April 18, 2024 Show with Matthew Sichel on “The New Global Methodist Church”

The Global Methodist Church and Why Conservatives Left the UMC

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 18th day of April 2024.

And most of you, if not all of you, may be scratching your heads as to why I was playing a clip from The Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go? Well, I think it fits in perfectly with our conversation today.

There have been conservative Bible-believing Methodists all over the world who have been a part of the United Methodist Church, most well-known, likely, to my evangelical audience as being a denomination that has largely become compromised by leftism.

And many pastors and members and congregations of that denomination I would have no hesitation to categorize as apostate. And there have been many of these Bible-believing Methodists in that denomination who have been wondering, should I stay or should I go?

And thank God, quite a number of them have made the decision to go and form the Global Methodist Church, which is a new denomination. And after many attempts to get an interview with a representative of this new denomination, I'm glad that through Providence, I finally got a hold of Matthew Sickle.

He is the Northeast Provisional Annual Conference Secretary for the new Global Methodist Church denomination. He's also a deacon at Grace Church of Hanover, Pennsylvania, which is a Global Methodist Church.

Sorry, I threw in the United there, Global Methodist Church. And today we are addressing the new Global Methodist Church, its reason for existence, its distinctives, and mission. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip on Zion Radio, Matthew Sickle.

Thanks, Chris. It's good to be here today with you. Well, before we go into your own personal salvation testimony, which is something that we always do with first-time guests on Iron Trip on Zion Radio, tell us about Grace Church of Hanover.

I've already mentioned that it's a member congregation of the Global Methodist Church, but tell us some more specifics about this group.

Oh, great. I'd love to. So I serve as the deacon assisting the lead pastor at Grace Church in Hanover. It's a growing congregation. We worship about 200 on a Sunday in three services and online. And the lead pastor there is the Reverend Todd Christine, and he is a wonderful, wonderful preacher and teacher.

It's a real pleasure to serve with him. I've been there at Grace since last June, really, and just really thrilled to do ministry with the folks in Hanover, Pennsylvania. We have folks from all walks of life, old, young, kids.

It's really, really a wonderful congregation, and it's historic. It used to be downtown in Hanover, and it was founded around the turn of the century. And it moved out of town in the late 1970s, recognizing that people were moving out of Hanover.

And so they bought a large piece of property on the outskirts of Hanover, where all the people were moving, because they knew that if they were going to reach people for Christ, they needed to be where the people were.

And so they built a brand-new church at that time, and we've been growing ever since. It's a wonderful congregation.

Well, if anybody wants to find out more about Grace Church of Hanover, Pennsylvania, go to mygracechurch .org, mygracechurch .org. And as I've already announced, whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to Himself and saved them.

And I'd love to hear your story. Sure.

It's always a good story to tell. So I was raised in a Christian home. My mom was a faithful United Methodist, and she actually married a man who was Jewish. And his desire was, because my mother was a faithful Christian, that we be raised in a Christian home, because in Judaism, at least in modern Judaism, you are what your mother is.

And my dad insisted on that. And you want providence, this is providence. My dad was an integral part of my upbringing in the church. He was in church with us every Sunday, even though it wasn't until I was about 24 years old that he accepted the Lord.

Amen. Yeah. So I had a real privilege of learning the New Testament from my mother and the Old Testament from my father. And my grandfather, who was president of his synagogue, he took me to synagogue with him whenever we were visiting my grandparents in Philadelphia.

So I got a real wide education into how does Christianity really develop out of Judaism? What is that about? What is it like to understand both sides of our faith? How do I deal with the Old Testament?

I got a really neat picture of that. I gave my heart to the Lord when I was seven years old at Bible school, Vacation Bible School. And I came home, told my mother that, and she was thrilled. And then when I was 12, I made a very public confession for Christ.

We attend every year Rollinsville Camp Meeting in Southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And Rollinsville is a Methodist camp meeting in the old style. And they do nothing but preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so I was brought up in that space every summer. And so at 12 years old, there was an altar call given in the tabernacle. And I went down to the front to say that I was going to stand up for Christ in the rest of my life.

And I've done that. Have I been perfect? No. Far from it. But from those two points in my life, I really fell in love with Jesus Christ. And between the discipling of my mom, phenomenal Sunday school teachers.

When I was a child, I had the Christian education that nobody can buy. And I held on to my faith through high school, where I was president of our Young Life chapter. I led Bible studies in high school.

And then when I got to college, I continued with my association with the Methodist Church and joined the Methodist student movement and the fellowship at the University of Maryland College Park, where I went to school.

So I've known the Lord ever since I was seven. And before that, I knew who he was. So there's not been a time in my life where Jesus Christ wasn't an integral part of who I was.

Discovering Liberal Christianity in the United Methodist Church

So when we were having lunch together day before yesterday, a time of fellowship I thoroughly enjoyed, you shared with me that you were somehow sheltered and unaware of how bad the United Methodist Church had become as far as leftism and apostasy until, you know, later in your life.

I'm not speaking about very recently, but sometime, I believe, when you were in college is when you found out that, wait a minute, this is not the United Methodist Church in which I was raised and in which I have been growing and flourishing as a Christian and where I was edified and taught the scriptures and had a biblical morality.

This is a totally foreign experience to what I was raised in. Tell us about that time in your life when you began to smell heresy and blasphemy in the air.

Yeah, I can, sir. So when I, like I said, when I was a kid, I had a solid Christian education. So I started doing Bible study with my mom in the adult Bible study when I was 14, because I had long ago learned all the basics in Bible and faith.

And so I was discipled by a phenomenal pastor when I was a child in a very small country, United Methodist Church, who was, he did his education at Oral Roberts University. So there was no hint of heresy or anything in his world.

He was an expert in Hebrew and Greek. And so then we moved to another United Methodist Church. And the pastor there, again, was extremely solid. And he was the one that led this Bible study that I went to when I was 14, 15, 16.

And it wasn't until I was about 16 or 17 that I began to understand, first of all, what liberal Christianity was. Because before that, I really did not know anything but very solid evangelical Christianity.

I had a lot of friends in Young Life who were solid, and I simply assumed that that was the way that everything was.

Young Life is a group within the United Methodist Church?

No, no. Young Life is an ecumenical evangelical college and high school ministry. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I hung around with all kinds of evangelicals, Baptists and PCA Presbyterians. And, you know, it was a good mix.

But I read a book by Marcus Borg. And, of course, Marcus was historically known for very liberal Christianity. And still is. And still is, yep. And I started to understand that there was something else out there.

And then I got to college. And as I said earlier, I joined the Wesley Foundation, which was the United Methodist student group on the campus of the University of Maryland at College Park. And I was very involved with that group.

But it exposed me to Methodism that was very liberal, very progressive even at that time. My chaplain at the university would have been considered progressive. And so I got involved in the wider United Methodist student movement across the entire world.

And I went to a bunch of different events for that. And I was the one who was asked to stand up if there was a panel discussion about human sexuality, which was a huge issue in the United Methodist Church and has been.

And give the traditional, the biblical perspective. And I recognized that not only were there clergy in the United Methodist Church by huge numbers who had very heretical views, but also a lot of United Methodists didn't really know what they believed because of what had happened in the United Methodist Church over the history from our founding in 1968 until the present day.

And it was it was a it was eye opening. It was shocking. It was discouraging. And it it may galvanized me, I believe, to stand up for biblical faith inside of a denomination that was what we called at the time a, quote, big tent.

That's the term that United Methodists have used for a very long time to talk about what kind of denomination that they wanted to have.

Why the Global Methodist Church Took So Long to Leave

And so you began discovering more and more of disturbing things. And one of the things that that folks from the outside looking in and perhaps even those within the United Methodist Church are wondering, what took so long?

What what what fellowship does darkness have with light that people. I'm always puzzled when I hear about biblically sound brothers and sisters in Christ who are still in denominations that have been overrun by leftists and apostates.

I don't know what kind of fellowship you could possibly share. And on some occasions, I don't know if this is the case with you, and perhaps you could let me know. On some occasions, if you are a church that is a congregation that is in a denomination, you one of the requirements is that you fund seminaries in that denomination and other institutions and organizations.

And you would be therefore required to use God's money to on on some occasions be funding satanic counterfeits of Christianity. And so so tell us about that. Why did it take so long in your experience for a sufficient number of folks to finally get together and say, oh, we no longer can be party to this.

We can no longer be unevenly yoked.

So it has a lot to do with how we're governed as a denomination. So Methodism is governed by a series of conferences. We have the General Conference, which is members from all over the world who meet together every four years to make policy for the United Methodist Church and then underneath of that are things called jurisdiction conferences, which handle a certain amount of a certain region.

And then below that are annual conferences, which are a more local state sized area. And so the wheels of Methodism grind slowly because we believe in conciliar type of work where we get together and we discuss and we conference together.

We call it holy conferencing. But really, honestly, since 1968 up until even 2016 and perhaps even 2019, conservatives have been on the ascendancy in controlling what happens at General Conference. And so in 1972, the sexuality discussion first came up after the UMC was formed and it was formed between a merger, a merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren, which were two Wesleyan denominations that in the heat and flurry of the ecumenical movement of the late 1900s decided to merge.

But they added a line to our book of discipline, which said that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. And that showed up in 1972 as an amendment to a larger piece of legislation that was being taken up.

And from that point on, that line in our book of discipline has become sort of a flashpoint every four years at General Conference. And honestly, our denomination had not been overrun by liberals like many of the other main lines had.

It was almost a denomination with a dual character, very evangelical folks sat along the side, some very liberal folks. And we sort of left each other alone for the most part, except for every four years when we came in to argue about what was going to be in the discipline.

And as time went on, liberals tried to find loopholes to get around the rules in the discipline. So conservatives would add more rules to the discipline to prevent things like same-sex marriages and the ordination of openly gay clergy, and then provided other kinds of legislation so that we could find out how to hold folks accountable who were violating the rules.

And so every four years, conservatives would come in and they would have to come up with some other piece of legislation to block some liberal attempt to get around the rules. And this went on and on and on from 72 up until 2019.

And really between the year 2000 and the year 2019 in the 21st century, Methodism started growing by leaps and bounds outside of the United States. We are the only one of the mainline denominations that is a worldwide church.

I was part of it at the time. And so we have a massive quantity of United Methodists in the continent of Africa, in Asia, in Eastern Europe. And each group of United Methodists across the world gets representation at the General Conference.

And it's proportional. So as time went on, though there seemed to be more and more progressives in leadership positions and in congregations in the United States, there were more and more very traditional conservative United Methodists across the world.

So that by the 2016 General Conference, when this sort of sexuality question came to a head, a united front of conservative Africans and Asians and Eastern Europeans with the conservatives left in the United Methodist Church in the United States was able to continue to control the floor of General Conference to keep the discipline traditional and biblical, regardless of what others in the denomination wanted.

So there was never, I wouldn't say never, but there was very little reason that we would have ever thought that we needed to leave. And in fact, in 2016, we were prepared to pass legislation in 2019 at a special session, which would have divided the denomination and pushed out the progressive voice.

Because we had a working majority on the floor of General Conference. But that didn't turn out that way.

Yeah, and of course, I have a bias since I am a Reformed Baptist and Baptists historically have never been denominationally minded. We've never had bishops other than the biblical understanding or the way that we define or exegete the scriptures.

Bishops are just elders, which are just pastors. But we've always believed in the autonomy and independence of the local congregation. So you're being interviewed by somebody who already has a bias against denominationalism.

Agreed. But there is, I'm sure, a great number of my listeners who I'm assuming are predominantly very conservative who would say that they would never even have tolerated being in a denomination that was not excommunicating unrepentant leftists who were in ministry.

Yes. So that's another reason that there's question marks over the heads of folks like me, I'm sure, who are wondering. I understand the things that you have said that perhaps made the departure, the exodus, out of the United Methodist Church that took so long but at the same time, they are still saying to themselves it should have happened long before this anyway.

Yes, agreed. And unfortunately, because we operate in a very different polity as far as how we're organized. And though we do have very strong systems of accountability, there were constantly ways to thwart those things.

And there were pastors in the United Methodist Church brought up on charges multiple times. Bishop Shelby Spong in 2004 was actually charged with denial of the resurrection. And he was ultimately acquitted.

Episcopal bishop. Yes. No. He's a United Methodist bishop. I'm sorry, not Bishop Shelby Spong. I'm sorry. Bishop Sprague. Bishop Joseph Sprague. Very much like Bishop Shelby Spong. Yes. He was acquitted by the jury of his peers because of the way we handle church trials and the way that the jury listened to the charges against him.

Well, we're going to pick up right where you left off when we return. That was... Oh, I'm sorry. You cut out there and I thought you were finished speaking.

In the way that we're governed and our governance system is very important to us. This sort of holy conferencing idea that we inherited from John Wesley, our founder. So, you know, when you're in the midst of a battle and you're not sure, you know, you can't see beyond what you know in the heat of it, we're convinced that we're going to finally, you know, expel those folks from the denomination, which was what the objective was all along.

It was very similar to what happened in the Southern Baptist Convention in the late 1970s when it was actually the conservatives who were able to expel the more liberal folks in the late 1970s in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Okay, we have to go to our first commercial break and once again, if anybody wants to send in a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say you are still in the United Methodist Church and you are on the same page with my guest and you would like to get counsel about departing the United Methodist Church and you don't want to bring attention to your identity in public at this point.

Things like that. I understand that that would be a reason that would compel you to be anonymous. In fact, you might even be a pastor in the United Methodist Church who still hasn't jumped ship and you have questions and do not yet feel ready to make yourself publicly known for this desire to depart.

Or maybe you're radically opposed to what my guest is saying. Well, we understand that there will be reasons why you'd want to remain anonymous but please, if it's a general question, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

That email address again is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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The Wesleyan Roots, Women in Ministry, and Complementarianism in the Home

Well we're now back with my guest today Matt Sickle and he is representing the new denomination the Global Methodist Church and if you have any questions please go to or send your email to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. And by the way I know that you're not a Calvinist Matt but your movement reminded me of a quote by John Calvin a dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.

And so I am glad, very glad that you and many of your brothers and sisters that were formerly in the United Methodist Church began in a more forceful and tangible way making your protest known by parting company with that denomination.

And Matt it's as you know there was a time when if you said the word Methodist people would likely immediately have popped into their head the circuit preachers of long ago open air evangelists they would think of everything that is associated with purity in living in biblical morality.

They would be thinking of John Wesley who is a hero of the Christian faith to many and in spite of his radical differences with his friend George Whitfield the Calvinist Methodist they remained friends and many people would never guess that from some of the heated interaction they had in writing over their differences on soteriology.

But nonetheless George Whitfield requested of Wesley to preach at his funeral when that day came when he departed this earth and entered into glory. And that actually happened. John Wesley did preach at George Whitfield's funeral.

But do you have any kind of a timeline when this crumbling began to occur. I'm assuming some of it has to do with the higher critics higher criticism originating in Germany that polluted across the board most of the denominational world such as the Presbyterians and the Lutherans and the Congregationalists.

And in fact the fundamentalist modernist controversy has everything to do with those who remain faithful to the scriptures finding it necessary to depart from those that were teaching all kinds of heresies.

So tell us from what your knowledge is of a timeline things that began to crumble and began to steadily get worse. Yeah sure I'd be happy to.

So in 1904 there was a heresy trial in upper part of New England the man on trial was a professor at Boston University which is a United Methodist seminary and was a Methodist seminary at the time and he was on trial for a theological persuasion called personalism and it was very very outside of what we would think of as mainstream Christianity and it really elevated the individual, the human being over the word of God in many respects and he was on, it was a church trial and he was acquitted at that church trial and that really opened the flood gates for liberal theology to sort of come into Methodism and at the time it was the Methodist Episcopal Church North and the Methodist Episcopal Church South as the southern churches had separated from the northern churches before the Civil War and that trial started sort of the disintegration and what was happening was, you made reference to it earlier, there were, there are denominational seminaries, there are 13 of them currently in the United Methodist Church and what was going on was the seminaries were extraordinarily influenced by the higher critics in Germany, very liberal theology coming out of New England, the transcendentalists and that sort of thing and all of that you know led up to the fundamentalist modernist controversy and many people would have told you that that didn't affect the Methodist Church at all and I've written elsewhere at length that explained how it did in fact affect the church but the problem was because the church was divided from 1844 up until that point, while the fundamentalist modernist controversy was going on at the same time there were forces trying to reunite the southern and the northern branches together so the concerns of that and that reunification effort really overshadowed the other activities that were happening in the denomination with regard to liberal theology against conservative theology and so with that reunification and with a bit more conservative theological thought coming in when the southern churches arrived sort of tamped down some of the fundamentalist modernist controversy issues in the Methodist Church but they were still there and very active and by the time you end up in the middle of the 1900s, the 20th century you have lines forming and out of them came a conservative group in United Methodism known as Good News.

Good News magazine was founded in the mid 1960s to give voice to conservatives within Methodism and they have really carried the banner for reform and renewal in the United Methodist Church since their founding and I really must give credit to Good News and all of the folks who have done an outstanding job over the years at trying to hold the denomination faithful to what has been our solid doctrinal standards but in 1968 I mentioned earlier that there was a merger between the Methodist Church now reunited and the Evangelically United Brethren which is a smaller historically Germanic speaking Methodist denomination in that in the midst of the very heady 1960s and the sexual revolution and all that was happening there they were going to take two doctrinal statements.

The Methodist articles of religion which were written by John Wesley 25 articles of religion and really had come out of the 39 articles of religion of the Anglican Church from the Reformation and they were going to merge those articles which are very solidly biblical and strong with an equally strong confession of faith from the Evangelically United Brethren and create a new doctrinal statement and there was a blue ribbon panel that was set up to do this in 1968 and they were to report in 1972 on their work to merge the two doctrinal standards together into one solid biblical doctrinal statement but many of the people on that committee ended up moving in a very liberal direction and instead of merging the documents they set them aside in our book of discipline and called them historical documents and instead wrote a brand new statement on how we do theology in United Methodism and we were no longer going to take our standards juridically and literally and instead we were going to use scripture, reason, tradition and experience as ideas and sources and understandings that we would work with to theologize was the word that they liked to use and so between 1972 and 1988 those doctrinal standards which should have been the guidestone for all of the work and all of the theology and all of the doctrine taught in Methodism were sidelined and so you had people coming through the denominational seminaries who understood those two documents as sort of bygone statements of faith that really are nice to inform us but are no longer the main focus for our work and it took until 1988 for the folks at Good News and many of the other congregational because the congregations were always more conservative than the clergy who were coming out of these seminaries to send enough delegates to general conference to reassert the authority of scripture and the authority of our doctrine back into a prominent place but by that time the cat was out of the bag and so you have massive amounts of liberal theologians and liberal clergy infecting what was the United Methodist Church and that's Chris what really set up this battle that we've been discussing.

Methodist and Wesleyan Denominations

We have a question from a listener in Hummlestown Pennsylvania, Seth and Seth says, Hello brothers, can you highlight the differences between Methodists and Wesleyans? Now I'm assuming, in fact Seth if you want to send in another email to clarify this but I'm assuming he means the denominations because obviously conservative Methodists would be universally Wesleyan, well the majority would anyway.

There used to be a group of Calvinist Methodists from Wales that would not have been Wesleyans but you can scarcely find people identifying themselves that way today. Martin Lloyd Jones was a Calvinist Methodist for those who are listeners who didn't know that but I am like I said before assuming that Seth means what's the difference between the denomination known as Methodist and maybe he means global Methodist and the Wesleyan denomination because there could be some confusion there when you know we see.

His question like that. Yeah I would think that's a safe assumption so there are other what I would call Methodist or Wesleyan denominations in the United States the majority of which are rather conservative, the Wesleyan denomination being one of them.

There are also the Free Methodists and there are the historically Black Methodist denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion and then there are the Holiness folks Church of the Nazarene and some other Holiness denominations and then the Pentecostals that come out of them.

The Wesleyan Church is one of the Holiness denominations and there were a large group of Methodists in the middle of the 1800s who decided that the Methodist Church even then wasn't standing solidly enough on the doctrines of Holiness and entire sanctification that Wesley originally preached and so they separated from the main Methodist Episcopal Church in the middle of the 1800s and so there are a bunch of other denominations that tend to look a little bit more Holiness than the Methodists do and the Wesleyan Church would be one of them.