"S" is for Southern Methodist Church

"S" is for Southern Methodist Church. In 1934 white Methodists in the southern states who opposed the unification of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had split over slavery in 1844 along with the Methodist Protestant Church, formed the Laymen’s Organization for the Preservation of the Southern Methodist Church. They feared northern domination and racial integration. In 1939 some four hundred opponents of reunification met in Columbia and a year later formed the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. They created a denomination without bishops and added to the Methodist Articles of Religion statements on creationism, premillennialism, Satan, and racial integration. In 1945, the withdrawing group adopted as its name the Southern Methodist Church and established in Orangeburg both its national headquarters and Southern Methodist College.