The United Methodist Church vs. Asbury Theological Seminary

The collapse of Mainline Protestantism was further evinced two weeks ago when the United Methodist Church derecognized evangelical Asbury Theological Seminary. Effectively, Asbury Seminary is no longer recognized to educate United Methodist ministers.

Asbury is America’s eighth largest seminary and the largest theologically Wesleyan seminary in the world, with nearly 900 full-time students from many denominations. (View data for America’s seminaries from the Association of Theological Schools here.) It had once hosted the largest number of United Methodist seminarians of any school in America. As recently as 2017, over 10 percent of United Methodist ordinands were Asbury graduates.

Founded in the 1920s in Wilmore, Ky., outside Lexington, Asbury Seminary originally emerged from Asbury College across the street, aligning with the Wesleyan Holiness Movement. That movement stressed personal sanctification. In subsequent decades, Asbury became the chief institution for evangelicals within Mainline Methodism, whose official seminaries had theologically liberalized in the early 20th century.

Evangelicals were always a 20th century minority within what in 1968 became The United Methodist Church, America’s largest Mainline denomination, and largest Protestant denomination until surpassed by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1967. But evangelicals in United Methodism were a vibrant and eventually a politically influential minority.

United Methodist debates over sexuality began in 1972. Every four years the denomination’s governing General Conference debated the church’s official stance affirming sex only within male/female marriage. Progressives prevailed in other Mainline denominations. But growing United Methodism in Africa aligned with U.S. evangelicals on the sexuality votes to maintain a biblical stance.

After Africans and U.S. evangelicals again prevailed at a special General Conference in 2019, but narrowly, U.S. evangelicals exploited a four-year window to exit the denomination with church property, concluding in 2023. Nearly 8,000 U.S. congregations voted themselves out of United Methodism. Half of these churches joined the new Global Methodist Church, while the other half have remained independent or formed new networks.

Those nearly 8,000 churches were the core constituency for Asbury Seminary, where the percentage of United Methodist students fell to 9 percent. The denomination has 13 official seminaries that include Duke Divinity School, Boston School of Theology, Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. It also recognizes about two dozen other seminaries to educate United Methodist seminarians.

United Methodist progressives for obvious reasons never liked Asbury Seminary, but pre-schism, it was too influential to challenge directly. Post-schism, it became an easier target.

Asbury was a threat to progressives not just for its evangelical theology, but also because it competed for the dwindling number of United Methodist seminarians. In 1968, when United Methodism emerged from a denominational merger, there were 11 million members served by 13 official seminaries. As of 2024, there were 3.9 million members still expected to sustain those 13 schools, which cannot endure.

Nearly all the seminaries that United Methodism recognizes outside of its own are theologically progressive, such as Harvard, Yale, and Vanderbilt Divinity Schools. Although United Methodist officials faulted Asbury’s traditional stance on sexuality, at least two still recognized schools, Fuller Seminary and Seattle Pacific Seminary, retain some statement of traditional standards.

Asbury Seminary was hardly surprised by the delisting, although it came faster than many had expected. Its president, David Watson, is ordained in the Global Methodist Church. Asbury serves that denomination and has students from other Wesleyan churches such as the Church of the Nazarene, The Free Methodist Church, The Wesleyan Church, The Church of God (Anderson), the Salvation Army, plus Pentecostals and others, including Anglicans, and national Methodist churches around the world. There are about 80 million Methodists globally in scores of denominations.

Meanwhile, United Methodism, having lost nearly two-thirds of its U.S. membership over 60 years and losing hundreds of thousands of more members annually, has a bleak future. Thousands of its 20,000 U.S. churches will merge or close in coming years. And the same is true for its 13 official seminaries.

As United Methodism’s U.S. constituency shrinks, Asbury’s is growing internationally. Wesleyan influenced movements, which includes much of Pentecostalism, are surging overseas. In the United States, Christianity is becoming post-denominational and credobaptist. But there will remain a niche for Wesleyan theology, with its focus on sanctification and its sacramental perspective. Interestingly, Asbury is the only seminary among America’s Baptist dominated top ten that teaches infant baptism. (Reformed Theological Seminary, also a great pedobaptist school, is just outside the top ten.)

United Methodism may or may not functionally exist in 10 years. Asbury Seminary certainly will. But in a post-denominational age it cannot rely on denominations to sustain it. Like other seminaries, it will have to sell itself in a wider and wilder religious marketplace, where Christians self-collate their spiritual resources instead of relying on the institutional church.

The age of Mainline Protestantism, and perhaps of traditional denominations, is closing. But the great Protestant traditions, including Methodism/Wesleyanism, will continue and are more needed than ever. We should pray that Asbury’s most important days are in the future, not the past.