United Methodists have heard the phrase General Conference tossed about frequently these days. Many of us are aware that there was a denomination-wide General Conference in Charlotte, NC, from April 23 to May 3, but what is a General Conference and why do we have one? 

 A General Conference is a representative gathering of laity and clergy who come together to set church laws, processes, budgets, elect committee members, consider resolutions on social issues, hear reports, and frame the work of the denomination for the coming four years. 

The general meeting of the United Methodist Church can be traced back to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who hosted the first conference of Methodist preachers in London in 1744. The first conference of preachers in America took place in Philadelphia in 1773, three years before the U.S. became a nation. In 1784, the Christmas Conference took place in Baltimore, officially launching one of the early predecessors of the United Methodist Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1792, this gathering took on the name General Conference and began a four-year cycle of meetings. Other branches of Methodism that formed in the U.S. followed a similar pattern, with General Conferences taking place as frequently as every year to every four years. The tradition of convening a General Conference extends back 250 years and continues today. 

NIC General Conference delegates and reserve delegates recieve a blessing at the Delegation Sending Forth Worship on April 7, 2024.

There are some significant differences between those early General Conferences and the gathering that is taking place in Charlotte. Lay delegates were not part of the General Conference body until 1870. Every early branch of the Methodist movement in the U.S. hosted a gathering of preachers only on a routine basis. Those gathered preachers would  . . well, preach, teach, and work in good Methodist fashion on “ordering the life of the church.” This included creating rules to live by, debating issues of social justice and taking stands on concerns such as slavery in 1800. Eighteen lay women were first seated as delegates at a General Conference in 1922 and the first laity address was delivered in 1980.  

In 1972, the first United Methodist General Conference took place in Atlanta. This quadrennial (every four years) gathering now includes a diverse body of delegates from across the globe: Africa, the Philippines, Europe, and the U.S. This year’s conference comprised 862 delegates, an equal number of lay and clergy. Ten languages were spoken during the sessions. 

Yes, this is the postponed 2020 General Conference, another first as we were prevented by the global pandemic from meeting for the past eight years (other than a limited, special called conference in 2019). There is much work to catch up on as the UMC’s landscape continues to change. We are a denomination finding our way through secularization in the U.S., the loss of churches to disaffiliation, continued conflicts over human sexuality, the regionalization of denomination, and the questions of social justice that unite, challenge, and call us to debate and pray.

Read what happened at this year’s General Conference on the UMCNIC website and the UMC website.