As I have stressed many times, I totally understand the challenges that religion-beat professionals face when attempting to do short, balanced, accurate hard-news stories about the 40 years of warfare inside the United Methodist Church over issues of marriage, sex, biblical authority and some core Christian doctrines about salvation and Christology.

I understand because I have been covering this story since my arrival at the old Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) back in 1983, with the church-discipline case of an openly gay UMC pastor, the Rev. Julian Rush. The progressive Rocky Mountain Annual Conference backed Rush and, well, the rest is history.

The biggest challenge in this story is helping readers understand why the Methodists who are defending the UMC Book of Discipline have decided to hit the exit doors, even though they have — for several decades — been winning the key votes at the global level of the denomination.

The problem is that the church establishment here in North America is actually running the show and the center-left leaders want to tweak the Discipline to allow more freedom for doctrinal progressives, while assuring mainstream Methodists that nothing will change at the local level unless their congregation wants it to change. See this recent post: “Why are United Methodists at war? Readers need to know that sexuality isn't the only fault line.”

The Associated Press recently shipped a long feature that tries To Explain It All, and there is much to praise in this piece. Here is the stating-it-mildly headline: “United Methodists are breaking up in a slow-motion schism.” Here is a long, long, essential piece of this feature that shows the complexity of these issues:

In annual regional gatherings across the U.S. earlier this year, United Methodists approved requests of about 300 congregations to quit the denomination, according to United Methodist News Service. Special meetings in the second half of the year are expected to vote on as many as 1,000 more, according to the conservative advocacy group Wesleyan Covenant Association.

Scores of churches in Georgia, and hundreds in Texas, are considering disaffiliation. Some aren’t waiting for permission to leave: More than 100 congregations in Florida and North Carolina have filed or threatened lawsuits to break out.

Those departing are still a fraction of the estimated 30,000 congregations in the United States alone, with nearly 13,000 more abroad, according to recent UMC statistics.

But large United Methodist congregations are moving to the exits, including some of the largest in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

The flashpoints are the denomination’s bans on same-sex marriages and ordaining openly LGBTQ clergy — though many see these as symptoms for deeper differences in views on justice, theology and scriptural authority. The denomination has repeatedly upheld these bans at legislative General Conferences, but some U.S. churches and clergy have defied them.