The Central Jurisdiction: Methodism’s Original and Central Sin

The United Methodist Church acknowledged “racism as sin” for the first time in the 1988 Book of Discipline, a concession coming after two centuries riddled by sin and schisms and twenty years after the posthumous dissolution of the Central Jurisdiction. The Methodist Church constitutionally ratified a legally, race-based Jurisdictional Conference as a compromise to the 1939 Plan of Union. Though it has been well-documented in the annals of Methodist history, this article claims that the Central Jurisdiction’s creation is Methodism’s original and central sin whose residual effects are still visible in today’s Central Conferences.