Origin from 1968
On 23 April 1968, delegates of The Methodist Church and The Evangelical United Brethren Church met in joint session at the Uniting Conference in Dallas, Texas, and voted to merge into a single denomination. Bishop Reuben H. Mueller of the Evangelical United Brethren Church and Bishop Lloyd C. Wicke of The Methodist Church joined hands before the assembly and declared, Lord of the Church, we are united in Thee, in Thy Church and now in The United Methodist Church. The merger brought together roughly 10.3 million Methodists and 750,000 members of the smaller denomination, itself formed in 1946 from the Evangelical Church and the United Brethren in Christ. More than ten years of negotiation preceded the union, and it finally dissolved the Methodist Episcopal Church's old Central Jurisdiction, the racially segregated structure that had held Black annual conferences apart from their white counterparts since the 1939 reunification, folding its conferences into the denomination's ordinary geographic jurisdictions.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks this 1968 merger forming The United Methodist Church at Dallas, distinct from the 1939 Uniting Conference that reunified the Methodist Episcopal Church's three branches already recorded here, and earlier than the church's 2019 split forming the Global Methodist Church already recorded here. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Texas directly: "at the Uniting Conference in Dallas, Texas, and voted to merge into a single denomination."
This source names The United Methodist Church directly: "in Thee, in Thy Church and now in The United Methodist Church."
Occurred In
Spread Event Of
Adds a specific, dated institutional milestone between the 1939 reunification of the Methodist Episcopal Church's three branches and the 2019 Global Methodist Church split already recorded here: the 1968 Uniting Conference at Dallas, Texas, merging The Methodist Church with The Evangelical United Brethren Church into The United Methodist Church and dissolving the denomination's segregated Central Jurisdiction.
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