Bishop Karen Oliveto is retiring in a few months as a United Methodist bishop. Oliveto was emotional saying those words aloud. As the church's first openly gay bishop, her path was not always certain.

The United Methodist Church overturned its 40-year ban on gay clergy Wednesday, marking a historic shift in the church’s stance on homosexuality. The church has long been divided into factions ...

Hundreds of churches split from a regional body of the United Methodist Church (UMC) over the weekend as the second-largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. continues to hemorrhage congregations.

The United Methodist Church on Wednesday voted to lift its ban prohibiting LGBTQ+ members from serving in the church’s clergy—the latest measure in an ongoing effort to revisit the church’s ...

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The United Methodist Church is facing a crisis that will define its future. Roughly a quarter of its 30,000 congregations in the U.S. are leaving over the church's views on ...

But in the years that followed, some 7,600 U.S. conservative Methodist congregations located mostly in the South left the church over its lack of enforcement of the anti-LGBTQ policies.

Bishop Karen Oliveto sees her consecration in 2016 as a breaking point for some of the thousands of people who have made the once unthinkable decision to leave the United Methodist Church.

A quarter of the denomination’s churches have left, as the faith divides over L.G.B.T.Q. policies. By Ruth Graham Ruth Graham writes about faith and religion, and visited a Methodist church in ...