ADVANCE,  N.C. (RNS) — The new church meets in what used to be a dog kennel.

A floor drain in the middle of the worship area is a reminder of its former use. But over the past few months one of the two metal garage doors was replaced with large glass windows. The concrete floor has been refinished, the walls repainted, curtains hung, the bathrooms renovated.

Here, in the middle of a bland industrial park that looks like a self-storage facility, a new church is emerging.

Its 40-plus members think of themselves as “the remnant.” For years, they belonged to various United Methodist churches in Davie County, North Carolina. But over the past four years, a majority of the county’s 24 United Methodist churches voted to disaffiliate from the denomination. Only 11 remain, most of them on the outskirts of this rural county located in the state’s Piedmont region, about 65 miles north of Charlotte.

The members of Grace United Methodist Mission — they are not formally a church yet — were blindsided by their different congregations’ sudden push to sever ties with the denomination they had grown up in and worshipped with their entire lives. They came together as a group like refugees often do, with one thing in common — a profound grief at losing their church home and a resolve to remain United Methodist.

“We were broken when we came here — I’m telling you we all were broken!” said Lois Steelman, formerly of Bethlehem United Methodist Church. That church, a few miles down the road, had a heritage stretching back to John Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism. Steelman and her husband Joe were members for 50 years.

But under the leadership of the Rev. Suzanne Michael, an enterprising United Methodist pastor with a Dolly Parton-like accent and blond hair to match, these remnant United Methodists are trying something new.

They want to complete the renovation of their rental space, especially to add a small children’s play area. But they have no desire to buy land or build a church. In the pioneering spirit of the early Methodists, the members of Grace want to keep things simple.

“All they wanted was a place to meet to start serving the world,” said Michael, who serves as the emerging community pastor for Davie County in addition to leading Grace.

In the past five years, more than 7,600 churches have cut their ties to the United Methodist Church, the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination — about 25% of its 30,000 churches have broken away. That five-year window that allowed churches to leave with their properties ends this month, and the denomination’s legislative arm will meet in Charlotte in April to chart a new way forward for those that remain.

Davie County, red, in North Carolina. (Map courtesy Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

In the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, a region that spans the 47 Western counties, the vast majority of the churches that broke away were small and rural, politically and theologically conservative.

They did not want to see the denomination loosen its rules to allow the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ people. And many were wary of seemingly far-away institutions that required annual apportionments to fund the work of the denomination around the world.

“It’s hard to be a connectional church when there’s a culture that focuses on the local,” said Bishop Ken Carter of the Western North Carolina Conference.

In many Davie County churches, the disaffiliation process was often secretive, involving a select group of church members working behind the scenes, often without the knowledge of the church pastor. In Davie County, church groups hired a local lawyer to help their congregations navigate the disaffiliation process.

Michael, who had been serving as pastor of Bethlehem United Methodist since 2020, did not realize members were talking about disaffiliation until it was almost too late.

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On Dec. 13, 2022, with only 112 members present, Bethlehem voted to disaffiliate. The vote was 76-36, just barely the two-thirds required. If there had been one more vote to remain, the disaffiliation vote would have failed. 

The Rev. Suzanne Michael leads a group of remnant United Methodists in their first Advent service on Dec. 3, 2023, in Advance, North Carolina. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

Many church members were livid. The next day the church secretary told Michael that a dozen people had called to ask that their names be formally taken off the church rolls. Michael asked the secretary to draw a list and she began to add other dissenters from neighboring churches that had also voted to disaffiliate.

Among those in shock were Jim Wilson and his husband, Tim Rose. For 45 years, Wilson, now 75, had been the church pianist. He and Rose attended regularly.

Wilson said he felt “totally gutted.”

“It bothered me so bad that when we had our first meeting with Suzanne after that disaffiliation, my spouse said, ‘I’m just afraid he’s gonna have a heart attack.’ I mean, that’s how hurt I was.”

Sue Boggs, an active member of Smith Grove United Methodist Church, another Davie County church that disaffiliated, said the vote was a big life change for her and her husband, Gary.

“Our church was our friend group, where we went for connection as well as spiritual growth and a platform to do ministry, also,” she said. “When that went away, it was like, now what?”

These holdovers cited various reasons for wanting to stay United Methodist. Some, like Pat Campbell, a retired schoolteacher, said she appreciated the orderliness and structure of the United Methodist Church.

She likes that her church follows the lectionary or Scripture readings appointed for the church year and provides vetted readings by learned theologians. (The congregation is now reading “Heaven and Earth: Advent and the Incarnation” by the noted Methodist theologian and bishop, Will Willimon.)

“I’m a person that has to have organization,” said Campbell. “A lot of other churches, especially these smaller churches that have disaffiliated, it’s like a hit or miss thing.”

The Grace United Methodist Mission rents two units in an old industrial park in rural Davie County, North Carolina. The rental space used to be a dog kennel. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

For many others, the notion that the church would disaffiliate because it did not want its ministers to ordain or marry LGBTQ people seemed wrong.

Bryon Vines had considered staying at Bethlehem, even after the vote. But one night, he said, he felt God speaking to him, telling him to reconsider.

“You have plucked a sin as one might pluck a feather from a flock of chickens,” Vines said he heard God’s voice telling him. “And you’ve judged people unable to come into my church the way that you come into it.”

Three months after the disaffiliation vote, Michael, a lifelong Methodist who was determined to stay in the denomination, raised $2,000 for a full-page ad in the local paper. It announced an “organizational gathering” for residents of Davie County to “discuss future possibilities for worship and church life.”

On March 26, 50 people attended the meeting — enough for Michael to consider starting a remnant church. She turned to one of her former congregants and asked if people could meet in her home, which had a large living room with a baby grand piano. When the group outgrew that, they started meeting in a small movie theater at the apartment complex where Michael and her husband, Jimmy, had moved into after vacating the parsonage.

By July, Michael had secured a position as Davie County’s Emerging Community Pastor — one of 18 such positions created by the Western North Carolina Conference with a $5.25 million grant from the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment.

With more churches closing than opening — not only in the United Methodist Church but across all U.S. Christian denominations — the grant allows the two North Carolina Methodist conferences to experiment with new models for doing church.

Michael now serves two roles: as pastor to the new Grace church and as a roving pastor to the county at large. She and members of the Grace mission recently started hosting a semimonthly dinner gathering in the town of Coolemee, where many families live in poverty, with a per capita income of $36,570. At a recent Tuesday night dinner, about 10 townspeople showed up for a meal of tacos, with seasoned ground beef and fixings, prepared by Grace volunteers.

Jim Wilson at the piano, left, and June Buzzard at the organ, right, lead Grace United Methodist Mission in music, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023, in Advance, North Carolina. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

On the first Saturday of December, members of Grace gathered in their new church home to decorate the space for Christmas. They hung ornaments on two Christmas trees, placed a dozen poinsettia plants across the worship area and arranged a Nativity scene and an Advent wreath near the altar.

The congregation is still working on renovating their rented space. They want to add a partition beside the bathrooms to create more privacy and add some storage space. Another aluminum garage door will be converted into a wall-sized window.

They are an older group; almost everyone is retired. They know that in order to survive they’ll need to attract more members. They’re hoping to find some at the gated retirement community in the town of Bermuda Run and among younger families interested in a more traditional service. 

Members of this nascent church still talk frequently about the grief the disaffiliation caused. But one year later, many feel hopeful about a new future. As Michael lit the Advent candle on Sunday, they looked expectantly toward a new season in their church life.

“At this point, we’re growing our connections to one another and ready for what God shows us next,” said Sue Boggs.

“It’s almost like it freed us,” her husband Gary Boggs said of the disaffiliation. “We didn’t know it at the time, but it did. We couldn’t have found a better place to go.”

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