NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — After the United Methodist Church voted this spring to allow its clergy to marry same-sex couples and lifted its ban on ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, Methodists around the world watched how the denomination’s African members would respond.On May 28, United Methodists in the Ivory Coast seemed to provide the answer when they announced the departure of their annual conference, a jurisdiction of some 1 million people, from the worldwide church.
At the annual conference’s extraordinary session in Cocody, a suburb of the capital, Abidjan, Bishop Benjamin Boni, president of the annual conference, accused the United Methodist Church of sacrificing its integrity and charged that the denomination had distanced itself from Scripture, thereby making the UMC no longer suitable for Ivorian Methodists.
But the United Methodist Church, formed in the United States in 1968 from the merger of two existing Methodist bodies, is only one branch of a faith tradition that has deep roots in Africa, and its culture is complicated by European colonialism and its aftermath.
In Ivory Coast, Methodism was brought to the then-French colony of Cote d’Ivoire In 1914 by William Wade Harris, a Liberian evangelist. Harris, who later belonged to the American Episcopal Mission, left a legacy of Harrist churches, which practic …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
At the annual conference’s extraordinary session in Cocody, a suburb of the capital, Abidjan, Bishop Benjamin Boni, president of the annual conference, accused the United Methodist Church of sacrificing its integrity and charged that the denomination had distanced itself from Scripture, thereby making the UMC no longer suitable for Ivorian Methodists.
But the United Methodist Church, formed in the United States in 1968 from the merger of two existing Methodist bodies, is only one branch of a faith tradition that has deep roots in Africa, and its culture is complicated by European colonialism and its aftermath.
In Ivory Coast, Methodism was brought to the then-French colony of Cote d’Ivoire In 1914 by William Wade Harris, a Liberian evangelist. Harris, who later belonged to the American Episcopal Mission, left a legacy of Harrist churches, which practic …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]