Unification, and what it meant for the Laity

The Unification of the United Methodist Church is something so far removed from my lifetime that it always feels more distant than it actually is. It always felt as a child growing up in a rural enviroment that the United Methodist Church had always been there, and it wasn't until I was older that I realized it wasn't until 1968. But how could this be the case?

I have to wonder how much the liturgy changed for the laity. Though there was a brand new hymnal as I was growing up(the one we still use today), there still was only one hymnal prior to our current one, which I still find used in Sunday School classes even today. But even so, I heard very little about any problems with becoming a single church: from the liturgy, to the identity of the UMC, to any number of issues that would come from merging an organization. It was as if time only started for the church in 1968, rather than the church having anything to fall back on prior to that.