Ivory Coast splits with UMC but other African conferences slow to follow
A United Methodist church, rear, in San Pédro, Ivory Coast. (Photo by Axe/Creative Commons)
After the United Methodist Church voted this spring to allow its clergy to marry same-sex couples and lifted its ban on ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, Methodists around the world watched how the denomination’s African members would respond.
On May 28, United Methodists in the Ivory Coast seemed to provide the answer when they announced the departure of their annual conference, a jurisdiction of some 1 million people, from the worldwide church.
At the annual conference’s extraordinary session in Cocody, a suburb of the capital, Abidjan, Bishop Benjamin Boni, president of the annual conference, accused the United Methodist Church of sacrificing its integrity and charged that the denomination had distanced itself from scripture, thereby making the UMC no longer suitable for Ivorian Methodists.
