The United Methodist Church has established ideal conditions for a field study on church growth and vitality. I hope some scholar takes advantage of the situation. If I weren’t retired and no longer doing active research, I would.

The United Methodist Council of Bishops announced Nov. 5 that regional governing units across four continents had approved a major denominational reorganization. The plan breaks the single United Methodist Church, with elements in Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States, into four semiautonomous regions. This reorganization lets each region decide whether to accept same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay clergy as well as accommodate local practices to each social context.

United Methodist law prohibited same-sex marriage and the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from 1972 to 2024. Efforts over the past 40 years to eliminate these prohibitions led to growing friction among United Methodists around the globe and a 2019-2023 split in the U.S. church.

One question for scholars to study is whether United Methodist congregations in regions that maintain traditional denominational values on human sexuality are more vital (attract more members and worshippers) than those in regions that accommodate changing sexual norms. Statistics on membership, worship attendance, and giving to ministries from the two groups should tell the tale and support or disprove a recent sociological hypothesis about church vitality (see below).

A second question could be whether congregations that left the United Methodist Church between 2019 and 2023 or those that remained in the denomination are more successful at attracting folks to the Christian faith. Again, statistics on membership, worship attendance, and giving to ministries among the groups could provide evidence.

The 2005 book, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy by sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, could provide the theoretical grounding for this field study.

In the late 1990s, Stark and Finke offered an economic analogy for church growth and vitality in the United States. Each U.S. faith group began in a specific, relatively stable market niche, they said. Each faith group provided a specific religious “product” (set of beliefs, approach to biblical interpretation, worship style, etc.) to its followers, offered a distinctive community experience, and differentiated itself from society at large.

To move into a larger market niche, Stark and Finke said, a faith community needed to attract more members. It did that by reducing tension with prevailing social norms, so it could include more people. Over time, extreme faith groups (sects) tended to shed qualities that separated them from society and drove people away, such as rejecting same-sex marriage. Thus, sects evolved into denominational expressions of religion that generally embraced temporal norms.

But the more a faith group became like society, Stark and Finke said, the less its religious product was seen as distinctive and appealing to new members. Groups that accommodated social norms the most lost members and spiritual vitality. On the other hand, faith communities that adopted standards more in tension with social norms often showed more vitality and attracted members.

Stark and Finke illustrated that dynamic in a 2001 study among United Methodists in California and Nevada. Pastors who increased their congregation’s tension with society by moving from more liberal to more evangelical preaching, stricter biblical interpretations, and more celebratory worship styles saw increases in organizational vitality. Conversely, pastors who attempted to keep reducing tension between church and social practices to appeal to as many people as possible saw losses in organizational vitality.

When religious groups move too far to either extreme, Stark and Finke said, they appeal to an increasingly smaller segment of the religious market.

Two United Methodist actions set the stage for a potential field study of this religious-market dynamic: (1) a 2019 vote to allow congregations to disaffiliate from the denomination for reasons of conscience concerning understandings of human sexuality and (2) the 2024 vote to create regional governance in Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States under the United Methodist umbrella.

Some 25% of The United Methodist Church’s 30,500 U.S. congregations left the denomination between 2019 and 2023, according to a 2024 study by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. More than half the departing congregations were in the denomination’s Southeastern Jurisdiction, which includes most of the states in the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Tennessee. Other large numbers of disaffiliations were in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

The regional judicatories with the highest percentage of congregational departures were in Northwest Texas (81%), North Alabama (52%), East Texas (50%), and South Georgia (50%), the Lewis report said.

Under the recently ratified United Methodist reorganization plan, each region can now adopt its own book of rules, worship rituals, and hymns to accommodate ministry in its locale. Furthermore, each region can set standards for church membership, clergy ordination, and chargeable offenses under church law. The goal is to allow each region greater flexibility to adapt governance and ministry to its social and missional context.

Over the past year, United Methodist judicatories in the United States have already dropped prohibitions of same-sex marriage and ordination of gay clergy members to accommodate U.S. social trends. Church bodies in Africa and the Philippines are likely to maintain the bans to fit social contexts in those regions.

Proponents of both the 2019-2023 church split and the 2024 reorganization said the moves were necessary so The United Methodist Church could become more appealing to potential church members. A field study over the next few years could show whether moves to accommodate changing social standards helped or hurt The United Methodist Church’s effectiveness at making disciples of Jesus Christ—and whether Stark and Finke’s hypothesis about church growth and vitality was valid.