NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the U.S., lost about a quarter of its total churches between 2019 and 2023 due to disaffiliations, according to a new Lewis Center report released this month.
More than 7,600 congregations have received permission to leave the denomination since 2019, according to the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, a research center out of the UMC-affiliated Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. The center’s third and final report highlights the disproportionate number and demographics among disaffiliated churches, including how a majority of disaffiliations were in southern jurisdictions.
“It is remarkable how the characteristics of disaffiliating churches compared to all United Methodist U.S. churches changed little as more churches disaffiliated,” the report states. “Patterns seen in the earliest disaffiliations tended to continue almost identically throughout the process.”
The exodus marks a historic shift in mainline Protestantism in the United States, which has seen a sharp decline in membership since the late 2000s – a trend driven partly by generational change, according to a Pew Research Center study . Until recently, the United Methodist Church was the third largest Christian denomination in the country, dominating America’s religious culture and landscape.