The lawsuit comes amid a slow-moving schism in the United Methodist Church largely over its stance on biblical sexuality and the ordination and marriage of its members who identify as LGBTQ. And, according to the head of a new, theologically conservative Methodist denomination that recently split from the United Methodist Church, it likely won’t be the last.

More than 100 churches are suing the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church to immediately disaffiliate from the denomination.
The lawsuit comes amid a slow-moving schism in the United Methodist Church largely over its stance on biblical sexuality and the ordination and marriage of its members who identify as LGBTQ.
And, according to the head of a new, theologically conservative Methodist denomination that recently split from the United Methodist Church, it likely won’t be the last.
“Florida is the first of what I would anticipate might be a number of similar lawsuits occurring,” said Keith Boyette, transitional connectional coordinating officer of the conservative Global Methodist Church.
In the lawsuit—filed Thursday (July 14) in Bradford County, Florida, by the National Center for Life and Liberty—106 churches allege the requirements for disaffiliation approved by a special session of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference are “onerous, and in many cases, prohibitive.”
That disaffiliation plan allows churches wishing to leave the denomination over its stance on sexuality to take their properties with them through 2023 after paying apportionments and pension liabilities. It was added to the Book of Discipline by General Conference delegates in 2019 alongside legislation called the Traditional Plan that strengthened the denomination’s language barring the ordination and marriage of United Methodists who identify as LGBTQ.
The annual conference is using the disaffiliation plan and the denomination’s trust clause to “hold for ransom Plaintiff Churches’ real and personal property,” according to the suit, when previously existing provisions in the Book of Discipline allow churches to simply deed their properties to other evangelical denominations.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit alleges the Council of Bishops and its past president—Bishop Ken Carter, who heads both the Florida and Western North Carolina conferences—are not abiding by the same Book of Discipline. Among other things, it said they did nothing as the California-Nevada Annual Conference elected the denomination’s first openly LGBTQ bishop, the Illinois Great Rivers Conference certified its first drag queen as a candidate for ministry, and the Western Jurisdiction declared itself a “safe harbor” for LGBTQ clergy.
In a written statement in response to the lawsuit, Carter said the Florida Annual Conference was “deeply grieved by this, as we seek to be a church united in love and in mission.”
The Florida Annual Conference is committed to the “gracious exit” provided in the Book of Discipline and has tried to engage churches in that process, according to its bishop’s statement.
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We need to get a grip on the goodness of God.  To allow the truth of God’s utter perfect goodness to transform us in our thinking and living and fighting sin and following Jesus.  We need to help one another see again and again the goodness of God so that we see temptation and sin for what it is; a lie, or a twisting of what is good to perverse ends.  

That’s the question.  And it’s the question behind so many of our questions.  We are tempted to believe the lie that God is not good because he hasn’t given me this or that or the other.  God isn’t good because his kingdom doesn’t fit with my kingdom.  Or he isn’t good because of these circumstances, or this suffering, or … fill in the blank.
Is God good?  It’s the original question that sinks its fangs into us every time.   It’s the question behind so many pastoral struggles and discipling issues.  A failure to believe that God is good and good all the time is behind the unhappy marriage with it’s dreams of, or talk of, separation and divorce.  It is at the root of envy of others, the nagging ‘if only’, the taking of something for ourselves even though our good God as an expression of his love says don’t.  It’s why so many fall away tempted the promise of good in created things rather than in the fountain of that goodness in the God who is good.
It’s a question we face again and again in varied situations all day.  Is God good?  Is his word good?
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Tyndale had cracked the foundation. Common people began reading the New Testament, for the first time, in their own language . . . and they acted with righteous indignation. They realized they had been kept in darkness, for centuries, from the light of Holy Scripture. A movement swept through England which already was sweeping through Europe: The Protestant Reformation. This reformation spawned denominations we know today as Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, and many others who are having an enormous impact on societies all over the world. 

William Tyndale was taken to a high platform in public view. Bishops flanked him, robed in their priestly vestments. Anointing oil, symbolically, was scraped from his hands. The Lord’s Supper was placed before him and then quickly removed, tauntingly. Tyndale was wearing priestly vestments. They were stripped away from his body. Finally, he was handed over to the hangman. In his last moments, he cried-out, “Lord! Open the king of England’s eyes.” They strangled him above a pyre of brush. He was burned. Gunpowder had been placed in the brush. His body was mutilated by the explosions. All for what? What was his crime?
He translated the NT into the English language.
Tyndale, the Man
William Tyndale was brilliant. He was fluent in 8 languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course, English. He was, first and foremost, a translator, but he was much more than that: A defender of gospel truth, a parser of words, a coiner of terms, a pitcher of phrases, a genius in language, a man of steely conviction. He was God’s English wordsmith. He not only gave us the Bible in our language. He “gave us a Bible language.”[1]
He coined a litany of now-famous phrases:

Let there be light.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
The salt of the earth.
Fight the good fight.
Let not your heart be troubled.
A city that is set on a hill.
As sheep having no shepherd.
Ask and it shall be given.
Twinkling of an eye.

He invented English words never before used: scapegoat, Passover, atonement, etc. His gift for language was magnificent, so much so that 90% of the King James Version Bible comes from Tyndale, directly transposed.
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