UMC 2025: The Death Tsunami Was a Picnic

In 2011 Lovett Weems of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership gave the United Methodist Church a name for its greatest fear: the "death tsunami." The church's members were old, and he warned that the death rate would be "higher than at any time in the history of the country since antibiotics were introduced," with 50% more deaths in 2050 than in 2010.

The death tsunami was in pastors' meetings, in articles, and in conference talking points. District superintendents heard it at their consultations, and United Methodist bloggers argued about it.

The 2025 numbers are now out on umdata.org, the General Council on Finance and Administration's public site. I went through them. All of them. The death tsunami now looks like a picnic compared to what the UMC has done to itself. Weems' wave was supposed to build until 2050. On the trend the church was already on, Weems' death tsunami plus the average yearly decline the church was already seeing in 2011 should have put the church at around 5.8 million members today. Instead it has far less: 3.8 million.

I don't blame Weems. No one could have guessed that the bishops and leadership would take gasoline and matches to the years that followed his warning.

An Embarrassing Ten Years

If there is one thing I appreciate about my former tribe, it's that its numbers are ready and available (excusing them coming a little late). And even taking the leadership at its word, something that has become impossibly difficult, the picture is terrible.

The UMC lost 46% of its members, but worse, it lost 62% of its attendance.

For perspective, that means the UMC lost an average of 891 members every single day for the last ten years. Think for a moment: how many members are in your church?

Even the currently war-torn Highland Park in Dallas, with its more than 15,000 members, would be gone in half a month. Adam Hamilton's Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, reported 12,259 members in 2025. They would be gone in two weeks.

That empties the entire Eastern Pennsylvania Conference in under three months.

Not Just Traditionalists Leaving

Membership has fallen sharply across every measured demographic but one. From 2015 to 2025:

• Women: down 45.1%
• Men: down 47.3%
• White members: down 47.9%
• Native American members: down 37.0%
• Hispanic members: down 35.5%
• Asian members: down 33.0%
• Multiracial members: down 24.1%
• Pacific Islander members: down 19.0%
• Black members: down 18.9% since 2021, the first year the site reports them as a separate figure

Even taking just 2024 to 2025 into account, the slide in those above categories continues. They are all down.

The only category that seems to have grown is the self-described "non-binary" members, which the church began counting in 2021 with 255 people out of six million members.

Even that number is not reliable. St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Bloomington, Indiana, reported 614 out of 616 members as non-binary in 2024. The year before it reported zero, and the year after it reported four. Across the country, I found 28 churches in 16 conferences that entered nearly their whole membership in the non-binary column for a year or two.

Taking errors and odd reporting cases into account, it's likely even the non-binary count fell during 2024 to 2025, from about 2,400 to about 2,260.

Professions of Faith

"Professions of Faith" has been one of the scariest numbers to follow over the years. And this is a good time to remind you: you are welcome to look up every number I cite for yourself on umdata.org.

A profession of faith is the closest number the church keeps to a new believer. Since 2017 the church has counted them separately: people received by confirmation, who are mostly youth, and people received on profession of faith other than confirmation. umdata.org publishes only the second part, to my knowledge.

In 2017 the UMC received 55,979 people on profession of faith other than confirmation. In 2025 it received 25,444. That is a drop of 55% in eight years. By every available measure of Matthew 28, the UMC had not done its job.

Now, there is a possible silver lining here. The GCFA reported the 2025 figure as an uptick, because it was up 5.66% from 2024. Even this number is skewed. Of the 1,363 added in 2025, 561 came from one church. Restore Austin, an independent congregation, joined the UMC in 2025 and unified with Memorial UMC in Austin, Texas. The new church reported 628 members and 561 professions of faith in its first year on the books. Without it, the 2025 increase was about 800, or 3.3%.

After the Season of Exits Ended

In 2016 the General Conference created the Commission on a Way Forward, and the real boxing match began. By 2019, the denomination was bleeding from figurative self-inflicted unforced errors, and attempted to cover them with cheap band-aids. It was public, it was ugly, and the worst part is that it didn't need to happen that way. It was a fight chosen by denominational leaders.

A few years ago, I created two YouTube videos that chronicled the process, From Unity to Division and Broken Legacy. There are a few errors I wish I could go back and fix, but the bones are correct. The history is better covered in those videos.

Paragraph 2553, the exit the church wrote into its own law in 2019, expired at the end of 2023. The 2024 General Conference refused to extend it. The Judicial Council and the bishops declared the season of church exits over.

The numbers, however, tell a different story, and it appears as if the churches told the bishops "No, the season of exits is far from over." In 2024, the first year after the season ended, the UMC lost 5.9% more. The latest 2025 numbers show it lost an additional 4.5%.

Despite wishful thinking or an attempt to show strength, that is still nearly three times the 2015 rate where the UMC was only losing 1.62% of its members a year. The slide might be better than 5.9%, but leaders who proudly proclaim they are finished with exits should certainly answer for 4.5% more.

Africa

The numbers above are the United States only.

GCFA says it collects statistics from local churches in the United States and nowhere else. For Africa, Europe and the Philippines, umdata.org shows one combined figure, 6,495,322 members, "from latest Journal received."

There is no year-by-year record to check it against, no attendance, and no professions of faith. GCFA says it is not publishing trends for these regions because the data set is "not yet complete."

Numbers from Africa are rarely, if ever, shared. Who knows how bad things are in Africa, but we do still get some information occasionally.

In May 2024 the Côte d'Ivoire Conference, which last reported more than 1 million professing members, voted unanimously to leave the UMC. In June 2025 it renamed itself the Methodist Church of Ivory Coast and kept most of its property.

In Nigeria, Bishop John Wesley Yohanna and his cabinet left for the Global Methodist Church in July 2024. Each side claims most of the members. Three United Methodists were killed in clashes in Taraba State that December. This spring a federal high court ordered the breakaway church to give back the name, the money and the buildings, and its leaders said they would appeal.

In Liberia, the Weala District voted in January 2025 to take about 12,000 of its 14,000 members out of the UMC. By March the bishop had seven property cases in court, and police had to step in when worshippers were attacked at a church in Margibi County.

And I remind you, none of this would have happened either, if not for the wonderful leadership (sarcasm intended) of United Methodist bishops. In January 2023 the Council of Bishops decided that Paragraph 2553 applied only to United Methodist congregations in the United States. Nothing in Paragraph 2553 says that, mind you. The bishops' explanation was a sudden and convenient about-face towards literal reading, as the 2019 General Conference's first vote delayed every new rule outside the United States until a year after the 2020 General Conference. The one that COVID interrupted three times until 2024.

Paragraph 2553 expired in December 2023. It expired before it could ever reach Africa. Conveniently.

The Lawsuits Aren't Over

Eastern Pennsylvania was my conference. In 2023, 51 of its churches sued the conference, its Board of Trustees and Bishop John Schol in the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas. The churches lost at trial in April 2026, and the case is now on appeal in Commonwealth Court.

The conference is in court against these churches, but the official count of the denomination still counts them, despite the obviousness that those churches are gone. Forty-eight of the plaintiff churches are on the conference's books for 2025, with 8,467 members. That is 13.3% of everyone the conference reports. In two of its four districts, about one member in five belongs to a church that is suing to leave.

Eastern Pennsylvania reports a ten-year decline of 38.1%, which looks better than the national 46.1%. Take out the churches that are suing to get out, and the decline is 46.4%.

I lay that on Bishop Schol nearly entirely, but new leadership has not done anything to right the wrongs of the past. I'm figuratively choking on irony about the whole thing now, as Bishop Schol has sued his successor, Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi, for libel and slander. He filed the suit in May 2026 in New Jersey Superior Court in Monmouth County.

I don't believe there is another example of one bishop suing another in United Methodist history. But it paints an odd picture: either Schol is right or Moore-Koikoi is right, and in both cases, Eastern Pennsylvania and Greater New Jersey were left with very questionable leadership somewhere.

What I do disclose personally, though, is that I never received any notice of receipt of my resignation. I only found out the Conference officially knew about it when my family's health insurance was canceled. Of course, I expected that, but it was one more unprofessional feather in the cap of a Conference that I feel is still reeling from abysmal leadership.

Across the country, there are more lawsuits still being fought. I found at least 150 churches still in court with their own conference, and more if you count cases under appeal:

• South Carolina: about 70 churches. The conference sued them for "fraudulently leaving" and wants their property. A judge has said he will dismiss the cases, and the conference plans to appeal. In its 2025 statistics, the same conference still counts 49 of those churches, with 7,507 members.
• West Virginia: 33 churches, now before the state supreme court.
• Rio Texas: the conference is suing 28 churches that voted to leave. The Texas Supreme Court hears the case November 3.
• Alabama-West Florida: about 18 churches with suits still open. The conference counts 37 churches from its lawsuits, with 8,905 members, 19.9% of the conference. Harvest Church in Dothan won its property at trial this year and is still on the books with 1,956 members.
• Horizon Texas sued Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, its largest congregation, in August. Highland Park reports 15,782 members, 9% of the conference.
• Single churches are in court in Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

If the bishops of the United Methodist Church were financial consultants, they would have been fired ten years ago. But they're virtually impossible to remove, even in the face of theological and managerial malpractice.

And Me

I'm a former United Methodist pastor, and while it's not my circus officially anymore, I'm still allowed to be horrified by what has happened. I was appointed to my first church in 2014, so this open and still ongoing warfare has absorbed nearly my entire ministry, which is over a dozen years now.

I've stopped trying to fake moving on, because the wound is still raw, the scars haven't formed yet, and the healing is going to take years. But the frustration that I feel must pale in comparison to the state of the denomination as a whole. My church has taken incredible care of my family and me; I cannot say enough good about Hopeland. But my heart still hurts.

I feel worse for the dozens of churches I personally talked to in this area during the disaffiliation period that said, "We want to leave, we don't want to stay, but we can't afford the Conference's costs." That's dozens within my own circle. That is an objective failure of trust in leadership at the Conference and the highest levels of the church. I know Eastern Pennsylvania can't be unique in that, so my prayers go out to every church across the world that is still held hostage.

I've heard United Methodist leaders accuse Global Methodist churches of "sheep stealing," which is really cute coming from the same people who made every effort to steal the entire farm. "Stop sheep stealing" is exactly what you should expect wolves to say. But you can only devour so much before the supply is gone, and the United Methodist flock continues steadily shrinking.