Earlier this year, the Rio Texas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church filed suit against about 40 churches in its area because they were refusing to engage the disaffiliation process in earnest, insisting on negotiating with conference officials instead. The legal filing can be found here. The long and short of this particular case is that Rio Texas is asking for a 1) declaratory judgment that the defendants must comply with ¶2553 and 2) an order that defendants pay $1 million in monetary relief. Since the conference filed, over a dozen of those original forty dropped out and decided to pay what was asked, joining almost a quarter of the total churches that were to disaffiliate from that conference.
If you would like a primer on this area of American law, I have interviewed an attorney, Lloyd Lunceford, who explains the issues well.
Latest Conference Stats
At the close of 2021, Rio Texas had 339 churches. They have now lost around a quarter of their churches, including two of their three largest. Bethany UMC, now the largest, recently held a disaffiliation vote, closely failing to reach the 2/3 margin required to cut ties with the UMC. After such a close vote, with a clear majority wanting to leave, it is unlikely that the church will continue to do well.
Rio Texas is the 28th largest conference out of 56 in America by attendance at the close of 2021. When you look at by the number of churches that they have in their conference they are 41st. This is a conference that has really been having a hard time. They are looking at losing a lot of money and a lot of churches. They seem to be doing their best to put up a strong front. To my mind, though, this posturing is not only ethically problematic, but could also come at a legal cost.
Background: The Era of Bishop James Dorff
Rio Texas was, once upon a time, actually two annual conferences. Southwest Texas was combined with the Rio Grande Annual Conference, which was something like the Central Jurisdiction. If you remember your history, that used to be a jurisdiction just for black people in The Methodist Church denomination before it merged to become The United Methodist Church. The Rio Grande Conference of the UMC was just for Hispanic people, but it was financially insolvent.
Their first bishop was James Dorff, who happens to have been an Oklahoman by birth. He had been elected a bishop in 2008 and appointed to directly follow Joel Martinez, who had been serving both conferences separately. Dorff also served these two conferences separately at first, and then in 2012 they were combined. At that point, they appointed him to the new Rio Texas Conference for a final quadrennium.
Prior to the uniting of the two previous conferences, the Southwest Texas director of camping ministries came to be in the crosshairs of liberal leadership. A good deal of public character assassination took place against him before it was decided that the conference merger would no longer need him for such a position. This had obvious implications for future youth leadership in the conference. Many noticed that Bishop Dorff seems to have been unable to correct bad behavior during this debacle.
In 2007, the liberal-conservative divide began to grow much more hostile.
The conference had, until then, had some kind of detente where they maintained a sense of decorum in the annual conference, but over time it became clear to conservatives that liberals were organized, and that they were making far more gains than they should really make in a conservative area like that. So conservatives started to organize, as well. Conservative leadership was of the mind that liberals were almost certainly organizing behind closed doors, so they concluded to do the same, but without secrecy.
The traditionalist caucus started passing around questionnaires to people that were nominees for becoming conference delegates, asking where they stood on different issues. The liberal leadership at the time told their people not to participate at all, so the only delegates that responded were conservative. Whenever the pamphlets got circulated with information on delegates and where they stood according to their own words, Bishop Dorff was compelled to kind of disown it on the floor of annual conference. Things kind of heated up after that.
Bishop Dorff was unfortunately not the man for the job in this time of rising tensions. There is some reason to believe that he was compromised in his leadership abilities in that annual conference. There were many times when he should have led with a firm hand and defended the Book of Discipline but chose not to. For instance, Trinity UMC in Austin did not want to obey the sexual ethics of the UMC’s Book of Discipline. Instead of forcing compliance or compelling them to disaffiliate, the church was allowed to become a federated church with the Consultation on Church Union, still benefiting in myriad ways through their connection with the UMC while no longer paying any apportionments and being able to upend Christian sexual ethics as a federated United Methodist local church.
There was a good deal of progressive activism during his tenure, including that of a person now called M Barclay. I believe she now identifies as non-binary, after divorcing her first female spouse and marrying another. She was trying to go through the ordination process in the Austin District of the Rio Texas Conference as an openly gay person. The Board of Ordained Ministry refused to interview her. She petitioned Bishop Dorff for an intervention, but instead he punted. It got sent all the way up to the Judicial Council, which ruled she was entitled to an interview. The committee finally granted the interview and elected not to approve her for ordination.
I have read an article written by someone from Love Prevails, an activist group, that just indicated that he was kind of their guy, a pushover to the militant social justice warriors. He really didn't take any action against activists in his annual conference.
It could be that he really was with them the whole time, but one of the things that came out about him later was that he had been unfaithful to his wife, reportedly with a subordinate. There was a large payout that was then swept under the rug. Those who asked about it were told that it was confidential. He resigned a few months before his retirement date, either because someone had been threatening to expose him, or because he could no longer bear filling an office of which he was unworthy.
He's not around to answer questions today. He died in 2021, after having been retired for a little more than four years. Sad story.
While it is probably unrelated, it is also reported that the conference treasurer was abruptly fired soon after this. The story is that he was locked out of his office and security personnel were called.
The Immediate Context: The Era of Bishop Robert Schnase
So that's kind of the mess that Bishop Schnase, the current bishop, stepped into in 2016. He has also become the interim bishop for the New Mexico area. According to his bio on the UM Bishops’ website, he has served as a big church pastor, he's served overseas, he's a native Texan, he's a smart guy (evidenced by his membership in the Phi Beta Kappa frat), but one of the big things about him is he's an institutionalist. He has written all these books, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Five Practices of Fruitful Living. He has published a lot of stuff on church growth, health, vitality. These things aren’t inherently bad, but the problem is the man doesn't seem to be very theologically adept, at all.
The reason I say that is I've talked to clergy that served under him, and it seemed to them that he genuinely does not understand conservative faith or a traditional approach to the bible. He is of the mind that issues of sexual immorality are really not important to the faith and that the only reason people in the pews care about it is because some mean clergy got them riled up about it. He doesn't seem to have any notion that the grassroots is actually quite conservative and theologically discerning. For this reason, he seems genuinely confused by the continued resistance to his personal ambivalence about sexual morality.
Violations of Book of Discipline Sexual Ethics in Rio Texas
Jim Calloway, a layman of the conference, sought to file charges against a clergywoman named Barbara Ruth for having performed a gay wedding ceremony. Bishop Schnase told him that charges had already been filed. When asked about the particulars of the case, the bishop responded that it was all confidential. This is something that has been seen around many activists like Drew Ensz in Virginia or Paige Swaim-Pressley and Elizabeth Davidson in Mississippi. In both cases, before faithful clergy could bring complaints, people friendly to the activists filed so that they could easily come to a resolution without any punishment. It is rumored that in this particular case, Barbara Ruth’s husband, Superintendent John Wright, was the one to file the charges.
Today, there are two openly gay clergy appointed to churches in Rio Texas: one serves at St. Mark's UMC in Austin, the other is in a town called Referio. When concerned parties have asked about this clear breach of discipline, the bishop has said that nobody has filed complaints. This is disingenuous because of Calloway’s public treatment. Many have answered that they haven't filed because the bishop has said publicly on multiple occasions that he would hold any charges dealing with sexual morality in abeyance. Why would anyone file charges if the bishop has already said that he would hold them in abeyance? What kind of bishop fails to protect the discipline of his church because nobody has officially filed charges? A bishop can and should file charges directly, as Bishop Sharma Lewis did in Mississippi when two of her clergy performed a wedding for two “nonbinary” people. It is somewhat laughable if someone has the notion that a bishop is responsible for defending the Book of Discipline if he cannot even file charges against a covenant breaker.
In 2019, in the wake of the 2019 Special Called General Conference, at which conservatives were victorious in the adoption of the ‘Traditional Plan,’ a Rio Texas church, Travis Park, began publicly performing gay weddings. They also removed ‘United Methodist’ from their building and documents and stopped paying apportionments. Even so, when they had a $6 million roof collapse issue, they were able to file a claim using the group insurance policy of the conference. It is still reported as one of the Rio Texas Conference’s churches in the the conference’s most recent Journal.
The Particulars of the Current Lawsuit
Bishop Schnase’s demeanor is kindly, but in his videos he seems diminutive and somewhat detached. For instance, consider the video he recorded when he led his conference to file suit against those 40 churches. He sets it up as though he is an impartial advocate for fairness and fiscal responsibility, saying the conference had some really good churches that played ball, even thanking them, and then using that attempted magnanimity to then lob accusations of selfishness on the ones that, according to him, just didn’t want to meet their fiduciary responsibilities. Having just filed suit against them, he portrays them as intractable and belligerent, even though it had been he who had refused to meet with them. He insists he had never wanted to file suit, but it seems pretty clear that he had not sought out other methods for remediation.
His video rightly leads to some questions being asked about the ethics at play. To recite what most of us are already aware of: the disaffiliation season began a little more than a year ago after it was determined that the Protocol for Reconciliation and Grace through Separation was dead in the water. Many United Methodist annual conferences began drafting disaffiliation agreements for those churches that wanted to comply with the provisions of ¶2553 in the Book of Discipline. It immediately became normative for annual conferences to expect that local churches pay two years of apportionments plus unfunded pension liabilities, with many conferences insisting on additional strictures and fees.
Despite these bare bones being easily made the general standard, from conference-to-conference and district-to-district, there was a great deal of discrepancy about the particulars involved. Leaders in Rio Texas noted that district superintendents were conducting themselves very differently, saying opposite things even, around information sessions and church disaffiliation votes. They also couldn’t help but notice how excited many superintendents were to get church leadership to sign the conference disaffiliation agreement immediately after a church vote. Some suspected this was the conference’s effort to establish a trust relationship explicitly with churches for the sake of litigation. Many churches flatly refused to sign.
Unfunded Pension Liabilities & Conference Reserves
The unfunded pension liabilities instantly became an issue. How was it that annual conferences were calculating the unfunded pension liabilities? Wespath Benefits & Investments is where all of the UMC’s pension/retirement money is kept. Supposedly, Wespath had some actuarial tables that showed that things were not funded.
There's some legitimate questioning about if it ever really was unfunded, but if so, how is it that you calculate who pays what? The 40 churches got together and said they didn’t think they owed anything. They did not accept the financials presented to justify such an exit fee. They attempted to reason with the conference treasurer, who turned out to be intractable and eager for litigation.
Prior to disaffiliations season, Rio Texas had three large churches. Two went ahead and disaffiliated. There was a third, Bethany, led by Rev. Tom Deviney. That church was looking very hard at disaffiliation. Deviney was trying to figure out what options there might be, and whether or not any reserves might be used to offset the cost for churches that wanted to disaffiliate. Until lawyers got involved, Rev. Deviney seems to have been the primary negotiator with conference representatives.
There are five annual conferences in Texas. Well, maybe six if you include New Mexico, which includes a good chunk of West Texas. Anyway, the other four annual conferences applied conference funds to ameliorate the cost of disaffiliation for any of their churches that wanted to disaffiliate. Great Plains Conference, among others, completely offset those costs, as I reported a few months ago. There have been others. I am not aware of any comprehensive list of all of the conferences that did this. I got in trouble in Oklahoma because I tried to facilitate a similar financial arrangement.
Whenever Southwest Texas and Rio Grande annual conferences combined, there was a fund of somewhere between seven and nine million dollars that could have supposedly been used for this purpose. Rev. Tom Deviney wanted to suss out how some of those funds might similarly be applied to Rio Texas churches.
This was not a conversation that the conference treasurer, Kendall Waller, was willing to have. Waller and Deviney went back and forth, Deviney finally saying something to the effect of, ‘Look, if you're not willing to talk about applying some of these undesignated conference funds to the balance, if you're not willing to talk about negotiating this down, then there's going to come a point where lawyers get involved and we don't want that."
Waller's response was something to the effect of, ‘Bring it on.’
Admitting Hypocrisy
In the midst of the back and forth between Deviney and Waller, Deviney found it somewhat bothersome that the bishop was so firm on abiding by the letter of ¶2553, when he had so flatly and publicly refused to abide by the clear meaning of ¶362, which makes clear that sexual sin is not to be tolerated among clergy. Waller, without hedging, in writing, acknowledged that it was the bishop’s intention to uphold some parts of the Book of Discipline, to the exclusion of others.
Willingness to Negotiate
Something that might also be the source of some confusion in all this mix is something I believe Deviney said in these negotiations. It was something to the effect that there wasn’t any point in meeting with conference officials if they were not willing to budge on anything regarding disaffiliation costs. I suspect this is the reason that the bishop has said on camera that the churches were not willing to listen to reason. The reality is that the churches sought to reason with Bishop Schnase and conference officials, but that the conference was not willing. Yet because of what the representatives of the defendants said before legal filings, the conference can obliquely argue that they were unwilling to talk.
Alongside the bishop’s video when the conference filed against those churches, the conference’s chair of its board of trustees, Kevin Reed, also made a video that is a helpful tool for navigating some additional issues. We can see here some mischaracterization of how the litigious situation came to be. He alleges that multiple lawyers went to the defendant churches and solicited them. The reality is that one lawyer was hired within a proactive church. These churches were already trying to intercede, but it wasn't going well, so they appealed to one lawyer. The directionality of that was misrepresented. One cannot help but notice that he and the bishop both seem to pretty significantly represent what took place.
A letter written by Rev. Forrest Deviney (Tom’s son) to his own church, Asbury Church in Corpus Christi, explaining the disagreement with the conference reads: “[We] strongly disagree with the required payments being demanded by the conference. In addition to demanding that we pay apportionments an extra year, through June 2024, the conference is demanding that we pay for unfunded pension liabilities which do not seem to exist. In making these demands, the conference has refused to consider the nearly $5 million in pensions reserves in a designated fund-a fund which Asbury, like all churches in the Rio Texas Conference, has contributed to.
“We have been attempting,” he says, “to negotiate a more reasonable payment, but the conference has refused repeatedly to meet or speak with us. Therefore, the conference left us no choice but to retain an attorney.”
Individuals on both sides claim that the other side was not willing to negotiate.
Legal Counsel Hired
Curtis J. Kurhajec is a member of the Dripping Springs church, which is one of the defendants in the suit. He is also a lawyer with Naman, Howell, Smith & Lee. He agreed to represent the churches that were trying to negotiate with the conference. He took over for Rev. Deviney when it became clear things were not going well. I did not get the impression, in inquiring about this process, that these negotiations were any more fruitful than those Deviney solicited. Between Deviney and Kurhajec, there were at least four formal meetings with Mr. Waller, the conference treasurer. While they asked more than once to meet with the bishop directly, this prospect never seemed to be anywhere close to a reality. There is some serious question about if the bishop ever even knew about these churches before the treasurer or the chair of the trustees decided that legal action was needed.
When the conference got clear that they wanted to file suit, they hired James Kimbell of Clark Hill PLC. This is a globally-ranked, huge law firm, with offices in dozens of major cities across the world. Similarly, in Oklahoma, when the annual conference was being represented in court, they hired the biggest, richest law firm in the state to represent them. In April, the conference treasurer asked Kurhajec for a list of the 40 names of churches that he was representing. Those churches, except for at least one, were then served with legal notices the following month, notifying them that the conference was asking the State of Texas to compel them to follow the conference’s disaffiliation process and to pay the $1 million in ‘monetary relief’ to the conference.
Play-by-Play of Court Filings
In short order, around a dozen of the original 40 churches dropped out of negotiations with the conference. They gave in, got out via the conference’s official disaffiliation process, and are now already gone. There are now 27 left. Of those, 26 are at least going along with the legal process. The one that isn’t responding to discovery requests at this point hasn't been legally served yet. It has just been an oversight, I’m sure, but they are refusing to comply until things have been done correctly.
The churches that chose to remain and make their plea in court filed for a change of venue. The court considered their filing on November 13 and denied their request. Meanwhile, the conference has filed for discovery, which is a process in which they compel the defendants to answer questions and submit documentation, including private correspondences. Now that the change of venue has been denied, the defendants are now similarly going to file for discovery against the conference, which is legally obliged to reply if they want to continue their filing.
The defendants are trying to schedule a court date for a motion to dismiss that they have filed, but the conference’s counsel is suddenly very hard to schedule with. The conference is trying to punt until 2024. In the meantime, they have asked for mediation, to which the defendant churches have agreed. It is worth remembering that mediation is not arbitration. Mediation is optional and can be ended by either side at any time. The defendants are approaching the negotiation table again, but it remains to be seen if the conference can offer much to dissuade them from pursuing this case to its end point. As of the publishing of this article (mid-December 2023), this is where things stand.
My Legal & Ethical Analysis
The main motion of the Rio Texas Conference is roughly the inverse of what happened in Oklahoma, where two of our churches were trying to get the annual conference to follow the provisions of ¶2553. Plaintiff representation argued that the Book of Discipline, or at least the part dealing with property (which ¶2553 is nested within), is a legal contractual document which can be interpreted by the State by neutral principles. In the Rio Texas case, the conference is actually making the exact same case.
Discovery & Financial Factors
In Texas, once a legal party submits answers to discovery questions, their responses can be made public. This was not the case in Georgia when Mt. Bethel was able to see correspondences from the North Georgia Conference. While they uncovered a good deal of impropriety and misbehavior, they could not legally share what was uncovered, thus maintaining the public image of the conference. This would not be the case in Texas. In Texas, the defendants can share what they learn.
In the discovery process, on top of professional correspondences, they are also able to get financial reports. This could be a good thing for the defense, as very few annual conferences have been monetarily responsible. There have been some, I’m sure, but I am pessimistic about there being many. Bloated bureaucracies have a certain entitled worldview around money. Oklahoma Conference, where I once served, was not financially responsible or transparent. There were a couple years in which they couldn’t pass an audit. Monthly reconciliations weren’t being done for a long time. When conference leadership eventually tried to reconstruct a line item budget, they could not figure out how much money was left in different designated funds or reserves. When these sorts of things become known by people more broadly, it has a way of souring a financial relationship (as it should). It is very possible that similar affairs have transpired in the Rio Texas Conference.
In Oklahoma, the conference has had a sort of de facto victory over the churches that filed against them because they were able to exhaust and demoralize the individual churches. First Church OKC and Church of the Servant did not have a large war chest for legal filings, and there were a lot more parties inside the churches who were not at all interested in contending in court. In Rio Texas, the situation is very different, as these churches have the willpower and resources to fight. This could have huge implications because, if they do appeal this up to a larger level, then it could potentially set a new precedent, new jurisprudence, which could have implications for other churches that just want to walk out the door.
At this point, the only money that the defendant churches are willing to pay is just a prorated share of the apportionments from when they were still a part of the denomination. They are almost certainly not willing to pay any unfunded pension liabilities or any additional apportionments. They at a place where negotiation just isn't going to happen.
The defendants do not seem intimidated by the litigation of the conference at all. Talking to Rev. Thornton, it sounds like the remaining 27 are of one mind that they stand in a good position. Even if for some reason the state does not side with them, they are in this for the long haul. They have the money, they have the resolve, they are not going anywhere. They plan to appeal this on up the different levels of legal structure in America.
The annual conference at this point is probably sweating because they've already likely spent over $200,000 on their legal representation, and the end isn't anywhere in sight. That's money that the conference probably don't get back. If they're not going to get any money from these other churches, then they are blowing all this time and energy on stuff that would be better spent on other affairs.
Is The Book of Discipline a Religious Document, Civil Contract, or Both?
The Oklahoma Supreme Court refused to interfere because the Oklahoma Annual Conference argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that the Book of Discipline is a religious contract, and the state court can't get involved in religious matters whatsoever. The plaintiffs in the Oklahoma case, of course, argued that the section of the Book of Discipline in question was not religious in nature and thus able to be applied and enforce by the state using ‘neutral principles.’
In this particular case in Texas, though, the conference and the churches are making the opposite case as that made by their respective parties in Oklahoma. The annual conference is saying that the State of Texas can just use neutral principles, make the churches obey ¶2553. Meanwhile, the defendant churches that the conference filed against are arguing that it's a religious document. The precedent the defense is citing is in some ‘Masterson’ case that I have not read, but that's what they're hanging their hats on.
In Oklahoma, the State determined that the court just can't get involved in church matters because the whole of the Book of Discipline is a religious document. If that is the case, then what is to stop churches from just leaving and not paying anything? The only document in place to keep them from doing so is the Book of Discipline, and the state has already determined that it can't rule on anything pertaining to that. To my knowledge, this hasn't been tried yet. Every church that has kind of postured in this direction has gotten threatenings from the annual conference, and they've chosen to play ball and pay a little bit of money.
The reality is that Texas is not likely to enforce a trust unless it is in the actual deed and agreed to by the local church, which does not seem particularly likely in these cases. The Bishop said three times that these churches were violating ‘church law.’ The conference’s lawyers probably aren’t happy he said that, as the language itself demarcates this as a religious, not civil, issue.
The metaphorical UMC emperor has no clothes and there are so many people who don't even know it. The only way they're going to see it is when people share what they know. I believe there is a way to do that without being nasty or hateful.
Defendants Already Out The Door
The final piece of this mosaic that just blew my mind was these 27 churches and their pastors are now affiliated with the Global Methodist Church. I had thought there was a GMC policy that until a church was clear of its annual conference, it couldn't join the GMC. But Leah Hidde-Gregory, President Pro Tempore of the Mid-Texas Conference, has already received their churches into membership.
Was it Wrong for Defendant Churches to Refuse to Pay?
Rio Texas did ask for the bare minimum funds stipulated by ¶2553, but the thing is that in Texas, the law is different, and these churches were in a different position. There are a lot of people that are going to look at this kind of unsympathetically, and say something to the effect of, ‘The conference really didn't ask that much money of them and they could have easily paid it. Why didn't they?’
One would be good to remember that the ethics of this was never resolved. People did not get clear on the ethics of this whole situation; they simply got practical. The majority concluded that litigation was not the ideal way to go, and that it was better simply to bend to the will of conference authorities.
Yet all the way along, I have been very consistent in arguing that it is not right for conferences to coerce churches into paying money if they are to leave. If a conference wants to have a conversation about what is rightly owed and let churches decide what to pay, great, do that. But if a conference wants to stand between a church and its exit and refuse to let them go unless money is paid, well, that is a bad position to be in. That is a morally reprehensible position to be in, and these churches know it. There are indeed so many churches and other annual conferences that would love to be able to pay a reasonable amount money and go.
So, as you're looking at California-Pacific Annual Conference and the gouging that has gone on there, or you look at Eastern Pennsylvania and the huge funds they had to pay to get loose, or Baltimore-Washington…all of those, I'm sure there are a lot of conservative churches there that would go, man, if only we could have gotten the provisions of Rio Texas, we would have loved to exit. Yet it is wrong to determine that the now-27 defendant churches are somehow entitled or spoiled to insist on better conditions than is thinkable in other conferences.
If there is something fundamentally wrong with the ethical position of the denomination (and I believe there is), and these churches are in a position to do something about it, as these churches in Texas are, then I would actually say it's morally incumbent upon them to advance the cause legally. Hypothetically, if it turns out the annual conferences actually don't have teeth and churches can walk away anytime that they want, then clarifying this right in a state or federal court would do a huge amount of good.
The question is, are they going to flinch?
If the conference flinches and they let these churches go, then they prevent this going up the chain and changing American jurisprudence. If they don't flinch and the case goes all the way up to a federal court, the conference, and maybe the denomination, could lose a lot more.
Making any prognostications about what is going to transpire would require so much more expertise than I have, dealing with the letter of state and federal law, the personalities and ideologies at play, how much influence money has, and any number of additional factors that are above my pay grade. I am not sure about these things at all. The sure ground on which I stand is that I am sure that if churches want to leave, they should be able to leave. That's where it gets very black and white for me.
Surely people have said and done unfortunate things on both sides. Even so, there is firm ethical ground on which one can stand if the blind loyalty to parties can be ameliorated. I wish that weren’t such an unrealistic thing to expect.
This is just an intractable issue. Conference leadership seems to speak out of both sides of their mouthes. Both Schnase and Reed in their public videos neglect to acknowledge very important parts of the case.
Reflection on The United Methodist Culture/Problem
It seems that there are institutional forces that have really compromised the integrity of individuals in leadership. My own former bishop was known as a solid conservative before he was consecrated as a bishop. Something happened after that. Schnase seems like a solid guy on a personal level, but theologically just doesn't seem to understand what this is all about. If these institutional forces were not so powerfully at work, I think he and many others would have the good sense to know that what is happening is wrong.
The tragedy of all this is that the United Methodist Church was uniquely positioned to advance the cause of Christ in America. As an organization, it has so much muscle, so much potential that could have been used to mobilize for scriptural holiness across the land. Yet it got compromised and co-opted decades ago by far-left entities that gaslighted critics part of the time, were militant against traditionalists a lot of the time, and flatly refused to do their jobs a lot of the time. It has been a combination of things that conservatives have tried to faithfully engage over these decades. It was because traditionalists did not understand the powers with which they were reckoning that they were finally compelled by conscience to leave the very institution they built.
The churches left behind now are mostly small to middle churches. There are not many big ones left. Rio Texas is like a lot of conferences: those churches that have much size or ability to do forward thinking have gotten out, so it remains to be seen if many conferences can stay afloat without radical restructuring. Most are almost certainly going to have to combine with other conferences.
Exhortation to Prayer
In your prayers for Rio Texas, I think it is important to pray for the bishop and conference staff, that they repent of their worldliness and release churches that want to leave without any extortion. Pray for the leadership of the defendant churches, that they maintain their righteousness. Pray for The United Methodist Church as a whole, that voices aimed at war would be silenced, and that peace and graciousness would prevail.
Rio Texas Conference - Lawsuit Update & Final Disaffiliations