HARRISVILLE — Residents of Slippery Rock, Harrisville and Grove City gather each Sunday at 10 a.m. to pray together in a banquet hall of Harrisville’s fire department, an hour before the Harrisville United Methodist Church begins its worship service just a few minutes away.

An altar and a podium are set up in the front of the banquet hall, with rows of folding chairs behind them. After the service, congregants of the newly-formed Trinity Community Church carry the chairs across the floor, and gather for refreshments on the other side of the same room.

With no church building yet to worship in, the arrangement with the fire department looks to be long-term, convening pastor Dennis Henley said.

Henley said the first service was on Sept. 10 and was sparked after he, lay speaker Connie Hagan and the Rev. Jim Eaton saw a need for congregants leaving United Methodist churches in the area to worship together.

The congregation emerged in response to the split within the United Methodist Church. Its teachings align with the Global Methodists, whose congregants disaffiliated from the United Methodists over the role of LGBTQ+ people in the church.

At this time, the Trinity Community Church is waiting to be designated as Global Methodist, Henley said, but welcomes people from all denominations.

Many of the congregants so far come from United Methodist churches.

Over the past few decades, the United Methodist Church has been at the center of internal debates over whether to change its official stance labeling homosexuality a sin. The church teaching presently includes a ban on the blessing of same-sex unions and prohibits noncelibate homosexuals from becoming ordained. The issue came to a head in recent years with the disaffiliation of over 1,800 congregations across the country in 2022, according to data compiled by the United Methodist Church.

“It’s a bit of a misconception that it was a split, because a split usually connotes that folks have come to a mutual agreement to part ways,” said Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi of the United Methodist Church. “This really was some folks who decided they could no longer go forward with us.”

In June, Moore-Koikoi presided over the disaffiliation process of nearly 300 congregations during the annual conference of the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church.

“It’s been a process that’s been painful,” she said. “There’s always grief whenever there are lost relationships, and when you had an idea of moving forward in ministry with folks and they come to a decision that they could not do that.”

“There are people in our church since 1972 who disagreed over homosexuality,” Moore-Koikoi said. “We value diversity, and there will always be people who differ. What we believe as United Methodists is that we can still agree to disagree and be in a community together.”

The issue of homosexuality is not essential to the United Methodist faith in the same respect as other core tenets of Christianity, such as Christ’s divinity, she said.

“There are people who are on all sides of (homosexuality) and hold all beliefs possible around it,” she said. “There are some folks who are understanding, and some who are in between.”

The division within the United Methodist Church has been starkly visible in Harrisville, a small borough in northern Butler County.

The Rev. Ken Miller of Harrisville United Methodist Church said nationwide debates around LGBTQ+ rights have filtered down to the level.

Amid the schism, some congregants have left Harrisville’s United Methodist Church and joined Trinity Community Church.

Pastors from both congregations described the nationwide schism as a divorce.

“When it ultimately hit, it was sad across the board,” Miller said.

Miller pastors two congregations — one in Harrisville, the other in Forestville. While the churches are two miles away from each other, they have experienced the split remarkably differently, he said.

Miller said while the church in Forestville seemed little affected by the split, the church in Harrisville has had many more people leave to join congregations affiliated with the Global Methodist Church, in part because the community leans more conservative.

Roughly a dozen or so congregants have left the church in Harrisville, Miller said. The rest are “hunkering down the best they can and looking for opportunities to move forward,” Miller said.

“Hopefully, especially, because any change also provides an opportunity,” he said. “We’re looking at the possibility of opportunities as well as adjusting to the loss of church members.”

For Henley, the decision to leave the United Methodist Church, especially as a retired pastor, was not a hasty one but followed several years of consideration as he saw what he described as the church distancing itself from traditional teachings, especially around the issue of human sexuality.

After retiring in 2015 and leaving the United Methodist Church last spring, Henley said he felt called to return to the ministry to help lead the growing congregation of Trinity Community Church.

“If you're familiar with the story of Moses standing at the burning bush, God is saying to him, ‘I want you to lead my people out of Egypt,’ and Moses saying, ‘Not me, get somebody else.’ That's the way I have felt about this,” Henley said. “I feel like God said, ‘Dennis, I want you to do this.’ And I'm saying, ‘I'm not the guy.’ But God said, ‘You're the one choosing.’ And so I felt compelled to take this. But I can't do it by myself.”

Henley’s mother, who is 94 years old, maintains a conservative stance around the same issues as her son but has remained a congregant of the United Methodist Church. His daughter and son-in-law are both pastors near Johnstown and have since left the United Methodist Church. He has friends and relatives who are in both camps, he said.

“I was a United Methodist my whole life. I was baptized in the Methodist Church before it became United Methodist,” Henley said. “I’ve been a part of that particular tradition my whole life.”

“It's caused a lot of difficulty for a lot of people, you know, leaving their church,” Henley said. “And it's kind of like the whole political atmosphere of the world right now. There's such a division on everything, and it reflects right down to the level of the church.”

When asked if he had pastored to LGBTQ+ congregants and couples before, Henley said he has and would welcome them wholeheartedly.

“They are received into the church like anybody would be,” he said. “The difference, the draw, the line that is drawn here is in the Global Methodist Church, we will not ordain someone who is a practicing homosexual into the ministry and we will not perform same sex marriages. But other than that, we want to welcome anybody to come in here.”

Ultimately, Henley maintained homosexuality is a sin.

“The way it has been the last couple of decades is that society has been influencing the Church and taking it from its traditional path and new directions to kind of validate what some of the more new age thinking is. And so that was another reason for the departure,” Henley said. “We felt too influenced by the world and we want to be influenced by God, by the Holy Spirit, by the word of Scripture.”

Henley said he saw a lack of accountability from the United Methodist Church regarding the Church’s Book of Discipline, which prohibits “self-avowed homosexuals” from becoming clergy and does not allow for the blessing of same-sex unions.

Pockets of the United Methodist Church were not following these rules, he said.

“When all this started coming about, I decided this isn’t what I believe,” Henley said. “I decided I had to leave and find someplace to go but it is very much like a divorce. You might still love the individual, but you can’t live with them anymore. There are irreconcilable differences.”

Paul Mowrey, who attends Trinity Community Church with his wife Nancy, said leaving the congregation at Slippery Rock United Methodist Church was a difficult choice.

The couple was among 12 to 15 members who left the church amid discussions around disaffiliating from the United Methodist Church.

“We dearly love our Slippery Rock church,” Mowrey said. “We’ve been there since 2004. We dearly love the congregation. Leaving is something we just felt we needed to do.”

A retired federal employee of over 35 years, Mowrey described himself as a “rule follower.” He said he was upset to find the Book of Discipline’s teaching around same-sex unions and LGBTQ+ clergy “not being taken seriously.”

“My parents were both United Methodist pastors, and I grew up in the United Methodist Church,” Mowrey said. “My father was asked by a close relative to perform the wedding ceremony of him and his (same-sex) partner and he said, ‘ I can’t do it.’ It was agonizing for him. I’m honoring his reputation.”

Mowrey said he would not have left the United Methodist Church if the Book of Discipline had been officially amended to reflect a permissible stance on homosexuality and same-sex unions. He and his wife both know and love LGBTQ+ people, Mowrey said.

As the United Methodist Church continues to discuss the role of LGBTQ+ people in the church, the official stance remains that homosexuality is a sin. The stance could change officially and the Book of Discipline could be amended to reflect that change at the Church’s General Conference in 2024.

“If you want to change things, change things,” Mowrey said. “Until then, follow (the rules).”

The last time the United Methodist Church split was over 150 years ago in response to slavery.

“The living experience in the presence of God changes things at some times,” Miller said.

“I believe that with the issue of homosexuality, it ultimately doesn't matter what point or what stance you take, as far as your essential relationship with God,” he said. “That's what puzzled me, in that why certain people were acting as if it was some kind of essential hindrance to having a life with God. I didn't grasp that. I believe that, just like with every other issue in the church, that we differ about just about everything else.”

“We take tradition seriously. We take the Bible seriously. We also take present experience and reason seriously,” Miller said. “Basically what's going on now is tension between Scripture and tradition and present, lived experience. More and more people are concluding based on their private experience of God, that homosexuality is not a sin.”