BATON ROUGE, La. – Throughout Louisiana, congregations are grappling with an existential query: ought to we stay within the United Methodist Church?
It’s a part of a nation-wide splintering of church buildings away from the world’s largest mainline Protestant denomination. Greater than 2,000 of the roughly 30,000 congregations have disaffiliated, representing 6.6% of the worldwide denomination, based on official estimates from the United Methodist Church.
In 2020, the church boasted about seven million members in the USA, the Occasions-Picayune reported on the time. However after waves of church buildings departed in 2022, membership fell to roughly 6.4 million, a Louisiana spokesman for the United Methodist Church stated.
Throughout the state, 69 church buildings have left the fold, church officers confirmed, and dozens extra are anticipated to comply with go well with this 12 months.
Probably the most often-cited explanation for the cut up facilities on LGBTQ acceptance.
Learn extra on the cut up from our information accomplice, The Advocate.