The Man Who Made Global Methodism Possible

You just don’t expect the pastor to be a lawyer. 

Rusty Dennen didn’t know a lot about church. He didn’t grow up religious and was generally pretty skeptical of Christianity. He only showed up at Wilderness Community Church one Sunday in 1999 because his wife and daughter wanted to go. 

But he thought he understood a few things. Like ministers are ministers. And lawyers are lawyers.

Then he met Keith Boyette, a pastor-lawyer in Spotsylvania, Virginia, who had actually argued a bunch of cases before the state supreme court, and he had to reconsider.

“He’s got a laugh that shakes the building,” Dennen said. “He’s got this really, really crazy sense of humor that he uses in his sermons, and he’s lawyerly—he’s got that lawyer experience—and he uses that to really make his points.

“I’m thinking, There’s something about this funny, rotund, lawyerly pastor. It’s a special gift.”

Boyette’s gift would be transformative for Dennen, who is today a committed Christian and a member of the Global Methodist Church (GMC). 

It would be transformative, in fact, for all Global Methodists and for Global Methodism itself. The pastor-lawyer played an essential role in the founding of the new denomination, which is today the 16th largest Protestant church in America and convenes its first General Conference in September. 

Boyette’s legal expertise and pastoral commitments built the bridge for traditionalists who wanted out of the discord and chaos of the United Methodist Church (UMC). 

“I don’t think anyone can fully appreciate all of the details and behind-the-scenes decisions and structures that have to be put in place for a new denomination,” said Cara Nicklas, chair of the Global Methodist transitional leadership council. “I don’t see how it could have been done without Keith.”

There were, of course, many faithful Methodists involved. Pastors shepherded their congregations through hurt and confusion. Organizers nurtured networks of connections. And theologians raised a flag for orthodoxy and rallied people around the core values of Methodism. 

But what the new denomination absolutely had to have to come into existence was a legal expert. It needed a minister who was also a lawyer.

“I don’t think they could have pulled it off without Keith,” said Jim Holsinger, a retired US Army reservist and expert in public health who once served on the UMC’s top court. “You had to have Keith. He brought that unique combination of being a deep man of faith but also an exquisite legal mind. He was the catalyst.”

At 71, Boyette is ready to retire. He says that as soon as the GMC votes to ratify the denominational structure that the transitional leadership put in place, he can step down.

“I think I was called by God for a specific role,” he told Christianity Today. “God has given me certain abilities and gifts and graces—the abilities and gifts and graces to navigate a dysfunctional system—and they were appropriate to a specific moment.”

The story of that calling started at another specific moment: February 4, 1991, on Interstate 195 in Richmond. Boyette was driving home from his downtown office at Hirschler, Fleischer, Weinberg, Cox, and Allen, where he was an up-and-coming litigator specializing in corporate law.

The 37-year-old wasn’t thinking about contracts, claims, lawsuits, depositions, mediations, or trials though. Boyette was praying. 

He had been a Methodist since childhood. He was baptized as a baby, and his first memory was watching his sister get baptized when he was three. The following year he professed his faith in Jesus at vacation Bible school, during a flannelgraph lesson about the shepherd with one lost sheep.

More recently, however, Boyette had become convicted that there were areas of his life where he didn’t trust Jesus. He had sort of said to God, Thanks, but I got this. He was working on that, praying about it during his daily commute.

“Increasingly, I surrendered different parts of my life to his lordship and trusted him more,” Boyette said. “John Wesley would call that sanctification.” 

On this day, something happened. 

“The Spirit of the living God filled the car,” Boyette recalled. “And I heard an inner voice that said, I want you to leave the practice of law, and I want you to be a pastor. My spirit immediately responded to his Spirit with a yes, and I was filled with a joy that I cannot put into words.”

One of the partners at the law firm said Boyette should see a psychiatrist. A bunch of his colleagues said it was a midlife crisis.

“I thought he was kidding,” said John Vaughan, who worked at the firm with Boyette. “People wouldn’t just quit. There were always people who were changing firms. Or people would decide they didn’t want to be litigators and they’d practice a different kind of law. He was the only person I ever saw leave the law and go to seminary.”

It was clear to Boyette that he had heard from God, though, so he quit. And with the support of his wife, Pamela—which astounds him to this day—he left his promising legal career and moved his family to Wilmore, Kentucky, so he could enroll at Asbury Theological Seminary. 

His first church assignment was Fletcher’s Chapel, a rural congregation outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. Boyette found he had a gift for reaching unchurched people, and the congregation grew from about 80 to around 200 in four years.

At the same time, Boyette grew concerned about the state of Methodism—the spiritual health of the denomination. Many UMC churches reported membership of three or four times the actual attendance, he said, and no one was going after those people like a shepherd who’d lost a bunch of sheep. 

“Everything was focused on institutional preservation. ‘Are you checking the boxes?’” Boyette recalled. “There was no sense of commitment to the primary calling of the church to witness to people, to bring them to faith in Jesus, and then disciple them.” 

The UMC at the time was shutting down about 150 congregations every year. Going against the trend, Boyette asked his bishop for permission to plant a new church. In 1999, he opened Wilderness Community Church at an elementary school in Spotsylvania. 

Wilderness attracted people like the skeptic Rusty Dennen; a lapsed Catholic named Larry Welford; and Janet Ayers, whose family had no church background at all. 

“I liked Keith’s message,” Ayers told CT. “He’s earthy. You can tell he’s really smart, but he also talks to you in a language that makes sense. And there’s some humor in it too.”

Church members said Boyette approached everything with a creativity developed through years of crafting arguments and negotiating settlements. Welford remembers working with the pastor on the budget for a new church building. They had to figure out how to cut construction costs by about $300,000, but Boyette didn’t seem stressed, Welford recalled. 

“He’s like, ‘Let’s look at that a little bit,’ and then he comes up with ways to do it,” Welford said. “Unconventional solutions are pretty standard for Keith.”

While Boyette was coming up with solutions to the good problems of a growing church, he was also getting a crash course in the complexities of the Methodist legal system. In 2000, he was elected to the UMC’s Judicial Council, the church’s highest court.

He was soon the UMC’s leading conservative expert on Methodist church law. He continued pastoring Wilderness week by week, while across the country traditionalists in the denomination started relying on him for advice.

“Keith just knew the Book of Discipline. He knew it as well and oftentimes better than anyone else,” said Walter Fenton, former director of strategic resources for Good News, a traditionalist caucus in the UMC. “He was among a handful of people who really understood some of the key rulings from the Judicial Council.”

After Boyette finished his term on the council, he was tapped to join and then lead the board of Good News. The pastor-lawyer also returned to the Judicial Council as an advocate for traditionalists, making the legal case against the election of a lesbian bishop. 

Karen Oliveto was made bishop over 12 western states in 2016—even though she was married to another woman and the Book of Discipline said that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” couldn’t be ministers. An attorney representing the Western Jurisdiction argued that a same-sex marriage was not an “avowal” of homosexuality and that the word should only be understood to mean a direct confession to church authorities.

Boyette opposed that argument, successfully. But then Oliveto wasn’t removed from office.

Boyette disagreed with progressive, LGBTQ-affirming theology. But he was especially dismayed by what he saw as a rejection of church authority and the defiance of the agreed-upon systems of Methodist government.

“People who wanted to change the church’s position tried to do it through legislative means, and they were repeatedly defeated,” he told CT. “Then they turned to the judiciary. They wanted the judiciary to order the changes. Then they turned to what I would call ecclesial disobedience: ‘We’re no longer submitting.’”

In the spring of 2017, Boyette accepted a position as president of the newly formed Wesleyan Covenant Association (WCA), an alliance of churches committed to contending for traditional, orthodox Methodism and preparing, if worst came to worst, for the division of the UMC.

WCA leaders appreciated Boyette’s legal knowledge and felt he had the right character to become the national leader of the traditionalist movement. He was a strategic thinker, they told CT. He also wasn’t a bomb thrower and wouldn’t let conflict fester in his heart and turn into animosity.

“I never sensed in him a spirit of war,” said Carolyn Moore, one of the WCA leaders who hired Boyette. “He wanted to minimize pain. He wanted to minimize drama. He was just looking for solutions—pragmatic and extraordinarily intelligent.”

Boyette also wanted to retire. 

He had served 19 years as pastor at Wilderness, and 20 seemed like a nice round number to finish on.

“I fought kicking and screaming not to become president of the WCA,” he said. 

Boyette sat in front of his computer praying and arguing in his head with God about whether to submit his application for several hours before he hit send. Ultimately, his sense that he was called to the role was not as dramatic as when God told him to stop being a lawyer and become a minister, but it was a calling nonetheless. He had to be obedient.

As president of the WCA, Boyette was asked in 2019 to join leaders from the conservative, progressive, and centrist factions to negotiate a plan for UMC separation. A bishop from Sierra Leone thought the continued fights over sexuality and denominational order could not go on. A number of American bishops agreed. They said the loudest voices could be given an exit and that would calm the controversies that had long roiled the UMC.

Traditionalist leaders, however, saw this as the beginning of the end. And it was, for them, possibly a good end—an amicable separation. 

“There has to be a way Christians can disagree and separate,” Boyette told the WCA. He pointed to biblical examples of good division that they could learn from and even emulate. “We can be like Abraham and Lot, Paul and Barnabas, going different ways,” he said.

In the room with a professional mediator and 15 leaders representing the spectrum of Methodist views, however, the traditionalists didn’t need a biblical scholar. They didn’t need a theologian. They needed a lawyer.

And they had one. 

“No matter which side of the issues you fall down on, Keith’s one of the best people who could have been in that position,” said Vaughan, Boyette’s lawyer colleague. “He’s not like a lawyer on TV. They get aggressive and ugly. He’ll be unfailingly courteous, and he’ll try to understand your side. He’ll stay calm. He’ll listen. And he’ll fight for what he thinks is right.”

Boyette first negotiated for a waiver of the UMC’s trust clause. Congregations that wanted to leave—whether progressive or traditionalist—shouldn’t have to pay the denomination for buildings they’d already paid for with years of passed collection plates, he said. After two days, everyone agreed. 

Then he negotiated a division of denominational assets. 

Finally, they had a big argument about the vote that would be required for a church or conference to exit the denomination. The traditionalists wanted a simple majority. The other side said two-thirds. Boyette proposed they make it 57.5 percent.

“If that isn’t a lawyer talking—‘Let’s split the baby, 57.5 percent’—I don’t know what is,” Boyette said. 

His gift, combining pastor and lawyer, made him a successful advocate. At the end of negotiations, the group agreed to legislation they would propose at the General Conference. They called it the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation.

Then COVID-19 happened. The Methodists did not meet to vote on the plan in 2020. The meeting the following year was also canceled. Traditionalist leaders told pastors and churches to be patient and hang on—they’d get a chance to approve the separation terms at the next General Conference. 

But then that one, in 2022, was also canceled. UMC authorities cited issues with international visas and put a vote on the protocol off until 2024.

“When the protocol came out, I was so hopeful,” Nicklas, also a member of the WCA council, told CT. “I felt like the traditionalists had compromised more than was fair, but this was our chance to show the world that we could separate amicably. Then when support of the protocol was winning, the postponements started coming.”

Traditionalist leaders decided they didn’t believe the stated reason for the delay and couldn’t accept that denominational leaders were acting in good faith. In 2022 they announced the formation of a new denomination: The Global Methodist Church.

Boyette, still president of the WCA, took on another role: chair of the GMC’s transitional leadership council. Here again, he was asked to use his training as a lawyer. Congregations and conferences started to look at leaving without a protocol and realized they would have to go through multiple complicated legal processes, involving both Methodist rules and state regulations. 

They’d have to arrange disaffiliation votes and payments for their properties, figure out how to change their names legally, change them on all their documents, and then deal with issues like pastors’ pensions.

“How do you navigate a church in a denomination that looks like it’s going to fall apart? You call Keith,” said Fenton, the Good News director who joined the staff of the GMC as deputy connectional officer. “Keith functioned as a pro bono attorney, coaching a half dozen churches a week. I lived in fear he’d get sick and I’d have to do it; and I’m not a lawyer.”

With the first General Conference of the GMC this September, the end of the pastor-lawyer work is in sight for Boyette. It’s time, he says, to pass the responsibilities of leadership on to other people. It’s time for a change. 

Some things will stay the same, however. When Boyette is no longer leading the traditionalist Methodists, he’ll continue attending Wilderness Community Church, sitting in a pew on one side, saying good morning to people whose lives were changed by that church plant. He will still think the church should be making disciples.

“He’ll be at the men’s group,” said Rusty Dennen, who was surprised so many years ago that a pastor could be a lawyer too. “We will talk about our lives and God, and Keith has these questions from John Wesley—I think there are 22—and he’ll ask us, ‘How did you encounter God this week?’” 

Daniel Silliman is news editor at CT.