A contentious, six-year legal battle between the United Methodist Church and Southern Methodist University is coming before the Texas Supreme Court today.
The controversy centers around who maintains control over the university—its Board of Trustees or the church—after the university tried to distance itself in 2019. The move came at a time when the church strengthened restrictive policies toward LGBTQ+ ordinations and marriages, exacerbating ideological fault lines within the denomination. SMU president R. Gerald Turner said at the time that the church decision would have no bearing on the university as “a separate corporate entity governed by the SMU Board of Trustees” and the university would continue to follow its nondiscrimination statement, which includes “sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”
The United Methodist Church has since backed away from its hard-line stance on LGBTQ+ issues, but that didn’t end the power struggle over the private Dallas university, which now enrolls more than 12,000 students and has a $2.2 billion endowment. The conflict started when university leaders changed its articles of incorporation in November 2019 “to make it clear that SMU is solely maintained and controlled by its board as the ultimate authority for the university,” Turner said at the time. The Board of Trustees also removed language that the university was “to be forever owned, maintained and controlled by the South Central Jurisdictional Conference of The United Methodist Church.”
The conference, which oversees churches in eight states including Texas, sued the university a month later, arguing the church’s relationship with the university couldn’t be severed without church approval. The church founded the university in 1911 with a gift of 133 acres, where the main campus still sits, with the church as the university’s “electing, controlling and parental body,” according to the lawsuit. The university filed its new articles of incorporation with the Texas secretary of state “without the Conference’s knowledge, authorization or approval,” rather than notifying the church it wanted to disaffiliate, the church asserted in court documents.
“Put simply, the Trustees of SMU had and have no authority to amend the Articles of Incorporation without the prior approval and authorization of SCJC,” the 2019 lawsuit reads. The church has accused the university of breach of contract and fiduciary duties.
An SMU spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the institution doesn’t comment on pending litigation. But the university asserted in court documents that its board did nothing out of compliance with Texas corporate law and that some of the university’s former provisions about church authority fell outside legal bounds. The university also argued that the church had already been “ceasing to play any role in administering SMU” by not sending representatives to board meetings, participating in tenure and hiring decisions, or contributing much money to the university. The university claimed the church hadn’t given it any funds for five years preceding the lawsuit.
The church and the university have since been locked in a lengthy, winding legal saga. A district judge ruled in favor of the university in 2021. But two years later, after an appeal by the denomination, Texas’s Fifth Court of Appeals sided with the church. An appeal of that decision by the university has landed the case in the state’s highest court.
Divisions Over LGBTQ+ Rights
When the university moved to separate itself, Methodist higher ed institutions more broadly were at odds with the United Methodist Church over LGBTQ+ issues.
United Methodist Church delegates voted in favor of what was called the “Traditional Plan” in February 2019—a set of policies that reaffirmed a ban on gay clergy and established stricter penalties for clergy members who performed same-sex marriages.
Ahead of the vote, presidents of 93 colleges and universities affiliated with the church, including SMU, released a joint statement calling on church leaders to “affirm full inclusion in the life and ministry of the United Methodist Church of all persons regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, national origin, gender, gender identity/expression or sexual orientation.” Some higher ed institutions formally disaffiliated from the church over the decision, including Baldwin Wallace University, the University of Mount Union and Randolph College, while others put their official ties to the church on pause.
“Students in 2025 don’t attend an institution if they think they’re going to be discriminated against,” said Scott Miller, president of Virginia Wesleyan University and the former president of what used to be called the National Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities of the Methodist Church. His institution pulled a move similar to SMU’s in 2017, revising its bylaws so the church wouldn’t have to approve its board members.
Even then, debates within the church over LGBTQ+ issues were heating up, so “we felt it was important to openly send a message to all that we are a welcoming community and that no outside entity was going to influence our policy or practice,” Miller said.
Brian Harkin/Stringer/Getty Images News
Since the lawsuit started, a traditionalist offshoot, called the Global Methodist Church, broke away from the denomination to form its own as more conservative congregations grew leery the church would reverse course on its earlier restrictions. A quarter of United Methodist churches, more than 7,000, disaffiliated from the denomination between 2019 and December 2023, either joining the Global Methodist Church or becoming independent.
For the most part, the split brought a renewed peace between the United Methodist Church and Methodist higher ed institutions, said Miller. Even so, he’s found that colleges and universities that disaffiliated from the church during that period of upheaval aren’t rushing to come back into the fold. He believes that as church attendance among Americans declines, university leaders may not feel as great a need for church affiliation.
“There’s less interest right now than there was five years ago in churches,” Miller said. He added that the church was already fairly hands-off with some of these institutions and contributes minimal funding to their bottom lines, especially now that a schism has winnowed down church membership.
Affiliated institutions are required to go through a process every 10 years where they affirm they’re following church policies and procedures, although they have the option to let their affiliation lapse. But the United Methodist Church and its advocates are adamant that SMU went about asserting its independence in the wrong way.
Will Haun, senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., law firm focused on religious freedom issues, said the “key difference” between SMU and other institutions that disaffiliated is the explicit language in its governing documents that the university can’t revise its relationship with the church without church approval.
“The issue here is, can SMU go to the Texas secretary of state and file new corporate articles that eliminate that language without ever going through the church’s channels,” Haun said. “It’s a ‘who decides’ question, as opposed to ‘can you disaffiliate.’”
Larger Stakes?
Court filings show the church and the university locked in nitty-gritty arguments about Texas corporate law. But Haun, whose firm filed an amicus brief siding with the church, believes the lawsuit has broader implications for religious institutions than these back-and-forth arguments would suggest. From his perspective, the lawsuit is really about church autonomy doctrine, a legal principle protecting the right of religious institutions to govern themselves, including their internal operations.
The United Methodist Church founded SMU, he said, “to essentially be an arm of its own religious institution to provide educational instruction, theological instruction, consistent with how the Methodist Church is organized.” And as far as he’s concerned, the court doesn’t get to weigh in on the church’s structural decisions, including what to do with that arm.
If the Texas Supreme Court rules in favor of the university, he worries that other entities founded by religious institutions will be emboldened to separate themselves in the same way.
“Imagine telling every religious institution that when they form a hospital, when they form a school, when they form a homeless shelter, all of those other arms of their religious ministry can simply unilaterally break off from them and go to the government and get protection for that,” Haun said, though he’s confident the Texas Supreme Court will see the case in the same way he does.
The Reverend Derrek Belase, chairperson of the South Central Jurisdiction Mission Council, also wrote to Inside Higher Ed that he believes cutting ties would negatively affect both the church and the university.
SMU “benefits significantly” from its affiliation with the United Methodist Church, Belase said, and in turn, the university has educated many of the church’s leaders. Their relationship “has underscored the university’s commitment to its founding values, including faith, service, and community engagement” and “allows SMU to uphold its historical Methodist heritage, which is also very important to the Conference.”
The university still describes itself on its website as “enriched by its United Methodist heritage.” Turner, SMU’s president, told The Dallas Morning News in a 2019 interview that the university wanted to shift its relationship with the church, not end it.
“Hopefully their problems become resolved because we have ‘Methodist’ in our name,” Turner told The Dallas Morning News. “And we intend to stay Southern Methodist University.”