Reference
Sources
What the text is taken from, and where the record is thinner than one would like.
The post-ratification text here is the ballot text. The wording the annual conferences voted on is the wording reproduced on this site. What is not yet available is an official reprinting of the Constitution as amended, published after certification. Until one exists, treat the paragraph numbering and the fine typography as provisional — the substance is what was ratified, but the final editing of the 2020/2024 Book of Discipline may present it differently.
Primary — the amendment
Proposed Constitutional Amendments, approved by the 2020/2024 General Conference, as printed in the Western North Carolina Conference 2025 Program and Reports, pp. 29–39. Prepared by Gary W. Graves, Secretary of the General Conference.
This is the document annual conferences voted from. It gives each amendment twice: once with deletions struck and additions underlined, then again as the paragraph would read if ratified. The second form is what this site reproduces as the "after" text. A second printing of the same document, dated 6 September 2024, was checked against it; the two agree except that the earlier one omits ¶48 from Amendment I's list of amended paragraphs, which appears to be a slip — ¶48 is present in the body of both.
Both PDFs are archived in this site's repository under
sources/gc2024/ with their retrieval dates and checksums.
Primary — the text being replaced
The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2020/2024, Constitution, ¶¶1–62. The "before" text on every paragraph page is taken from it, so that the comparison is against the law as it actually stood rather than against the older wording the ballot was drafted from.
The certification
The result was announced by the Council of Bishops on 5 November 2025 after completing the canvass at its autumn meeting: all four amendments ratified, regionalization at 91.6% of the aggregate vote.
Why two sets of paragraph numbers
The ballot papers number the regionalization paragraphs 9 to 61. The 2024 Book of Discipline numbers the same provisions 10 to 62. The ballot is one behind throughout.
The cause is an earlier amendment. Article VI on gender justice was added to Division One and ratified in 2019, and everything after it in the Constitution shifted up by one. The regionalization petition was drafted against the older numbering and never renumbered — its own editorial note says so: "Numbering of paragraphs will be subject to the final editing of The Book of Discipline 2020/2024."
The other amendments on the same ballot confirm this. Amendment II concerns ¶4 and Amendment III concerns ¶5 — both before the 2019 insertion, and both numbered identically on the ballot and in the Discipline. Only paragraphs after it are shifted.
This site uses Discipline numbers throughout, because those
are the numbers a reader will find in the book. Each paragraph page shows its
ballot number alongside. The mapping was not assumed: it was derived by
matching each paragraph's content against the Discipline, and independently
checked against the Roman article numbers, which line up exactly on 23 of the
26 amended paragraphs. The three that do not are accounted for — ¶10 and ¶11
trade contents by the amendment's own instruction, and ¶41's article number
moves from IV to II because the two paragraphs before it are struck. The full
audit is in MAPPING.md in the repository.
What is not here
- The three other amendments ratified on the same day, except as context on the timeline.
- The enabling legislation outside the Constitution — ¶101, ¶507, ¶¶543–544, ¶2201 and others. Those are ordinary legislation and were not part of the ratification vote.
- An official post-certification reprinting of the Constitution, which does not appear to have been published yet. If one exists, this site should be corrected against it.