Alabama bishop elected president of World Methodist Council

United Methodist Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, leader of the North Alabama Conference, was elected president of the World Methodist Council at its meeting this week in Sweden.

Wallace-Padgett, who will leave her post in Birmingham on Sept. 1 after 12 years as bishop of the United Methodists of North Alabama, was elected Wednesday at the meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, said Danette Clifton, communications director for the conference, who is attending with Wallace-Padgett.

Wallace-Padgett will serve as president of the World Methodist Council for the next five years. The council meets every five years.

“The World Methodist Council is made up of 80 denominations from around the world that emerged from the Methodist movement started by John and Charles Wesley,” Clifton said.

“The organization works by considering the commonalities we share and our common theology rather than focusing on differences.”

Wallace-Padgett was elected a bishop of the United Methodist Church in 2012 and assigned to northern Alabama.

In 2021, he assumed leadership of the Holston Conference in Tennessee and will continue in that role after leaving the North Alabama Conference. He will also assume leadership of the West Virginia Conference effective Sept. 1.

In recent years, Wallace-Padgett chaired the North Alabama Conference during a period of controversy in which more than half of the conference’s churches “disaffiliated,” or left the denomination.

The churches that disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church had opposed same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy, which the United Methodist Church now supports after successful votes to update its policies on those issues at the most recent General Conference earlier this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Across the state of Alabama, more than half of United Methodist congregations have disaffiliated (about 555 churches). Most of those departures have occurred since 2022.

Nationwide, over the past four years, 7,600 congregations have left the United Methodist Church (5,600 in 2023), representing about a quarter of all United Methodist churches. They left under 2019 guidelines that allowed churches to negotiate an exit and take their property with them through the end of 2023.

In the North Alabama Conference, 198 churches disaffiliated on December 10, 2022, and another 132 churches disaffiliated on May 11, 2023.

Bishop Jonathan Holston will assume leadership of the North Alabama Conference and the Alabama-West Florida Conference, effective September 1.

Bishop David Graves, currently head of the Alabama-West Florida Conference, will oversee the Kentucky-Tennessee Conference, replacing Bishop Bill McAlilly, who is retiring after recovering from a near-fatal car accident last year.

The Alabama-West Florida Conference’s departures were complicated by tightened disaffiliation rules, with 45 churches filing a lawsuit against the conference alleging it attempted to “run out the clock” before the disaffiliation deadline to prevent them from leaving. There were 193 churches that disaffiliated from the Alabama-West Florida Conference on May 7, 2023, and eight more on Nov. 12.

A Dothan megachurch that seceded sued the conference, claiming it didn’t owe money to leave. The state Supreme Court denied the United Methodist Church’s request to dismiss the suit.

Additionally, the Alabama-West Florida Conference voted to close 10 churches this year, including the historic Uniontown United Methodist Church.