Do not the progressive elements wish the traditionalists would stay? Are not the traditionalists choosing a path of their own sans progressive expectations? It's more like they are fleeing than being expelled.
The reason some parishes are leaving after some analysis, I’ve realized, is that the “gracious dismissal” initiative, which is a bad deal, financially, for the parishes which do leave, has a sunset clause, and parishes are afraid of being trapped in the UMC, like what happened in the Episcopal Church. My thought is they stick it out or instead adopt dual membership, because the membership of the liberal parishes in the US is still declining, and that of the African parishes is still growing, and so the Traditional Plan will be upheld again when the next General Conference occurs, which is probably why it is being delayed, and the African majority in the General Conference will likely be looking into how to enforce the traditional plan.
They are doing so because while they can still dominate the UMC organizational structure officially, the moderates and progressives are just not going to continue to play that game. And they like the opportunity of creating a new denomination from the ground up rather than staying UMC.
The moderates and progressives really don’t have a choice other than to attempt to leave at the Conference level, and the optics of breaking away from African conferences because you don’t like the way they vote aren’t good. Due to the ambiguous rulings, while the ACNA Diocese of Fort Worth got to keep its property according to the US Supreme Court, who knows if the organizational structure of the UMC would allow for that.
Now, if the UMC does implement the Traditional Plan, I will commit, in the interests of my opposition to schism, to joining it, with my two parishes, provided sufficient flexibility in liturgy exists, and this would be splendid for us, because it would be a delight working with the Order of St. Luke. My Wesleyan Liturgical Congregationalist missions are really spiritual successors more than anything else to the Congregational Methodist Church, also known as the Republican Methodist Church and later as the Christian Connection, (the name change happening well before the Democratic-Republican party broke into the Democratic and Republican parties, so it has nothing to do with party politics; when it was called the RMC the President and the Congress were controlled by the Federalist Party) which later put the word Christian in the name Congregational Christian Church, and Conservative Congregational Christian Conference as a result of its merger with the Congregational Church, which was also Christian, of course. There was also a connection, interestingly, with the Christian Church of the Stone-Campbell movement, some aspects of the historic practice of which I really like.
