Depending on how long you have been around The United Methodist Church, the words Social Principles may mean very different things to you.
Some of you know them well. Our Spirited Women, for example, studied a previous version together in 2020. Some of you may remember conversations about our Social Principles from Sunday school classes, Annual Conference, or debates within the denomination.
And for others, my recent preaching may be the first time you have heard the words at all.
So, before we get much farther into our year of commUNITY: Living God’s Dream Together, I thought it might be worth answering a pretty basic question:
What exactly are the Social Principles?
First, they are not a United Methodist political platform. They are not a collection of liberal or conservative talking points dressed up in church language. And they are not church law.
Our Social Principles describe themselves as a “prayerful and thoughtful effort” by the General Conference to speak to contemporary human issues from biblical and theological foundations. They are meant to call us into prayer, study, conversation, and faithful living.
I like to think of them as one way our connection helps us wrestle with an old Christian question: If we really believe what we say we believe about God, Jesus, grace, creation, and our neighbors, how should that shape the way we live together?
That is deeply Methodist. Methodists have been connecting personal faith and life in the world since John Wesley. The first Methodist Social Creed was adopted in 1908, and what we now call the Social Principles first appeared in 1972.
They are also distinctly United Methodist because they are connectional. They aren’t written by one pastor, one bishop, one congregation, or one American interest group and handed down to everybody else. The current Social Principles grew from a worldwide process begun after the 2012 General Conference called for a document that would be more globally relevant, more theologically grounded, and more concise. Listening took place across the denomination. Fifty-two writing teams included clergy and laity from Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States, and more than 4,000 United Methodists responded to an early draft. The resulting document was considered and adopted by the delegates of our worldwide General Conference in 2024. That global piece is the sweetest part.
There will be things in our Social Principles that feel immediately connected to life in Geneva, Illinois. Other sections may address circumstances that seem rather distant from our everyday lives but are very real for United Methodists somewhere else in the world. That is part of the gift of being a global church. Our neighbors get bigger.
Our new Social Principles are also different from the version many United Methodists remember. For decades, the document was regularly amended as new concerns emerged and different General Conferences added or changed language. And, particularly around human sexuality, the Social Principles became one of the places where our denomination’s culture-war battles played themselves out.
The resulting document could contain real tensions. The previous Social Principles, for instance, affirmed LGBTQ people as persons of “sacred worth,” insisted upon their human and civil rights, and urged churches not to reject lesbian and gay people while in the same section declaring the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
Whatever someone’s position in those debates, it isn’t difficult to understand why people experienced those words as contradictory or why the Social Principles themselves sometimes became something to fight over rather than something to help us faithfully follow Jesus.
The current revision -the one we’re using as the basis for commUNITY- took a different approach. Rather than continuing to patch and amend the old document, the church essentially began again, intentionally rooting the Social Principles more clearly in Scripture and our Wesleyan theological tradition and listening to the experiences of United Methodists around the world.
Before we get to particular issues, we are talking about creation, covenant, human dignity, responsibility, confession, community, and the kind of people God is forming us to become. Because without those roots, the Social Principles really could become little more than a list of positions. And that isn’t what Pastor Heather and I hope this year will be.
We also will not preach through every paragraph. As we move into more specific portions of the Social Principles, sometimes we will group several subjects together. Sometimes we will move quickly over one. Sometimes we may not address a topic in worship at all. A sermon series simply can’t do everything.
That’s why I hope you will read them for yourself, talk about them with other people, disagree where you disagree, stay curious, pray, study Scripture, and keep asking what faithful discipleship looks like in the world we actually inhabit.
You can read the full 2025–2028 United Methodist Social Principles here.
Our Social Principles aren’t perfect. Neither is the church that wrote them. Nor are the people trying to live them. But maybe that is part of the point. We are a connection of Christians, across cultures and continents, trying together to discern what it means to love God and love our neighbors in a complicated world.
And thank God, there is grace for that.
