Others included removing the disciplinary consequences for dissent and striking a 52-year-old provision calling homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The UMC General Conference’s decisions reversed many of the policies traditionalists worked for decades to pass and protect.

The United Methodist Church marked a new era of LGBTQ inclusion by voting to lift the bans on LGBTQ clergy and on pastors performing same-sex unions. They also removed the language that said homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching.

At the United Methodist Church's General Conference, bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriages were removed. However, the denomination faces internal strife and declining membership.

When the United Methodist Church removed anti-gay language from its official rules last week, it marked the end of a half-century of debates over LGBTQ inclusion in America’s mainline Protestant denom

United Methodist delegates on Friday repealed their church's long-standing ban on the celebrations of same-sex marriages or unions by its clergy and in its churches. The action marked the final major reversal of a collection of LGBTQ bans and disapprovals that have been embedded throughout the laws and social teachings of the United Methodist Church over the previous half-century.