President Hagiya’s Statement on the 2024 UMC General Conference

I have been attending the United Methodist Church General Conferences since 1988, and I have never witnessed the spirit of transformation and forward movement that we have seen at this General Conference. With the bulk of our disaffiliations behind us and those who have strived to maintain the status quo absent, the body has a new spirit of collaboration and partnership. Through all the past General Conferences, I have perceived a church that has been stuck. We have been stuck on theological, ecclesiological, and disciplinary levels. The United Methodist Church has been polarized between competing forces, conservative and progressive.  

Now, we are not just witnessing another General Conference but a pivotal moment in the history of the United Methodist Church. We have broken the log jam with some key changes:

We have removed all the exclusive language against our LGBTQIA siblings for ordination and marriage and, most importantly, the incompatibility language with Christian teaching.

We have also approved a regionalization proposal, a move that will redefine the United States as a region along with our other Central Conferences outside the U.S. This significant change will require ratification from every annual conference in the denomination, a process that usually takes up to a year to complete.

We have adopted new Revised Social Principles, which cement our new identity as a socially progressive denomination that unconditionally accepts all people through the Grace of God, in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.

We rejected the traditional call to continue the disaffiliation process, which ended before the General Conference began.  

There were so many other changes that time does not allow a mention of all of them, but in general, there was a move to remake the United Methodist Church into a new church.  

We are still determining how these monumental changes will affect our United Methodist Church, and I hope to share more with you soon.  

As we have become the Hope,

Grant