This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 1 May 2024, delegates at the United Methodist Church's General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, voted 692 to 51 to repeal the denomination's prohibition, in place since 1984, on ordaining or appointing as a minister anyone the Book of Discipline described as a self avowed practicing homosexual.
The repeal passed as part of a consent calendar, a bundle of twenty two pieces of legislation adopted together without individual debate, a procedural path that moved four decades of restriction off the books in a single vote rather than through a contested floor fight.
The same General Conference, sitting through 3 May 2024, also voted separately to remove the denomination's ban on clergy performing same sex marriages and the penalties that had been tied to it, addressing clergy practice alongside clergy ordination in the same session.
Together the two votes reached both ends of ordained ministry the 1984 restrictions had touched, who could be ordained and what ordained clergy could perform.
What the Charlotte votes changed for Methodism's spread was retiring a forty year old ordination restriction through a bundled consent vote and pairing it, in the same conference, with the removal of the parallel ban on clergy officiating same sex marriages.