Alongside essays from a diverse group of United Methodist leaders, he wrote that he believed the denomination should not split.
“Now, years later, I realized that my hope and my dream turned out not to be possible because the church has in fact, split this last year,” Jones told Religion News Service. “But it was a desire to try to do whatever I could to hold it together and point the way forward. It just didn’t work.”
It didn’t work, he said, because some church leaders and regional conferences have taken action to oppose the denomination’s official stance barring LGBT members from ordination and marriage.
“These doctrinal and moral disobedience questions have made it hard to keep the idea that we really are a church following the same Book of Discipline,” he said.
Scott Jones’s exit from the UMC is causing a stir, in part because of the unique position his family holds in Methodism. https://t.co/hQ54ziw7TP
— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 1, 2023