Occasionally, a Christian denomination finds disagreements within itself and decides to split.
Undoubtedly, the first major split in the Christian church was the Great Schism in 1054 where the East and the West split. This basically resulted in what we have now with the Roman Catholic Church and the Easter Orthodox Church.
I won’t get into the details of why the split occurred because it can get very complicated, but from this point the two churches were divided against one another.
Obviously, they’re still divided today and since then they have each divided even further.
My own denomination is the result of another split that happened back in the 70s when it split with another denomination after it started becoming to liberal. So in order to preserve the conservative and orthodox stance of the church, they formed a new one.
One of the reasons that it split is similar to the reason why this recent split is happening. Last week, the United Methodist Church annoucnedt hat they will be ending a years long disagreement over LGBTQ issues by splitting themselves.
The more conservative portion of the United Methodist Church will now form what is to be called the Global Methodist Church. They will favor a traditional view of marriage and clergy whereas the United Methodist Church is more in support of gay marriage and LGBTQ clergy.
“Many United Methodists have grown impatient with a denomination clearly struggling to function effectively at the general church level,” said Rev. Keith Boyette, chairman of the Transitional Leadership Council that has been guiding the creation of the new denomination over the past year.
“Theologically conservative local churches and annual conferences want to be free of divisive and destructive debates and to have the freedom to move forward together. We are confident many existing congregations will join the new Global Methodist Church in waves over the next few years, and new church plants will sprout up as faithful members exit the UM Church and coalesce into new congregations,” he added.
I believe that the universal body of believers will always be split on theological matters until the end of this age. As someone who is deeply entrenched in theological matters and philosophy, it’s not so simple to just find agreement on all issues. It gets more complicated than you could ever imagine.
