Ivory Coast splits with UMC but Kenya and other African conferences slow to follow

by News Feed Editor | Jun 5, 2024 | Religion

NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — After the United Methodist Church allowed its clergy to marry same-sex couples and lifted its ban on ordination of LGBTQ clergy, Methodists in Ivory Coast became the first annual conference to leave the 9.9 million-member denomination, even as other African conferences have emphasized their ties with the U.S. church.The Ivorian annual conference, as the UMC’s geographical jurisdictions are known, said the decisions made at the April 23-May 3 United Methodist General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected current cultural and social values rather than biblical ones.
Bishop Benjamin Boni, the 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 the Ivorian conference.
The Ivorian conference, “for reasons of conscience, before God and before his word, supreme authority in matter of faith and life, decides to leave the United Methodist Church denomination,” Boni said in a statement after the annual conference’s extraordinary session on May 28 in Cocody, a suburb of the capital, Abidjan.

The United Methodist Church has deep roots in West Africa. In 1914, William Wade Harris, a Liberian evangelist, promoted Methodism in what was then the French colony of Cote d’Ivoire. …

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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnNAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — After the United Methodist Church allowed its clergy to marry same-sex couples and lifted its ban on ordination of LGBTQ clergy, Methodists in Ivory Coast became the first annual conference to leave the 9.9 million-member denomination, even as other African conferences have emphasized their ties with the U.S. church.The Ivorian annual conference, as the UMC’s geographical jurisdictions are known, said the decisions made at the April 23-May 3 United Methodist General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected current cultural and social values rather than biblical ones.
Bishop Benjamin Boni, the 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 the Ivorian conference.
The Ivorian conference, “for reasons of conscience, before God and before his word, supreme authority in matter of faith and life, decides to leave the United Methodist Church denomination,” Boni said in a statement after the annual conference’s extraordinary session on May 28 in Cocody, a suburb of the capital, Abidjan.

The United Methodist Church has deep roots in West Africa. In 1914, William Wade Harris, a Liberian evangelist, promoted Methodism in what was then the French colony of Cote d’Ivoire. …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]