United Methodist General Conference votes to allow churches in Russia, Belarus to leave

The United Methodist Church voted Thursday to allow conferences in Russia and Belarus to leave.

They are part of the United Methodist Eurasia Episcopal Area, based in Moscow, which also includes United Methodist churches in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their departure comes against the backdrop of increasing U.S.-Russia tensions since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

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Bishop Eduard Khegay, head of the Eurasia Episcopal Area, spoke to the United Methodist Church General Conference and thanked them for allowing the four conferences in the Eurasian region to become autonomous.

The nation of Ukraine, with Moldova, in the Ukraine-Moldova Provisional Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, was previously part of the Eurasia Episcopal Area led by Khegay, but will stay in the denomination, United Methodist News reports. The Ukraine-Moldova Provisional Annual Conference was moved from the Eurasia to the Nordic and Baltic Episcopal Area at a called session of that Central Conference in May 2022.

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Khegay thanked United Methodists for supporting the Moscow Seminary, which trains pastors for the entire region, and thanked them for their influence on his education. He earned a master’s degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.

He said this would be his last United Methodist General Conference, but that autonomy for the Eurasia Episcopal Area would become official with the Eurasian Conference’s final vote scheduled for 2025.

“During my 12 years of episcopal ministry, I have faced many challenges and hardships in Eurasia — the East-West divide, the geopolitical struggles between superpowers, economic ups and downs and theological controversies,” Khegay said. “But today I want to express my gratitude.”

Khegay did not address reasons for the 66 churches in the Eurasian Episcopal Area seeking independence from the United Methodist Church, but the Eurasian churches have generally been more conservative theologically than the U.S. United Methodist Church.

“We want to say thank you very much for all the support your churches have shared over the last 30-plus years and even in the early part of the 20th century,” he said.

The conferences approved to leave, under paragraph 572 of the United Methodist Book of Discipline, are: the Central Russia Annual Conference, Eastern Russia and Central Asia Provisional Annual Conference, Northwest Russia Provisional Annual Conference, Belarus Provisional Annual Conference and the Southern Russia Provisional Annual Conference.

Following that vote, the United Methodist General Conference, which meets through May 3 in Charlotte, took up debate over a plan for regionalization, which would allow regional bodies to govern themselves, and prevent churches around the world from helping set U.S. church policy on issues such as same-sex marriage and ordination of practicing homosexuals. 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.

Methodism in Eurasia began with a missionary pastor from Sweden, Carl Lindborg, in 1882. He founded the first Russian Methodist congregation in St. Petersburg in 1889. A few congregations were planted in Ukraine prior to the first World War, notably near Uzhgorod and Ternopil. Uzhgorod was shuttered during the Soviet era.

Current churches in Ukraine began after the end of the Soviet Union, which brought an influx of United Methodist missionaries from the United States, Germany, and Liberia into many of the newly independent nations in the 1990s.

Ukrainian delegate attends

The Rev. Yulia Starodubets of Ukraine, a delegate to the conference, told United Methodist News that her husband, the Rev. Oleg Starodubets, drove her to Budapest, Hungary and she then flew to Munich, then on to Charlotte.

Starodubets, a pediatrician who teaches remotely at a Kyiv medical school, and her husband work with people displaced by the war with Russia.

“We have mothers of killed soldiers,” she said. “All families have their own special story. All of them experienced tragedy.”

She and her husband and Nordic-Baltic Area Bishop Christian Alsted dedicated a United Methodist center for displaced persons on April 7 in the village Kamyanitsa, near the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod. The United Methodist Committee on Relief gave a $1.5 million grant to purchase a former hotel for the center.

“We all see it as a rehabilitation center in the future,” Starodubets said. “We want to receive people with physical and psychological trauma.”

Her dual roles as clergy and physician will be crucial.

“She will have an important role in relation to this center,” Bishop Alsted said. “She’s one of those in the church who will have real expertise in this area.”

The United Methodist Church currently has 10 faith communities in Ukraine, but an established church outside Kyiv has asked to join the denomination, and a new United Methodist faith community for Ukrainian refugees is forming in Berlin.

Starodubets said she’s seen a revival of interest in religion during the war.

“People who didn’t pray before, they’re praying,” she said.

Ukraine had been part of Khegay’s area, but, amid the tensions of war, came under Alsted’s supervision in April 2022.

“Many people asked me, ‘Are you leaving?’ No, we’re not. We’re a United Methodist church,” Starodubets said.