largest seminary with a head count of around 1,600 students, according to The Association of Theological Schools. The largest official United Methodist Seminary is Duke Divinity School with 599 students.
Asbury’s absence as an option for United Methodist ordination candidates will leave a notable hole in the UMC’s theological education options for its remaining theological conservatives. But Asbury will continue with a clear conscience.
“For the United Methodist Church to say that Asbury is no longer aligned with ‘Methodist teaching, theology, leadership and values,’” Tennent, Methodist chair of divinity at Beeson, wrote on his blog, “is tantamount to saying that the United Methodist Church is no longer aligned with the teaching, theology, leadership and values of John Wesley.”
This dustup over Asbury has implications beyond Methodism. Every church of every denomination should be prepared, like Asbury did, to articulate a biblical position on human sexuality despite countervailing cultural headwinds. That also goes for us, a denomination who has been hestitant to oppose cultural iniquity and unrighteousness in the public square. Said Tennent,
“The issue of human sexuality is something that spreads across the whole Church,” he said. A “really good theology of the body is essential for every church to have. Very few churches have a well-articulated theology of the body” that resonates with “the average person in the pew.”
Here’s some good advice to anyone whose denomination rejects the biblical view of human sexuality and gender roles: “Find yourself a better denomination.”
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“Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13)