Cobb Church In Showdown With Conference, Prayer Meeting Planned

COBB COUNTY, GA — Mt. Bethel United Methodist Church in suburban Atlanta, tangled in a fight with its governing organization over whether it can leave its denomination, will hold a guided prayer session Sunday night led by 18 area faith leaders.

Planned to last 90 minutes, the event begins at 6 p.m. in the church’s main sanctuary at 4385 Lower Roswell Road in Marietta.

According to East Cobb News, Thursday morning’s announcement from Mt. Bethel said attendees “will focus on a particular aspect of heavenly-minded HOPE as a confident expectation and dynamic assurance of things unseen providing strength, courage and boldness for the future.”

Sunday’s prayer event will be the latest skirmish in a war between the prominent East Cobb church and its governing body, the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church.

When the conference tried to reassign Mt. Bethel senior pastor Dr. Jody Ray in April, the church declared it would sooner leave the denomination than give him up. The conference responded on July 12 by announcing it would seize Mt. Bethel's assets, giving the church 10 days — until Wednesday — to respond.

That deadline came and went with no public word from either side. Patch has contacted both Mt. Bethel and the conference for comment and had yet to receive a response by Thursday afternoon.

Underlying this struggle is a larger schism in the United Methodist Church over the denomination’s stand on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ministers. Mt. Bethel, the largest congregation in the North Georgia Conference, is staunchly conservative.

A takeover like this “has never happened with a church of anywhere near this size or for this reason,” said Rob Renfroe, a Methodist pastor who’s president of Good News Magazine. Renfroe’s comments were reported by Christianity Today, the evangelical publication founded by Billy Graham.

Read the stories in East Cobb News and Christianity Today.

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