Highland Park pastors, conference address suit

Key points:

• Highland Park United Methodist Church’s senior minister addressed the case in his Sunday sermon. His predecessor released a statement on Aug. 19.
• The Horizon Texas Conference also added more information to its lawsuit calling for the Dallas megachurch to bring its governance back in line with the denomination’s Book of Discipline.
• A retired United Methodist pastor who attends Highland Park offered a nuanced perspective on what is happening.

Both the current senior minister of Highland Park United Methodist Church and his predecessor are speaking out about the grief caused by a lawsuit filed by the denomination against the Dallas megachurch.

Meanwhile, the Horizon Texas Conference has amended its case to add a fuller record of the church-governance issues under dispute.

The conference, which is the regional governing body for The United Methodist Church, filed the lawsuit Aug. 10 in state civil court in Dallas County. The litigation challenges the changes that Highland Park’s church council began making in 2022 to the church’s articles of incorporation and bylaws.

Those changes, the lawsuit argues, “represent an attempt to sever the connectional relationship” between the Highland Park corporation, the congregation, the conference and the broader United Methodist Church.

Ultimately, the conference said it is seeking to bring the church’s governing documents back in line with the Book of Discipline, which contains denominational rules that apply to all United Methodist congregations. The lawsuit followed months of closed-door talks between the conference and church leaders that failed to resolve the dispute.

The Rev. Matt Tuggle, Highland Park’s senior minister, addressed the suit at the beginning of the sermon he preached at two Sunday services. He stressed that the church very much remains part of The United Methodist Church and that he and other church leaders were “blindsided” by the suit.

“The only word I have for what I felt is grief,” said Tuggle, a lifelong United Methodist. “Many of you feel the same. Some of you came from other denominations or no Christian background. But many of you, like me, have a long history with The United Methodist Church and never thought you would see your denomination and your local church at odds with each other.”

He also said that because of the ongoing litigation, he did not expect to talk about the case on Sunday mornings going forward.

On Aug. 19, the Rev. Paul Rasmussen — Tuggle’s longtime predecessor who retired in February and is now the church’s pastor-in-resident — released a statement about the lawsuit.

“It is among the more unnecessary and egregious betrayals of a loyal ministry partnership I’ve witnessed in 26 years as a United Methodist pastor,” Rasmussen wrote.

Tuggle and Rasmussen both emphasized that the church stayed with The United Methodist Church during a season of church disaffiliations amid escalating debates around LGBTQ inclusion. From 2019 to 2023, more than 7,600 U.S. congregations left the denomination under a now-expired policy in the Discipline that allowed churches to exit with property if they met certain conditions. Highland Park was not among them.

“In fact, we did more than stay,” Rasmussen said.

“We put our full support behind the conference and other churches in our UMC community. HPUMC has launched a staggering 41 United Methodist churches over the years, the most of any conference partner.”

He noted that the church also established a new dormitory and student center at Africa University, the pan-African United Methodist university in Mutare, Zimbabwe. He also said the church’s renowned Belong Disability Ministry for children and adults with physical and mental disabilities makes its resources available to all Horizon Texas United Methodist churches free of charge.

The 110-year-old congregation, which has more than 16,000 members, is the largest in the Horizon Texas Conference and the state of Texas. The conference stretches across the upper half of Texas from the Panhandle to just north of Austin and east to Paris, Texas.

Conference leaders declined to offer additional comment about the lawsuit. However, the conference updated its website Aug. 19 to answer more frequently asked questions about the case. Among other additions, the conference stresses that the disagreement is not about theology or Highland Park United Methodist’s approach to ministry.

“Highland Park UMC is a church with a long history of faithful ministry and a congregation known for its generosity, service and love of Christ,” the conference website said.

“It is a strong, thriving church with committed Christ followers. But its current governing documents and structure are inconsistent with United Methodist polity. That is what the Conference is seeking to correct.”

The conference also submitted an amended court filing Aug. 18 that showed how church leaders had altered their previous 1999 bylaws.

The amended filing said the conference “made repeated good-faith efforts to resolve the dispute amicably” since the conference learned of the changes in October 2025. Those efforts include meetings in October, December and March.

“Despite these efforts, the parties were unable to reach an agreed resolution, leaving the Conference with no reasonable alternative but to seek judicial relief,” the lawsuit said.

The amended filing goes on to include two new exhibits — copies of the bylaws that Highland Park United Methodist adopted in 1999 and the bylaws officially adopted in 2024.

The revised bylaws change the corporate name to Highland Park Methodist Church. Among other changes, the new bylaws also empower the church council to become affiliated with or terminate any affiliation with any religious or other charitable organization, group of churches or denomination.

In its own answers to frequently asked questions about the case, Highland Park notes its charge conference in 1998 voted unanimously to delegate authority to amend the bylaws to the church council. The charge conference is the body that connects the local church to the wider denomination. Charge conference meetings must be presided by the church’s district superintendent, an ordained elder appointed by the bishop to oversee local churches in a district.

“Everything that’s happened since then has been in accordance with that delegation,” the church said in its FAQ.

But the previous bylaws make multiple references to the denomination’s Book of Discipline, while the revised version only references the Texas Business Organization Code, or TBOC for short.

The 1999 bylaws also state that the bylaws can only be amended with notice by the church council of what’s being proposed.

The Highland Park church council made the changes at a time when not only The United Methodist Church was undergoing a splintering, but also The Episcopal Church was dealing with the fallout of its own fracturing.

Ann King, a Highland Park United Methodist spokeswoman, told the Dallas Morning News that the church received guidance from a Texas Supreme Court decision in 2020 that sided with the majority of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth in the majority’s withdrawal from The Episcopal Church.

However, The United Methodist Church is set up differently from The Episcopal Church.

The Rev. Charles “Chuck” Cox, a retired United Methodist pastor in the Horizon Texas Conference, offered a nuanced perspective on the dispute between the conference and the congregation he loves.

Cox began his pastoral career as an intern and then associate minister at Highland Park United Methodist in the 1970s and now attends the church in retirement and actively participates in one of its Sunday school classes. He is proud of the role the church has played in strengthening and planting other United Methodist churches in the conference and respects the leadership of both Rasmussen and Tuggle.

“I’m a lover of HPUMC for sure,” he said.

However, he said, he is also troubled by what the changes the church made to its legal documents could mean for The United Methodist Church in general.

Cox said he thinks the changes to the church’s legal documents were made by “well-meaning people” trying to protect the congregation during a time of denominational turmoil.

The problem he sees is that if Highland Park can change its relationship to The United Methodist Church by a church council vote, then every church can do it and the entire United Methodist connection in Texas breaks down.

“So, I just wish that that our church would just say, ‘Well, you know what? If we’re in the denomination, we’ve got to play by the rules of the denomination’ and just accept that,” he said. “And if the rules do not allow for the kind of bylaws that were made, then those need to be removed from our church’s bylaws.”

Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Friday Digests.