As someone who grew up in the Methodist church, I'm pretty certain that the Methodists will never come around on this issue. In fact, most of the people I went to church with growing up (and yes, I'm an atheist nowadays) think that same-sex marriage will cause America to disappear off the face of the earth.
Guessing you didn't grow up in the Methodist Church of 2015, though. I mean it was 5 short years ago that no one influential in either party supported gay marriage.
Nah, I'm with Wolverine. I grew up in the UMC, and attended a UMC church through 2012. The Methodist church in the US tends to be pathologically afraid of rocking the boat; witness the obsession with attempting to find a "third way" when it comes to letting openly LGBT clergy into the church and permitting gay marriage:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/14/united-methodist-church-gay-marriage_n_6680290.htmlhttp://www.ibtimes.com/united-methodist-church-moves-allow-lgbt-clergy-gay-marriage-1814812Kennetha was actually one of my pastors for three years, and I feel pretty confident in saying that she personally supports gay marriage. But, in order to get anything remotely decent done in the UMC, you have to include that sort of "third way" rhetoric that almost apologizes for the idea of letting gay people serve fully in the church. The problem really isn't with the UMC in the US. I suspect you'd be quite right that Methodists in the US would by a moderate margin (not as much as many of the other mainline denominations, because of the more Southern-slanted membership of the church) favor greater LGBT inclusiveness in the church, but more than 30% of the members of the UMC are
not from the US, with most of them coming from Africa or the Phillippines. And that proportion keeps growing and growing.
That said, I miss me my red hymnal, and sometimes I think about going and finding a Reconciling congregation when I next move. (Or sneaking to
Foundry UMC, which is notable for its strident activism, once and a while for the time being!)
