Origin from 2024
On 28 May 2024, at a special session in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, members of the United Methodist Church's Cote d'Ivoire Conference, known locally as EMUCI, voted unanimously to leave the denomination. The conference, one of the United Methodist Church's largest with roughly 700,000 members and about 900 churches and 100 preaching points serving a wider community of nearly a million people, had joined the denomination in 2002. Conference leaders explained their decision at a briefing to local press two days later, pointing to changes the denomination's April 2024 General Conference made to the Book of Discipline, removing longstanding language against homosexuality and broadening the definition of marriage to include same sex couples. Bishop Benjamin Boni told delegates that the United Methodist Church now rested on socio cultural values that had consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity. The conference's departure was not yet final at the time of the vote, with leaders indicating they would work through the practical and legal steps toward becoming an autonomous Methodist church.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks the departure vote of one of the denomination's largest annual conferences, not its final legal exit, which conference leaders said at the time was still being worked out, and not a claim about the size or fate of Methodism as a whole, which this fact does not address. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names The United Methodist Church directly: "in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, members of the United Methodist Church's Cote d'Ivoire Conference, known locally as EMUCI, voted unanimously to leave the denomination."
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Adds a fact not yet on the map: one of the denomination's largest single annual conferences, encompassing roughly 700,000 members in Ivory Coast, voting to leave the United Methodist Church over the same 2024 General Conference changes already reflected in this timeline's other citations, a scale of departure the existing record had not yet captured.
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