The United Methodist Church has lost more than 1 million members over new rules on premarital sex and homosexuality.

The United Methodist Church in the Ivory Coast in West Africa announced its decision to leave the denomination after delegates repealed their church’s longstanding ban on LGBTQ clergy, removing a rule forbidding “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or appointed as ministers.

Robert Blain, a Houston public high school teacher, saw many friends leave the United Methodist Church in recent years because of the denomination's ban gay clergy. But on Wednesday, Blain celebrated when reading news posted on X that the majority of UMC delegates at the annual General Conference in Charlottesville, N.C. agreed to remove a 40-year-old rule forbidding "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from taking leadership positions in the church.

United Methodist delegates on Thursday removed a 52-year-old declaration from their official social teachings that deemed “the practice of homosexuality ... incompatible with Christian teaching” — part of a wider series of historic reversals of the denomination’s longstanding disapproval of LGBTQ activity.

United Methodist delegates voted Thursday to make the denomination, which has skewed leftward in the wake of mass defections by conservative-leaning congregations, more gay- and LGBTQ-friendly.

By a 523-161 vote, delegates to the General Conference of the United Methodist Church meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, voted to drop a decadeslong definition of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and struck language saying homosexual practice “is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

The top legislative body of the United Methodist Church passed a series of measures Thursday to restructure the worldwide denomination to give each region greater equity in tailoring church life to its own customs and traditions.

The primary measure, voted on as the UMC General Conference met at the Charlotte Convention Center in North Carolina, was an amendment to the church’s constitution to divide the denomination into four equal regions—Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States.

The fracture of the United Methodist Church (UMC) is nearly complete as a quarter of U.S. congregations in the church have received permission to leave the denomination during a five-year window, closing at the end of this month. 

With 17,000 members, White’s Chapel Methodist Church in Southlake, Texas, offers multiple worship services each weekend along with the kind of attractions that only the largest houses of worship can boast: a coffee shop, an indoor playground, a Christmas festival with pony rides and fireworks, and near-daily opportunities for volunteering and socializing. On Sunday mornings, a small white bulldog named Wesley, after the founder of Methodism, roams the campus with a handler, greeting admirers.

Carolyn Moore assumed that her Evans, Georgia, church would be one of the congregations disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church (UMC). Across the country, as of June 14, more than 5,500 churches have separated along the lines of the deep fissures in the denomination: LGBT acceptance and Methodist authority structures.

But for a long time, Mosaic UMC looked like it was going to get stuck in the UMC.

A large Methodist church outside of Dallas, Texas that left the United Methodist Church (UMC) last year, has decided to start its own denomination.

White's Chapel Methodist Church overwhelmingly voted last November to disaffiliate itself from the UMC over theological disagreements about same-sex marriage.

The 17,500-member church now belongs to a new denomination it is calling the Methodist Collegiate Church (MCC). 

So far, they are the only members of the network but according to its website, the new denomination will be a middle ground among Methodists.