Asbury Seminary and the UMC’s Unmasking

At its June meeting, the University Senate of the United Methodist Church (UMC) decided to drop Asbury Theological Seminary from its list of approved schools for UMC clergy education. The news reverberated throughout Protestant circles, opinions on the matter coming everywhere from Inside Higher Ed and Christianity Today, to former Asbury president Timothy Tennent and Mark Tooley at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Asbury was a loose end in the messy divorce that led to the creation of the Global Methodist Church (GMC). Writing for UM News, Heather Hahn pulled back the curtain:

Hahn identified those leaders as former presidents Maxie Dunnam and Timothy Tennent alongside current president David F. Watson. 

These former UMC ministers had betrayed their family, despite the fact that Kenneth Feinberg’s mediation had produced a protocol for separation in 2020, signed by parties representing most UMC constituencies. Had that protocol been implemented, it would have led to an amicable, if painful, separation. As it happened, the delays to the General Conference in 2020 and 2022 meant the protocol died a slow death. Traditionalists saw the writing on the wall and got out while they could take their church properties with them, creating the GMC after the second delay in 2022.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Daniel Aleshire, the former executive director of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), questioned the UMC practice of training ministers at schools that aren’t officially affiliated with the church. “Can we for sure get true-blue United Methodists if they’re trained in these schools?” he asked. It’s a trick question. Considering the new direction of the UMC, the answer must be that Asbury is no longer capable of training “true-blue” UMC ministers. 

Asbury no longer fits the UMC for more fundamental reasons than the role seminary leadership played in the split. In its commitment to historic Methodist doctrine and morality, Asbury belongs to a different tradition. It’s not that Asbury has no UMC ministers to teach UMC doctrine and polity, as some outlets have claimed. Harvard Divinity has no full-time UMC faculty, and it remains on the list of approved seminaries. (Harvard gets around the full-time requirement by enlisting denominational counselors and adjuncts.)

Besides, it’s not as though all these former UMC elders on faculty at Asbury—like Kenneth Collins, one of the foremost interpreters of Wesley—suddenly forgot how the UMC functioned and what it taught. If the letter of the law were that important, Asbury could have copied Harvard and partnered with a UMC minister who served as a counselor to Asbury students.  

The deeper issue is that we have two forms of Methodism that operate within distinct traditions, one liberal and the other traditionalist. It’s another version of the story of the demise of mainline Protestantism, albeit with a Methodist twist. The UMC’s University Senate had the courage to make it clear that being a historic Methodist institution holding traditional Christian views of morality was unacceptable. To remain in good standing, Asbury needed to embrace fully the liberal theology enshrined in the 2024 UMC Social Principles. It had to accept the late modern theological tradition of liberal Protestantism.

Two Traditions in a “Big Tent”

The UMC was formed in 1968. Albert Outler, one of the primary architects of this new form of Methodism, had recently returned from the Second Vatican Council. In his 1966 public lecture on the council, with his typical Southern wit, he declared, “Failing a renewal of authentic evangelical religion, we may be nearer the end of the Protestant era than we had thought but by default and not by transfiguration.” Outler firmly believed that the council called Protestants to stop talking about reform and renewal and start doing it. 

Within two years, the newly formed UMC flung open the doors of reform. At the April 1968 uniting conference, Outler preached his famous sermon on “Visions and Dreams,” setting forth his hope that Methodists could build a church “truly catholic, truly evangelical, truly reformed.” He hoped that the path to being catholic and evangelical would be through reform and renewal. As chairman of the UMC theological commission, Outler guided a process that ensured ongoing reform. 

His intention was to build a framework that anchored Methodism in the past but kept it open to creative theological developments in the spirit of semper reformanda. The result was stances that slowly corroded the pillars of the UMC until the foundations gave way. Rather than serving Protestant catholicity, reform produced a liberalism intent on evacuating Christian norms in the name of political advocacy and social justice.

The first stance came in the UMC’s 1972 Book of Discipline, which describes the older confessional statements of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren as “landmark documents.” The UMC simultaneously adopted and neutered both statements. Like quaint mementos, they became monuments to the past that should never be “juridical norms for doctrine” and therefore no impediment to constructive theology. Although technically the Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith could not be changed, they were rendered obsolete.  

The second commitment was to Outler’s newly invented Wesleyan quadrilateral as the guide for driving reform. As a good Anglican, John Wesley had operated out of the three-legged stool of Scripture, interpreted through Christian tradition as guided by reason. To these, Wesley added the need for spiritual experience. In simple terms, if the Bible talked about being born again as a radical move away from the world, then people should experience the new birth in their lives. Having identified these emphases in Wesley, Outler turned them into four basic sources for Methodist theology. The quadrilateral was born.

From the outset, Outler’s formulation was problematic. Despite statements about the primacy of Scripture, the quadrilateral’s four sides meant Scripture was functionally equivalent to other sources. Even among Methodist theologians like Thomas Langford at Duke, for whom Scripture held primacy, it was always Scripture as mediated by appeals to tradition, experience, and reason. Moreover, experience became primarily one’s lived experience in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity, thereby opening space for all forms of liberation theology and process theology. 

The final commitment was to theological pluralism. Outler believed formal dogmatic pronouncements could not overcome doctrinal confusion. While Outler thought this principle grounded the UMC’s big tent, it accelerated the problems the quadrilateral had created.  

Schubert Ogden and John B. Cobb, Jr. championed this principle to spread process theology throughout the denomination. When a committee revised the sections on doctrine for the 1988 Book of Discipline, Ogden and Cobb raised the alarm. For Ogden, the purpose of theology was to critique doctrinal standards. Ogden had advocated for the full ordination of homosexuals since 1980. For his part, Cobb’s entire career had been spent rethinking traditional Christian theology and morality, and he worried that heresy trials would suddenly become the new normal. From their positions at Perkins Seminary in Dallas and Claremont in Los Angeles, Ogden and Cobb helped reshape the Western Jurisdiction of the UMC. 

Theological pluralism enshrined inclusivity as orthodoxy, creating a church without borders for a nation without borders. This is the meaning of catholicity in its postmodern context. Universality is boundless diversity. Its sole boundary is the denial of its boundlessness, and Asbury was found guilty. 

The debates over gay marriage and ordination of practicing homosexuals in the UMC endured through a fifty-year cold war. Writing for First Things in 1998, the Methodist theologian Billy Abraham warned that the UMC was germinating seeds that could destroy the denomination. In Abraham’s words, “Doctrinal pluralism, despite its intellectual incoherence, will work so long as something akin to Liberal Protestantism is held by the leadership of the church and so long as those who are not Liberal Protestants acquiesce. In fact pluralism is part of the intellectual structure of Liberal Protestantism.”

These repeated warnings are why I wrote in First Things at the beginning of 2020 that the UMC was a failed experiment. Grounding the “big tent” in theological pluralism mirrored the initial release of Burmese pythons in Florida in the 1970s. While it took time for this invasive species to spread, eventually it devasted native Methodist life in many congregations and schools. 

For decades, traditionalists tried to curb its spread, but as Abraham implied in 1998, the control of the bureaucratic structures remained largely in the hands of the liberals. Through continuity of appointment, they ensured that this pluralism would continue to reflect the secular developments in the wider culture, effectively creating a new tradition. So-called moderates like Adam Hamilton, who kept saying that the big tent could work, gave them cover. Now running as a Democrat for Senate in Kansas, Hamilton is not that naïve. He attempted to keep as many congregations in the fold while delaying the General Conference until after December 31, 2023, when such congregations could no longer leave with their property. 

With the creation of the GMC, we have two Methodist denominations that represent different traditions. This is not a debate between evangelicals and mainliners but liberal and traditional Protestantism. Asbury’s release simply said the quiet part out loud. The only question is, Where do we go from here?

The Future of Asbury and the UMC

As many have pointed out, while disappointing, this decision will have little impact on Asbury’s future. Under David Watson’s new leadership, Asbury will remain solidly rooted in its Wesleyan and Holiness heritage. Watson made this clear in his own response to the recent decision. Currently the seventh largest ATS seminary by headcount, Asbury shows no signs of dropping out of the top ten. If one removes Duke Divinity and Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Asbury’s total student population is equal to the remaining UMC seminaries combined. 

While Asbury has seen a steady decline in UMC students, from 25 percent in fall 2023 to 9 percent in fall 2025, it will most likely be offset by the increase in GMC ministerial candidates and non-denominational students. As an approved GMC seminary, Asbury’s GMC student population will grow with the denomination. Currently, the GMC has over 7,800 approved pastors serving 7,224 congregations. The 19 percent of Asbury’s student body that is non-denominational represents another area of growth, especially since this affiliation represents the largest percentage of Protestants. Asbury will remain the largest ATS seminary in the Wesleyan tradition for a long time.

The UMC, on the other hand, has some hard decisions in its future. As Mark Tooley points out, almost eight thousand congregations left during the split. Between those departures and ongoing decline, the UMC has lost around three million members since 2019. Even though the 2024 figures have somewhat stabilized at 3.9 million professed members in the U.S., the apportionments from churches for the denomination is down by over $13 million from 2023. The four-year budget approved at the 2024 General Conference is 40 percent below the budget for the 2016 General Conference. The signs point toward a bleak future.

One can glimpse the road ahead for the UMC through its Western Jurisdiction, which forms the heart of liberalism in the denomination. It was this jurisdiction that elected and consecrated Karen Oliveto as the first openly lesbian bishop in 2016 against UMC rules at the time. Despite its large geographical size (from Alaska to Arizona and Hawaii to Colorado), the Western Jurisdiction is by far the smallest of the five UMC jurisdictions in the U.S. With less than 200,000 members, it’s on life support. The Western Jurisdiction continues to maintain five bishops, even though the North Central and Northeastern Jurisdictions have six bishops each, with four times the membership. 

One of the UMC seminaries that supports the Western jurisdiction is John Cobb’s former institution, Claremont School of Theology. Just two years before John Cobb’s death in 2024, Claremont sold its 16.4-acre campus in Los Angeles to the Claremont Colleges. The school currently exists as a set of offices in Westwood United Methodist Church on Wilshire Blvd, just east of Beverly Hills. Westwood UMC is another symbol of decline. It maintains a tradition of liberal Protestantism even though the congregation has dwindled to just over 200 weekly attendees in its six-hundred-seat building.   

The 2024 UMC Social Principles document will keep this trajectory going for the whole UMC. It represents more than a revision of UMC views of human sexuality. The 2024 UMC Social Principles also revised Trinitarian language out of existence. Whereas in previous iterations of the UMC Social Principles the preamble opened with an affirmation of the Triune God, the new version has removed all reference to the Father, preferring the more generic “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,” with its implicit unitarianism. 

The University Senate’s decision to remove Asbury from the list of approved UMC seminaries reveals the ongoing division of Protestantism into liberal and conservative traditions. The older division between mainline and evangelical does not capture what’s happening. The UMC’s rejection of Asbury has nothing to do with Methodism and everything to do with the denomination’s more fulsome embrace of liberal Protestantism. Likewise, the GMC’s designation of Asbury as an approved seminary is less about evangelicalism and more about Asbury’s consistent stance as a historic Methodist school maintaining an orthodox form of Protestantism. Daniel Aleshire asked the right question. Asbury cannot train “true-blue” UMC ministers—at least, not according to the leadership of the UMC.

Good for Asbury.