New Methodist Conference
To Our United Methodist Colleagues
In December 2006 a United Methodist minister from central California wrote to us stating with pride that he'd been praying for schism in the United Methodist Church for years. He assumed that the New Methodist Conference was the answer to his prayers, and that we would provide a new organization to siphon off all the theologically progressive United Methodists, leaving the UMC to the religious conservatives. He assumed in error.
Religious fundamentalists within the United Methodist Church have sought to use the existence of the New Methodist Conference in their polemic against their progressive fellow United Methodists. We cannot state clearly enough that this is repugnant to us, and contrary to all that we stand for. Our tiny denomination has never been anything other than an oasis of hope for those without a religious or spiritual home, for persons and communities who seek to know the generous loving God that John Wesley tirelessly preached.
The New Methodist Conference is not, and has never been, a schism from the UMC, nor a participant in the civil war now raging in that denomination for control of the organization. We witness this in sadness, and we pray for healing of the Body of Christ, and following John Wesley's own conviction that there can - and always will be - diversity within unity, we pray that All may be One.