I grew up with the Methodist Church, but I learned very early on they were taking a Communist road. A decade before my discovery that I cannot ever be a Democrat.
The United Methodist Church of today is nothing like the Methodist movement that John Wesley established in the mid-18th century.
It really dates to 1968. That was when there was a movement to merge a bunch of the major mainline Protestant churches (the Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians) into one big unified church. (Never mind that the Calvinist roots of the latter two were largely incompatible with the Wesleyan and Anglican roots of the first two, but that's another discussion.) It never came to full fruition here in America, but the Methodists ended up gobbling up the United Brethren in Christ as part of the amalgamation to become the United Methodist Church. (The merger largely succeeded in Canada where a United Church of Canada largely controls most of the Protestant churches, and even here in America, there are several churches that have or recently had affiliations with the UMC and another denomination like the Presbyterians or Congregationalists.) Not only that, but the whole ecumenical movement (from which the idea of amalgamating all these different churches together came) was being influenced by liberal theology. The Congregationalists, for example, evolved into the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal denominations in America.
The ecumenical organization that tried to negotiate that merger released a Revised Common Lectionary that a lot of churches use, one that is very similar to the Catholic lectionary. It disturbed me how often I was seeing people at other churches hearing sermons that were on the same scriptures I was hearing at my church... then I realized that we were all using a common set of scripture. That lectionary has some... interesting... elisions. For example, it cut out the portion of Revelation that explicitly warned not to cut out pieces of Revelation. (When reading it in our church, we simply read it through.)
Anyway, the thing that always amused me is that over the past 200 years, there have been countless offshoots and breakaway churches from the mainline Methodist branch—the Wesleyans, Church of the Nazarene and Free Methodists, all substantially more ideologically conservative than the UMC*, being three of the popular ones where I live. (*The Wesleyans, where I spent a decade as an attendee but never invited to join, has been liberalizing itself, but this is mainly in the manner of largely outdated concerns such as dancing or playing of cards. That said, their colleges have churned out some, well, eccentric graduates. Fuller's Rule of the Nevers, #4, "Never date a girl who went to Houghton College!") I am not ashamed to say that I have been a lifelong practicing Methodist, but I have never been fond of the direction of the United Methodist Church, and I can safely say that there are a huge portion of Methodists who feel the same for any number of reasons.
(Disclaimer: I am a chairman of a former United Brethren church congregation that is currently within the UMC. As a matter of principle, I am not going to publicly disclose any discussions over which way we will be headed, but I will say that those discussions have happened.)
