The Discipline It Wrote, and What It Left Out

The doctrinal standards are the inherited Methodist ones: the Articles of Religion, the Confession of Faith that came into Methodism through the Evangelical United Brethren, the standard sermons of John Wesley and his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. On the questions that produced the separation the church teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman and that clergy are to be celibate in singleness and faithful in marriage so defined.

The structural choices are where the new church deliberately differs from the old one. It provides for far fewer general agencies and boards, keeping money and decision-making closer to the annual conference and the congregation. It ended the guaranteed appointment, under which an ordained elder in good standing was assured of a pastoral charge, which supporters describe as accountability and which changes the position of clergy considerably. Bishops are elected to terms rather than for life. Local churches hold their own property rather than holding it in trust for the denomination, which removes the mechanism that made the separation itself so complicated.

It ordains women, which was not in dispute in the separation and which distinguishes it from some other traditionalist Methodist bodies. As a denomination assembled within a few years from congregations on several continents, a good deal about its structure and its ministry is still being settled by its own conferences.