The collapse of Mainline Protestantism was further evinced two weeks ago when the United Methodist Church derecognized evangelical Asbury Theological Seminary. Effectively, Asbury Seminary is no longer recognized to educate United Methodist ministers.
Asbury is America’s eighth largest seminary and the largest theologically Wesleyan seminary in the world, with nearly 900 full-time students from many denominations. (View data for America’s seminaries from the Association of Theological Schools here.) It had once hosted the largest number of United Methodist seminarians of any school in America. As recently as 2017, over 10 percent of United Methodist ordinands were Asbury graduates.
Founded in the 1920s in Wilmore, Ky., outside Lexington, Asbury Seminary originally emerged from Asbury College across the street, aligning with the Wesleyan Holiness Movement. That movement stressed personal sanctification. In subsequent decades, Asbury became the chief institution for evangelicals within Mainline Methodism, whose official seminaries had theologically liberalized in the early 20th century.
Evangelicals were always a 20th century minority within what in 1968 became The United Methodist Church, America’s largest Mainline denomination, and largest Protestant denomination until surpassed by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1967. But evangelicals in United Methodism were a vibrant and eventually a politically influential minority.
United Methodist debates over sexuality began in 1972. Every four years the denomination’s governing General Conference debated the church’s official stance affirming sex only within male/female marriage. Progressives prevailed in other Mainline denominations. But growing United Methodism in Africa aligned with U.S. evangelicals on the sexuality votes to maintain a biblical stance.
After Africans and U.S. evangelicals again prevailed at a special General Conference in 2019, but narrowly, U.S. evangelicals exploited a four-year window to exit the denomination with church property, concluding in 2023. Nearly 8,000 U.S. congregations voted themselves out of United Methodism. Half of these churches joined the new Global Methodist Church, while the other half have remained independent or formed new networks.
Those nearly 8,000 churches were the core constituency for Asbury Seminary, where the percentage of United Methodist students fell to 9 percent. The denomination has 13 official seminaries that include Duke Divinity School, Boston School of Theology, Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. It also recognizes about two dozen other seminaries to educate United Methodist seminarians.
United Methodist progressives for obvious reasons never liked Asbury Seminary, but pre-schism, it was too influential to challenge directly. Post-schism, it became an easier target.
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Mark is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. A lifelong United Methodist, he has been active in United Methodist renewal since 1988. He is the author of Taking Back The United Methodist Church, Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century, and The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War. He attends a United Methodist church in Alexandria, Va.