From news editor Daniel Silliman: Today we’re publishing my third dispatch from the Global Methodists’ first General Conference, where they established themselves as a new denomination following the split from the United Methodists.

I’ve reported on this new denomination a lot this year.  Partly, because it was a chance to write the first draft of history. A major new denomination was born, and I got to witness the birth.

But I’m also doing it for the late L. Nelson Bell, who was Billy Graham’s father-in-law and one of the first editors of Christianity Today. I once wrote an academic paper on the founding of CT and spent some time in the archives, looking at how the first editors decided who to include under the big tent of evangelicalism. I remember in one letter in 1955, Bell was complaining that they had lots of connections with Baptist and Presbyterians, but few in other denominations.

“I wish that we might have one or two more evangelical Methodists,” he wrote. “I realize that they are as scarce as hen’s teeth.” 

Bell was wrong about that. He just didn’t know the Methodists. But he was right, I think, that they should be included in CT. Sixty-nine years later, I got a chance to work on that.