The United Methodist Church, while declining for decades in its American version, has been growing exponentially in Africa.

As part of United Methodists worldwide, Africans have a large say in what happens in the denomination.

Africans have generally opposed efforts to update the traditional Christian stance of marriage as between a man and a woman.

While U.S. church leaders have increasingly pushed for full LGBTQ inclusion, calling for an end to bans on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ clergy, Africans have pushed back against those efforts.

The United Methodist General Conference opened on Tuesday in Charlotte, and as it continues through May 3, those tensions will be in play.

See also:

As a way of resolving this clash, U.S. leaders have been advancing a new effort to offer regional autonomy – for U.S. churches, and for conferences in other countries, including those in Africa.

That would allow the U.S. church to adopt rules that reflect its own culture – such as embracing same-sex marriage, while African churches keep their bans against acceptance of same-sex relationships.

“We are not suddenly overnight a progressive denomination, when a third of the delegates are coming out of Africa,” said the Rev. Brian Erickson, senior pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Homewood, a reserve delegate to General Conference.

“This will be the last General Conference where the Americans have a majority, and it’s a slim majority.”

For U.S. progressives, the matter is urgent. This may be the last General Conference where Americans outnumber United Methodists from other countries.

“In 2000, the international delegates made up around 16 percent of voting delegates,” Erickson said. “This go-around, they make up 44 percent.”

Since so many churches have left the U.S. denomination through disaffiliation, U.S. church decline will be reflected in the size of delegations and Americans will likely be the minority.

After a large exodus of American conservatives who have left the denomination the past two years – about a quarter of all churches and more than half in Alabama – progressives may have a slight numbers advantage at this General Conference, a window that could close fast.

“We haven’t redone those delegation representative numbers since disaffiliation,” Erickson said.

“So, whatever the next conference is, all of us will be realigned with the new numbers. The American church is going to have less of a voice the next go-around. They (Americans) still will have a slight majority at this one. This will be the last one for the foreseeable future.”

The proposal for “regionalization” calls for the seven central conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States – three of them in Africa – to each have the same authority to pass legislation for their own regions. It’s already made it out of committee and will be voted on next week.

It will require a two-thirds majority to pass at General Conference, then would also require two-thirds vote in the regional conferences. Such a proposal has previously failed at the regional level.

“We passed it at General Conference, but it didn’t pass the ratification process,” Erickson said.

The issue of African participation in this General Conference has already been a major theme going into day two. Many of the African voting delegates expected to attend are not in Charlotte. Only 87 percent of 862 delegates were on hand as the conference opened.

The Rev. David Livingston, a delegate from the Great Plains Conference of Kansas and Nebraska, on Tuesday requested a full accounting of letters of invitation, flight arrangements and an explanation for the missing delegates from Africa.

An African delegate complained that official documents have been presented mostly in English and are not immediately available in the other three official languages of the meeting: French, Portuguese and Kiswahili.

One African delegate complained that per diem funding for African delegations they have received in the past has not been given this time, and Africans did not have access to food that was culturally acceptable.

“A lot of folks in Africa and Asia see our structure as colonial, and it is in many ways,” Erickson said.

“Our jurisdictional structure is a holdover from the racism of the Deep South in 1939. Part of the challenge of being a church that’s been around for so long is we’ve got to deal with some of these skeletons in the closet of the ways we made decisions in the past, and how they’re not only not efficient and effective for the modern era, they’re also laden with sinful and short-sighted thinking. We need some reform.”

The denomination has touted wide-ranging inclusive input on its proposed new Social Principles statement, which would eliminate some of the old language such as “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” which dates to 1972, the first General Conference after a merger created the United Methodist Church in 1968.

Africans, Asians and Europeans have shared in the drafting of the new summary of social beliefs for the worldwide church that will be voted on next week.

“We understand that all of us may not agree on every statement, but our goal was to find language to reach across diverse contexts to encourage conversation and put our faith into action,” the Rev. Ande Emmanuel of Nigeria told the conference on Wednesday morning.

In opening the conference on Tuesday, Bishop Thomas Bickerton of New York, president of the Council of Bishops, urged delegates to work to revitalize the denomination.

“Don’t you tell us we don’t believe in scripture, in the doctrine of the church, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ or claim that we don’t believe in the power of the Holy Spirit,” Bickerton said.

Update: A petition to amend the constitution to allow regionalization got the necessary two-thirds majority on Thursday, with 586 yes votes and 164 no, but still requires further two-thirds approval by all conferences.

See also: United Methodist General Conference votes to allow churches in Russia, Ukraine to leave