Key points:
- The Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering is now less than a month away.
- Bishops are bringing together some 300 United Methodists around the globe to help reimagine the denomination’s future.
- Organizers are providing ways for all United Methodists to engage in the work, which will also be informed by surveys offered earlier this year.
- The latest survey specifically focused on the priorities of young adults.
With excitement and earnest prayer, Leadership Gathering organizers and participants are making final preparations for the first-of-its-kind United Methodist event — now less than three weeks away.
In the meantime, organizers also are releasing resources — including devotions and a podcast — intended to engage United Methodists around the globe in the Leadership Gathering’s work.
The organizers have compiled the results of a survey of United Methodist youth and young adults that they hope will help shape conversations at the event.
“It’s not just about the 300 or so people in the room,” said Stephanie Henry, co-convener of the event’s design team and lay member of the Pacific Northwest Conference. “We want the rest of the church to feel like they’re a part of the process, part of the history, part of what’s happening.”
The Council of Bishops and other organizers are planning the gathering — set for Oct. 20-24 at Knox United Church in Calgary, Canada — to help move the international denomination past a painful season of church disaffiliations to where God is calling.
Resources
- Join the Council of Bishops in weekly prayers and devotions ahead of the gathering.
- Listen to podcasts about the Leadership Gathering.
- Read books from Cokesbury that will inform the conversation.
- Learn more and watch livestream here.
- Give.
Participants also have work to do in advance of the gathering. That includes prayerfully answering questions sent by the organizers and downloading the Whova conference app. Participants also are asked to covenant together based on John Wesley’s rules to do no harm, do good and attend to all the ordinances of God.
From the get-go, the bishops envisioned the meeting to be different from General Conference, the denomination’s top legislative assembly. Instead of a decision-making body, the bishops and other organizers see the gathering as a discerning body that ditches parliamentary procedure in favor of prayerful discussion. The theme for the event is “Emboldened by the Spirit: Imagining a Church Yet to Be.”
Council of Bishops President Rubén Saenz Jr., who along with Henry is the design team’s co-convener, said that he and his fellow bishops had a decision to make after the momentous 2024 General Conference.
“The choice before the council was: Are we going to spend the next decade managing decline, or are we going to begin to imagine a church yet to be that the future generations will receive and value?” he said in the first podcast about the gathering. Saenz also leads the Horizon Texas Conference.
He is hoping the participants will explore how The United Methodist Church’s structures might need to change to help churchgoers carry out the new vision to “love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously.”
Ashley Boggan, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History and a design team member, observed that the people called Methodist have undergone multiple schisms and mergers in their nearly 300-year history but never before had a gathering like this.
“I am very excited that The United Methodist Church is finally taking a moment to pause and listen — not only to each other, but also to the work of the Holy Spirit,” she told UM News. “This is an opportunity to really think about not only what our identity as The United Methodist Church is now, but what does The United Methodist Church need to be 30, 40, 50 years from now?”
Who is coming?
Boggan added that she especially finds it inspiring and hopeful that the denomination is now doing that work by intentionally including young voices.
Unlike General Conference, participants in the discussions will not be clergy and lay delegates elected by their respective annual conferences. Instead, each bishop has chosen three participants from their episcopal area — a clergy member, lay person and at least one other young adult. Some bishops have opted to name three young adult participants.
Participants also include the top executives of the Connectional Table and each general agency as well as the bishops themselves. Altogether, those chosen across Africa, Europe, the Philippines and the U.S. include both General Conference veterans and a new generation of rising church leaders.
But getting United Methodists from around the globe to Calgary, Canada, has proven challenging.
Because of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Canadian authorities have suspended visas for people living in Congo and neighboring Uganda and South Sudan through Nov. 27. That suspension affects 22 participants.
Leadership Gathering organizers have been getting regular updates on participants’ visa status. As of mid-September, Henry said, 35 had received approvals, 20 were waiting for decisions on their visa applications, six had their applications denied and 10 had not yet reported their visa status.
With so many facing travel barriers, organizers are planning for invited participants who are stuck at home to meet together through Zoom.
Ways to get engaged
United Methodists who are not among the invited participants can still be a part of the Leadership Gathering’s work through their prayers, reflection and willingness to follow along online.
Derrick Scott III, a Leadership Gathering participant from the Florida Conference, is hosting a series with Boggan and other gathering organizers on his United Methodist-focused podcast “Bar of the Conference.” So far, two episodes are available including one on the purpose of the gathering
Cokesbury, the United Methodist Publishing House’s retail arm, also has assembled discounted book bundles to offer United Methodist perspectives on various topics the Leadership Gathering might address. These topics include discipleship, leadership, social justice, accountability and stewardship.
Seven bishops from across the United Methodist connection are offering a devotion and a prayer on each of the seven Sundays leading to the Leadership Gathering. The devotions are available in English, French and Portuguese.
Organizers also offer recordings and discussion guides for three webinars held earlier this year based around the denomination’s vision statement.
- “Love Boldly” webinar on theology.
- “Serve Joyfully” webinar on mission.
- “Lead Courageously” webinar on church life.
United Methodist Communications, which includes UM News, plans to livestream the plenary sessions on the Leadership Gathering homepage. The agenda for the meeting is also online.
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Voices informing the conversation
Ahead of the gathering, organizers also have conducted two surveys of United Methodists around the globe with the goal of learning what priorities they hope shape participants’ work.
Earlier this year, 12,292 United Methodists across the denomination’s nine world regions responded to the 2026 Global Survey. Based on those survey results, the gathering will be looking at how United Methodists can engage in innovative discipleship formation, empower younger generations and strengthen global connections.
With the people who responded to the first survey skewing older, organizers did a second survey specifically geared to teens and young adults below the age of 35. All told, 985 young United Methodists responded.
Their top ask of the denomination over the next 10-20 years was more leadership opportunities for young people, with 53% of respondents choosing that goal as their top priority. The survey also found that the survey results differed more by the region than the age of those responding.
The survey analyses will be included in the resources and will provide data for conversations within the covenant groups that will meet throughout the gathering, Boggan said.
“These surveys will be a way for voices beyond the covenant groups to be part of the conversation,” she said. “When drafting the discernment process, all of the survey results were taken into account and informed the questions proposed and process discerned.”
What counts as success
Over the three days in Calgary, participants both online and in person will ground their work in worship. They will also meet for discussion in covenant groups, which will respond to questions presented each day that will inform the ideas coming out of the gathering.
The first day will focus on naming the church’s reality, with each covenant group naming three realities to carry forward. The second day will move toward discerning what new living practices can respond to the named reality. The third day will move toward “faithful imagination” — asking the Holy Spirit to help the church envision beyond how it currently exits.
By the end, organizers plan for the participants to put together 15 prioritized recommendations for living into the vision and creating a future-facing United Methodism.
The design team will take those ideas to assemble a report for the bishops and wider church. Some of those ideas could end up as legislation before the next General Conference, scheduled May 8-16, 2028, in Minneapolis.
“This is the beginning of the conversation,” Boggan said. “This is the breaking open of the concept of what church is currently and should be or could be.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
