Highland Park Methodist Church votes to possible leave United Methodist denomination | Dallas News Live

A big week for Highland Park Methodist Church. Members are considering leaving the Methodist Church. This is one of the largest Methodist churches in the country, richest Methodist churches in the country, and happens to be the church of former President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. Joining me live, faith reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Isabella Vollmer. Isabella, so tell us how we got here first. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This dispute between the local church, Highland Park United Methodist Church, and the regional governing body they're called the Horizon Texas Conference, this all started over a disagreement over Highland Park's language that they had in their internal bylaws and their articles of incorporation with the state, they made some changes back in 2022 now the conference says that those changes were out of line with its policy and it resulted in a lawsuit that the conference filed against the church over the past two months the leaders of Highland Park have said that the bishop in the conference broke trust with the local church they say that trust cannot be repaired and they are encouraging their members to vote to leave the to leave the denomination so what happens this week i know that there's two days of scheduled voting will the decision today cancel a vote tomorrow walk me through that process yes so the church is holding a two-day vote it started yesterday morning and it is actually going to conclude in about an hour The vote will go on until 3 p.m. today. Official members of the church were eligible to vote. It was a vote yes or no on whether to leave the denomination. So we will be awaiting the results of the vote. What's complicated is that the conference has said that their policy, under their policy, this is not a valid vote, essentially. So there's going to be further disagreements after that. I saw a story that one of our reporters did with you, I believe, last week about this. talk about the behind the scenes of it is, I mean, these churches pay a fee basically to the denomination, right? And so if this church leaves being one of the richest churches in United Methodist Church, that could take a hit, right? Absolutely. So Highland Park, like you mentioned earlier, is one of the biggest churches in all of the United Methodist Church, which has locations in churches across the world, not only in the U.S., and it's also a very wealthy church. They contribute um the church has said that in the past four years they've given 12 million dollars to the UMC and its various ministries and organizations every month churches pay in the United Methodist Church what's called an apportionment so um if that's no longer the case that is a that is a big lack of funding from the UMC um so there is a lot on the line and also Highland Park has thousands of members here in North Texas um and and their relationships to to other United Methodists will certainly be impacted by the outcome of this vote as well. Depending on the outcome of this vote, let's say the vote is yes, we want to leave. Could there be a ripple effect with, I know I grew up Baptist and the church that I go to here used to have the Baptist title and now they don't. Are we seeing a trend in different churches that are leaving these larger organizations that they're a part of? That's a good question. Well, so in the United States, there's been a long decline in mainline Protestant denominations of which the United Methodist Church is part of. And this vote here in Dallas comes on the heels of a much larger schism that happened over the past 10 years. From 2019 to 2024, about one-fourth of all United Methodist churches left the denomination over disagreements over gay and lesbian clergy and same-sex marriage. Now during that time Highland Park, they never took a vote to leave, but now they're making this decision. So it's one professor kind of told me that this could be a canary in a coal mine for how mainline churches go in the future. Highland Park, again, they contribute a lot of money to the UMC, but they also do a lot of work in Dallas. They have a lot of members, they have the infrastructure to be independent. So we will see if this will kind of show other churches if this is a way that they can go. And as you mentioned, that vote ending soon. Isabella Lambert, we'll have to see what happens. Faith Reporter for the Dallas Morning News. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.