Reading the Redline of the 2024 Book of Discipline
For years it was called dialogue, listening, a wider table. Then the church set its old page beside its new one — and the words it had cut stood exposed in its own hand. This is the redline.
The Church and the Christian Church • Part Two: The United Methodist Church • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
Part One read the receipts from a distance. Here we open the book and set the old law beside the new — the exact words struck from the United Methodist Church’s own Book of Discipline, and the words written in over them.
The verdict the church removed — “incompatible with Christian teaching” — was declared in its Social Principles, required for ordination, and punishable at church trial. In 2024 all three were struck. The one mention that survives exists only to forbid the charge.
A church can cut a sentence from its own book. It cannot cut it from the mouth of Christ.
In Part One we stood back and read the tally — a list of dated votes, each one a step down. Here we come close, and open one of them up.
Because a church does not change its mind at the microphone. It changes it in the editing. And the United Methodist Church left the editing behind, in its own book, for anyone to read: the old page, and the new page written to replace it.
Set the two side by side and you do not have to be told what happened. You can see it. You can read exactly which words were removed, and exactly what was written in their place. That is what this article does. It reads the redline.
The Old Page and the New
Start with marriage, because the change there is the cleanest to see — and because marriage is not the church’s word to begin with. It is God’s. He built it in the garden, before there was a nation, a temple, or a law: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, ESV).
One man, one woman, one flesh. That is the wall, and it was hung by the hand of God. Every true sentence a church has ever written about marriage is only an echo of that one.
For decades the United Methodist Church’s Social Principles carried that echo faithfully. The church affirmed “the sanctity of the marriage covenant that is expressed in love, mutual support, personal commitment, and shared fidelity between a man and a woman.” And it did not stop at the church door. The same paragraph added, “We support laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman” (2016 Book of Discipline, ¶161.C).
Now read what stands in its place. In the 2020/2024 revision, marriage is “a sacred, lifelong covenant that brings two people of faith, an adult man and woman of consenting age, or two adult persons of consenting age, into union with one another” (¶162.D).
Look at what left the page. The words between a man and a woman — gone. The sentence supporting civil law that defined marriage as one man and one woman — gone entirely, not softened but deleted. In their place, a single new clause does all the work: or two adult persons of consenting age.
Here is the thing a church may not do, though the world does it every day. When the United Methodist Church struck “a man and a woman” from its page, it was not revising a policy of its own making. Those words were never its own. They were Genesis 2:24, written into church law — God’s definition, borrowed and preserved.
To cut them is not to update a denominational position; it is to take a knife to the Word of God and keep the book. And a church that edits God’s Word to fit the age has not written a broader gospel. It has written another one — “a different gospel… let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8, ESV). The man and the woman were not argued with. The page was replaced. But the sentence beneath the page was God’s, and it does not come out.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
The Verdict They Buried
Start with the sentence at the center of it all. For fifty-two years the United Methodist Church’s book carried one line above every other: “The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching” (2016 Book of Discipline, ¶161.G).
But a verdict is only as strong as its enforcement, and this one was enforced. It was written into the ordination standard, where it barred the door to ministry: “self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be certified as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve” (¶304.3). And it was written into the church’s trial law, where it became a punishable offense — the Discipline listed among the charges for which a minister could be tried “practices declared by The United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings,” naming the self-avowed practicing homosexual and the officiant of same-sex unions (¶2702.1b).
So the conviction was not a sentiment the church happened to hold. It was law with teeth in three places: declared in the Social Principles, required at the door of ordination, and punishable at church trial.
In 2024, the teeth came out — all of them. The sentence was struck from the Social Principles. The bar was lifted from ordination. The offense was removed from the list of charges for which a minister may be tried. Not one location was missed. To empty a conviction from three separate corners of a law book is not something that happens by drift; drift is passive, and this was deliberate — the verdict hunted down in every place it lived and removed from each.
Scripture has an image for a man who takes a knife to the words he cannot bear to keep. When the scroll of God’s word was read to King Jehoiakim, “as Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a knife and throw them into the fire… Yet neither the king nor any of his servants… was afraid” (Jeremiah 36:23–24, ESV). We do not call the United Methodist Church Jehoiakim; that is not ours to say. But the act has a shape, and the shape is the same — words that convict, cut away, without fear.
The One Line They Kept
And yet the phrase did not vanish completely. It survives in the 2024 book exactly once — and where it survives tells you everything.
It appears in the moratorium on church trials, ¶2701.6, which suspends any complaint that a minister is a “self-avowed practicing homosexual,” or has performed a same-sex wedding, or has otherwise done what “the 2016 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church stated is ‘incompatible with Christian teaching.'”
Read those words slowly, because the church chose them with care. The verdict is quoted, but held at arm’s length — the 2016 Book stated — in the past tense, inside quotation marks, like a thing handled with gloves because the church no longer wishes to own it. The single surviving mention of the conviction exists for one purpose only: to forbid anyone from ever being charged under it again.
Follow that reversal to its end, because it is the whole story of this chapter in one turn. The sentence that for fifty-two years kept a practicing homosexual out of the pulpit now stands in the book for the opposite reason — to protect one in it. The words were not merely removed. They were turned to face the other way. A church buried its own conviction, and laid across the grave the stone of a moratorium, so that it could never rise to accuse again.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
What Replaced the Boundary
A redline is not only what was removed. It is also what was written in.
The old Human Sexuality paragraph had a boundary in it. After calling sexuality God’s good gift, it drew the line plainly: sexual relations “are affirmed only with the covenant of monogamous, heterosexual marriage” (¶161.G). That boundary is gone.
In its place, the revised paragraph calls sexuality “a sacred gift,” describes it as “shaped by a combination of nature and nurture,” and honors “celibacy, marriage and singleness” as parallel and equal paths (¶162.C). The language is warm. But read it for what it no longer contains: there is no boundary in it at all.
The same replacement happened in the ordination standards. The old rule required of every candidate “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness” (¶304.2) — a single clear line running through a minister’s whole life. The revised rule asks instead for “faithful sexual intimacy expressed through fidelity, monogamy, commitment, mutual affection and respect.”
The words sound rigorous. But the old standard named what faithfulness required; the new one names only how faithfulness should feel. The boundary was not enforced more gently. It was removed, and a mood written in where a rule had been.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
The Wool, and the Verb
For years, the direction of all this was denied, or softened, or given gentler names. It was a season of dialogue. It was holy conferencing. It was making room. It was a bigger tent. It was the church still discerning, still on a journey, still listening to one another in love.
But a redline does not do euphemism. Set the old page beside the new, and every gentle word falls away. There is no “journey” on the page and no “conversation.” There is a verb, and the verb is cut — and its companion, replaced.
Somebody located the sentence that confined marriage to a man and a woman, and removed it. Somebody found the verdict that stood in two paragraphs, and removed it from both. Somebody struck the boundary out of the ordination vow, and wrote a feeling in its place. That is not a mood settling over a denomination. That is editing. It has an author, and it has a hand.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
Watch the Committee, Not the Vote
Here is the part most people never see, and it is the part that matters most.
The floor vote that adopted the new Social Principles — 523 to 161, on May 2 — was the headline. But the real work was finished before that vote was ever called.
In the legislative committee, dozens of separate petitions on human sexuality, marriage, abortion, and divorce were gathered up and set aside in favor of a single replacement — a bundled omnibus, petition 20730 — and carried out of committee by a vote recorded again and again in the record as 46 to 13 (Daily Christian Advocate, 2024). By the time the measure reached the floor, the choosing was done. The plenary only ratified it.
This is why this series keeps insisting the headline is never the whole story. A church that changes its mind does the real work quietly, in rooms most members never enter, on documents most members never read. The vote is the funeral. The decision came earlier.
Scripture commends the opposite habit. “Now the Bereans were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11, ESV). The Bereans did not wait for the final count and then react. They examined — tested the claim against the Word while it was still being made.
The Christian in the pew most needs to recover that wakefulness: to know that the grave decisions are made in committee, and to be awake in the room before the microphone is ever switched on.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
The Word They Could Not Strike
So set down the lesson of these two pages.
The United Methodist Church did not lose the man and the woman on the day it counted the ballots. It lost them earlier, in the committee that bundled the petitions and the editors who chose which words to remove — while most of its members assumed the wall was holding because no alarm had sounded. The vote was the funeral. The death came in the editing.
But hear the hope in it, because it is real, and it is the same hope Jeremiah was given. The words the church cut from its book were never the church’s to unmake. “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4–5, ESV).
A church can draw a line through that sentence in its own Discipline. It cannot draw a line through the One who spoke it. The definition the United Methodist Church removed from ¶162.D still stands, unstruck, in the mouth of Christ. And God’s own word to the man who took the knife to the scroll was not condemnation only, but a command that carried a promise: “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words” (Jeremiah 36:28, ESV).
No page of red ink ever saved a soul, and no argument ever raised the dead. Only the Spirit who breathed out the Word can do that. The Board’s task is the smaller one: to hold the two pages up to the light, to read what was cut without flinching or gloating, and to leave the door of repentance standing open for everyone who helped cut it.
In the next article, we stop tracing what the church did and ask the older question — what does Scripture itself say, and does the church’s case survive it?
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). The old provisions are quoted from the 2016 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church (¶161.C, ¶161.G, ¶304.2, ¶304.3, and the chargeable-offense list at ¶2702.1b); the revised Social Principles (¶162.C, ¶162.D), the revised ordination standard (¶304.2), and the moratorium on church trials (¶2701.6) are from the 2020/2024 Book of Discipline, © 2024 The United Methodist Publishing House. The committee consolidation of petitions into petition 20730 is recorded in the Daily Christian Advocate of the 2024 General Conference.
For Further Study
The Receipts Condemn the United Methodist Church — Part One: the dated record of the 2024 votes, wall by wall.
How the Skin Came Off — the Episcopal Church’s 2015 marriage canon, struck in its own hand: the same redline, the first door.
The Redline in the Book of Order — the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s constitution, edited the same way: the same redline, the second door.
The Church and the Christian Church — the series introduction and the plumb line.
Measured and Found Wanting — the full series.
