By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
The Methodist Church was founded by John Wesley in 1738.
By the 1840s, it was the largest Protestant denomination in America.
Its conservative fundamentalist position was well-known, from teaching avoidance of most “worldly” amusements including mixed bathing (swimming), ballroom dancing, dancing, theater attendance, card gaming, as well as abstinence from liquor, tobacco, gambling, and swearing.
The church of yesteryear would hardly recognize the modern church. Nor would the church of the 1960s recognize the 2026 Methodist Church.
I spent almost 41 years as a United Methodist, including as a certified lay speaker and pastor, so I know the church inside out.
My most distressing experience was in researching the denial of earned degrees, termination of careers of science professors, and the hell some go through (which has resulted in 11 suicides that I am aware of) because they recognized the overwhelming scientific case against the idea that apes can become people as a result of damage to the genome caused by mutations.
This evolutionary claim, that the eminent British ornithologist Douglas Dewar (1875-1957) called an illusion, could never have occurred due to the laws of genetics, the subject that I taught at the college level.
In the over 200 cases that I researched of professors who appealed to the courts for the injustice mentioned above, invariably some Methodist bishop would testify that evolution was accepted by most informed Christians as the method God used to create life. The Methodist Church officially supports the evolution of humans from some apelike ancestor.
Courts tend to be very impressed with the testimony of bishops. Leading evolutionists have stated that an evolutionist bishop was worth ten scientists in court. One result of Methodist Church court testimony was that Bible-affirming cases, of all the cases I examined, were all lost in court.
The court ruling that, given billions of years for apes to become people by mutations, is now hardened into law. I have carefully documented this in my 274-page book on Amazon, The Methodist Darwinian Syndrome: The Consequences of Adopting Darwinian Theology (see the cover below).
Darwin made it very clear that his goal was to murder God by replacing the reason most people believe in him, namely recognizing the wonders of His creation, with another theory of “creation,” namely evolutionism.
In fact, Darwinism is the doorway to atheism, the title of a book I authored by that name. And Darwin was amazingly successful. Before Darwin, almost 100 percent of naturalists believed in God. After Darwin, 97 percent of biologists reject belief in God.
The Continued Decline of the Methodist Church
Pastor Tom Fuller wrote that the UMC has removed Asbury Theological Seminary (Wilmore, KY), Luther Seminary (St. Paul, MN), Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan University (Rochester, NY) and Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University (St. Davids, PA) from its list of theological schools approved for UM ministry. How many more will be added?
Pastor Fuller added that one reason was that the UMC blesses same-sex marriage, and Asbury and the three other seminaries do not. Fuller added from his Facebook page, which I lightly edited, that:
The irony is, the leftist UMC assumes itself superior because of its theological and social diversity — except most Christians, including those who think with balanced reason, do not.
The UMC has fallen from 11.3 million members to under four million, and the freefall continues. Yet apparently not one of its leaders senses that what they are doing is wrong.
The UMC has become a cult, defined as a religious organization whose doctrines directly conflict with Scripture. Theological liberalism resembles ancient Baalism more than first-century Christianity because of its preoccupation with deviant sex and its tacit blessing of the disposal of unwanted children who are produced by promiscuity.
Ever since Jesus walked on the Earth, groups of religious people have been trying to recreate Him in their image. His way includes this command: “If anyone would be My disciple, let him take up his cross and follow Me” (Matt. 16:24).
That means we abstain from acting on our base urges if acting might harm someone. We resist temptation and do what is right for everyone involved, especially children.
Choices have consequences, and we cannot defeat God’s objective. Natural truth with carnal, subjective sophistries will take them down. To paraphrase James, the Sun of God’s unchangeable truth will rise on them, and its scorching heat will wither the plant they are trying to cultivate, even as they strut around, posing as legitimate spokespersons for the Lord (James 1:11).
Indeed, this is already happening, but they are blinded. Involuntarily, they are demonstrating that the Scriptures are true.
Pastor Fuller said it much better than I could. I do wonder why the UMC seems so determined to self-destruct. When my great-grandchildren ask, “What is the United Methodist Church?” I will have to answer, “Like Rome, they rose and became great, but eventually self-destructed by their rejection of God’s word.”
Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com Bergman’s website is: https://crev.info/author/jbergman/
