Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are siding with their longtime church and its leaders in the congregation’s high-stakes clash with the United Methodist Church, a spokesman for the couple said this week.
The Bushes have been members at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas since the late 1980s.
The church, which is one of the largest and wealthiest United Methodist congregations in the country, is now locked in an intense public battle with the national denomination for control of its assets and its identity.
Mr. and Mrs. Bush participated in the congregation’s recent vote to leave the denomination, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Freddy Ford, told The New York Times on Thursday. The vote took place in person at the church in October. Of the 4,775 votes cast, just over 90 percent favored departing the United Methodist Church.
The Bushes “are grateful to Reverend Matt Tuggle for so faithfully guiding the congregation through these rough waters,” Mr. Ford said, referring to the church’s senior minister.
The statement is the Bushes’ first public comment on the controversy that is roiling their usually decorous church community — and reverberating far outside Texas.
What began as a quiet ecclesiastical dispute burst into public view in August, when the United Methodist bishop overseeing Highland Park, Ruben Saenz Jr., sued it over changes to its bylaws. The church has since waged an unusually public campaign pushing back, with the congregation’s leadership board saying that the denomination had “irrevocably broken the bond of trust that once existed between our Church and The United Methodist Church.”
The backdrop to the conflict is the denomination’s move to affirm same-sex marriages and gay clergy, a change that prompted thousands of conservative congregations to leave between 2019 and 2023.
Highland Park stayed, but it also revised its bylaws to claim more decision-making power over its own hiring and other matters and to remove all mentions of the United Methodist Church.
After the congregation voted last month to leave the denomination, it began worshiping as Highland Park Methodist Church, snipping out the “United” but retaining its connection to the broader Methodist tradition.
The denomination has said the congregation cannot simply vote to depart, setting up a prolonged legal and ecclesiastical showdown.
The acceleration of a clash that could ostensibly have been settled peacefully behind closed doors has baffled many observers in Dallas and beyond. But all agree that the stakes are particularly high for the denomination, after the membership losses it suffered in recent years.
Last week, Bishop Saenz removed Mr. Tuggle and another pastor from their roles at the church, appointing his own chief of staff, Andy Lewis, as the church’s new senior pastor. He also announced that services would take place for now at a nearby Methodist church to “avoid unnecessary conflict.”
The appointments set up a confusing duality.
Highland Park United Methodist Church is meeting in a new location with new leadership, has a new website and is apparently attracting only a tiny remnant of former members under the church’s original name. The Dallas Morning News reported that “more than 100” people received communion there on Sunday.
Less than three miles away, the renamed Highland Park Methodist Church continues to meet in the original 100-year-old building, on a leafy block adjacent to Southern Methodist University. The church reported that 7,950 people worshiped there over multiple services last Sunday, a higher number than usual.
The allegiance of the church’s two best-known members is now clear. By siding with the breakaway congregation, the Bushes may, in some light, be viewed as nondenominational Christians.
In this, they join growing numbers of American Christians, including President Trump, who announced in 2020 that he no longer identified as a Presbyterian, but as a nondenominational Christian.
Mr. Bush’s Christian faith was a constant undercurrent in his presidency. Raised in Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, he married a Methodist and began attending congregations in that denomination. He has spoken about recommitting to his faith in the mid-1980s, around the same time he gave up drinking.
In the late 1980s, the Bushes moved to Dallas and became active members of Highland Park. Mr. Bush was on deck to become the church’s finance chairman when he ran for governor in 1994.
The Bushes have lived quietly in Dallas since leaving the White House. In September, Mr. Bush exhibited some of his paintings at the George W. Bush Presidential Museum. The museum sits on the campus of Southern Methodist University, which made its own failed attempt to disentangle from the denomination a few years ago.
In Mr. Bush’s memoir “Decision Points,” he credited a pastor at Highland Park with inspiring him to run for president. The pastor, Mark Craig, preached a sermon from the book of Exodus on the morning of Mr. Bush’s second inauguration as governor, focusing on God calling Moses to action. Mr. Bush had been wavering about whether to run.
“There were no mysterious voices whispering in my ears, just Mark Craig’s high-pitched Texas twang coming from the pulpit,” he wrote. “I felt a sense of calm.”
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