Judge: Court has no say in property fight in Louisiana Methodist church split

Plaintiffs sought an order stopping the Louisiana conference from divesting property to more churches. David Cohn, a Baton Rouge attorney representing the plaintiffs, used First Methodist United Church Shreveport as an example of local churches misusing the exit policy.

The Shreveport congregation is set to vote on disaffiliation April 16. Cohn estimated the Louisiana conference stands to lose more than $50 million in assets if the Shreveport church elects to depart the denomination. He pointed out that the Shreveport church will only have to pay about $765,000 in fees to keep the property.

“What is the duty of the Annual Conference to ensure fairness?” he asked the judge. “When you give somebody the privilege of managing the process, that creates a duty to make sure it’s fair.”

The suit is part of an ongoing schism in the Methodist church playing out in many states across the nation, including Louisiana. There are currently 384 churches and campus ministries in the state’s Annual Conference, which had more than 102,000 congregants at the end of 2022, church officials said Thursday.

So far, 69 Louisiana churches have disaffiliated, according to UMC officials. The denomination expects several more churches to get the requisite two-thirds vote from their congregations by Dec. 31. That’s when the exit policy sunsets.

“It’s been very heartbreaking to be here,” Louisiana Annual Conference Bishop Delores J. Williamston said outside the courtroom after the judge ruled in her favor. “This has been decades of sensitive concerns in our denomination. It’s a 50-year fight.”

The lawsuit, filed March 13 in the 19th JDC, is rooted in the LGBTQ debate.

The General Conference, a worldwide delegation of Methodist churches, meets every four years to set policies for the denomination. They vote on everything from which songs are included in the hymnal to picking relief efforts the UMC will support.

In 2019, the global delegation added paragraph 2553, a new provision to the Book of Discipline, a theological rule book outlining the denomination’s ecclesiastical doctrine. The new clause gave individual member churches the option to remain in the fold or detach from the denomination if they had “reasons of conscience” regarding the UMC’s stance on LGBTQ issues.