WOODVILLE – Hope United Methodist Church has relocated to Woodville, after hosting services for the past two years in the Mt. Hope Church near Chester, and with the new location, it will be able to do more ministry work in the community.
“We will take everyone God sends us,” said Rev. Ernie Turney, an East Texas native who has served in the ministry throughout the region, and in Houston.
The new location, which is the old Rainey Air Conditioning building at 103 North Pecan in Woodville, has been converted into a sanctuary and fellowship hall, and last Thursday, a steeple was placed atop it just in time for the first service there, a Christmas Eve service. The church will host regular Sunday services at 10 a.m. after the beginning of the new year.
The church began its services at its old, historic location on Jan. 8, 2023. Hope UMC formed after the body of Woodville Methodist Church (formerly Woodville UMC) voted in October of 2022 to separate from the United Methodist Church conference. The name, Turney said, came from John Gazzaway.
A group of 12-20 people in the church who voted to remain United Methodists contacted a leader in the UMC annual conference to meet and explore the idea of starting a new congregation.
In that time period, the core group of the congregation grew to 30, and that growth had come from Woodville.
The separation came at a time when, in December of 2022, hundreds of Methodist churches, statewide, voted to split from the UMC. Turney said that split came from many years of debate over the church’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues, namely marriage equality and the topic of LGBTQ+ clergy members.
Although those issues had been hotly debated since 2000, the conversations had taken place throughout Methodist churches since the 1970s, Turney said.
Available data shows that more than 40% of the Methodist churches in Texas left the UMC, including 294 in East Texas. Turney said that figure is about 30%, nationwide.
Turney said he is no stranger to those hot-button issues. For nine years he pastored the Bering Methodist Church, in the Montrose district of Houston, which openly accepted LGBTQ+ congregants, and was the first in the nation to host an AIDS ministry.
Turney, who was retired, but helping in various congregations in East Texas, including in Kirbyville, said he is glad to look forward with ministerial outreach ideas, one of which is the issue of educational opportunities in Tyler County, and seeing how the church can assist.
“We’re coming with a vision of doing something, but we’re not coming in with a vision of doing another week of Vacation Bible School,” he said.
Turney said that some might ask why another church would be starting in Woodville, as there are already many churches within the city limits. “The United Methodist Church can bring some history and outreach that are traditional to our core belief system,” Turney said. “It is not our intent to duplicate ministries.”
Relocating the church was a process, Turney said. There were obvious factors as to why those conversations began to happen among the Hope UMC leadership, including the ability to do ministry.
The average age of the congregation was a big factor, Turney said. “Doing things in the late afternoons and evenings and driving to Chester was not on a lot of people’s to-do list,” he said.
“In order to do outreach in the community, we had to be in Woodville,” he added.
Turney said that with the previous location, the church’s activities and outreach were “basically limited to a Sunday-only deal.”
