Gathering offers 16 ideas for church future

Key points:

• More than 230 United Methodists from four continents joined together for the Leadership Gathering.
• Near the end of the meeting, the participants unveiled 16 recommendations they hope will help The United Methodist Church flourish.
• The Council of Bishops plans to share a report shaped by those recommendations to the whole denomination in January.

Contextually relevant resources for evangelism. A new liturgical prayer of confession. Pilot programs to nurture discipleship among children and youth.

These are among the 16 recommendations that the Leadership Gathering’s participants presented for a renewed United Methodist Church that will make disciples of Jesus Christ for years to come.

“You opened up a window to the future,” Council of Bishops President Rubén Saenz Jr. told the participants as the five-day gathering at Knox United Church concluded Oct. 24.  

“You imagine a United Methodist Church of 2050 deeply rooted in Christ and our Wesleyan means of grace, forming disciples rather than merely counting members, or noses and nickels. You imagine a church where prayer, evangelism, service and justice belong together, and generations learn from one another.”

Saenz, who also leads the Horizon Texas Conference, and his fellow bishops invited more than 280 lay and clergy United Methodists from around the globe to help them discern where the Holy Spirit might be leading The United Methodist Church after a season of disaffiliations. More than a third of the bishops’ chosen participants were under the age of 35.

In a podcast ahead of the Leadership Gathering, Saenz said the bishops did not want to spend the next decade managing decline but instead “begin to imagine a church yet to be that the future generations will receive and value.”

Multiple participants told UM News that they are already seeing that future emerge after this past week.

“This was amazing, and it’s just the start,” said Teri Watanabe, member of Junction City United Methodist Church in Oregon. “I hope we realize that the conversations and the learnings that we experienced are taken individually, back to the local church, back to our wider conferences and then back to the world as well.”

Whitley Henson, who is 29, shared a similar sense of excitement. “I am very hopeful for my generation and for the future generations who come up in The United Methodist Church,” said Henson, who works with both the Central Appalachian Missionary and Kentucky conferences.

Over the course of the week, the participants joined in stirring worship, listened to thought-provoking speakers and most crucially, spent hours in small covenant groups engaged in prayer and deep conversation about how to address the struggles they see across the denomination.

The groups moved from first naming a reality that challenges the church to developing a recommendation for how United Methodists might, with God’s help, address that named reality.

The problems the groups named included a focus on maintenance more than mission, a lack of clarity around discipleship, the exclusion of younger generations from decision-making, the wounds of colonization and a lack of church support as young people face global crises.

Altogether, there were 16 covenant groups — 15 that met in Calgary and one that met online. The virtual covenant group consisted of mostly African participants who, because of travel restrictions, could not make it to Canada.

All told, 46 invited participants could not attend in person but only 17 people were able to connect with the online group. Of those meeting in Calgary, 22 participants were from Africa, 17 from Europe, 14 from the Philippines and 182 from the United States.

Late afternoon Oct. 23, each group announced its recommendation and what it means for The United Methodist Church of 2050. Some of the ideas were more concrete and some aspirational.

Here are the recommendations from each group, edited for length.

• Reclaim our Wesleyan core of deep relationship and connection to the broader church, evangelism and service through our means of grace.
• Accompany younger generations (inside and outside the church) in the power of the Holy Spirit toward their emotional, spiritual and physical flourishing grounded in Jesus.

How gathering worked

Ashley Boggan, a United Methodist historian and one of the Leadership Gathering’s organizers, said she hopes the event is just the beginning of a bright new chapter for The United Methodist Church.

“I hope that United Methodists 100 years from now will look back to these few years of the 2020s as the big pivot point for The United Methodist Church,” said Boggan, the top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History. “I hope they see this as the point when we finally started asking the hard questions and uplifting voices that had been pushed to the outskirts, and really were thinking about who we are and whose we are as United Methodists.”

Shaping the ideas of Leadership Gathering participants were the priorities, identified in a survey of United Methodists earlier this year, of supporting innovative forms of discipleship, empowering younger generations and amplifying global voices.

They did this work in one of five cohorts dealing with the topics of discipleship, leadership, impact, stewardship and accountability. Each of the cohorts split into three covenant groups focused on one of three priorities and how it relates to their cohort’s topic.

See their recommendations.

• Create multiple avenues to help people model the life and ministry of Jesus Christ including young adult gatherings, virtual reality models and cross-cultural and multi-accessibility experiences with the expectation of strengthening equitable connection and intercultural competence.
• Urge the Council of Bishops to champion a pilot program, inviting at least one conference in each region to design and implement at least one creative venture related to innovative children and youth discipleship, intentional bi-vocational ministry or redesigned models of theological or administrative formation.
• Invest in a system of empowerment and mentorship that encompasses redistribution of resources, culture of call and leadership development.
• Recommit to “the world as our parish” through forming and nurturing Christ-like leaders who intentionally build global relationships and holistically share resources.
• Embrace new forms of communal discipleship that relinquish structures, assets and buildings in order to co-create with the neighbors Jesus called us into ministry with across the world.
• Have each region support 10 new locally rooted, Christ-centered circles that engage young people in responding to the global crises confronting humanity.
• Provide contextual resources for evangelism and discipleship that will encourage local churches to identify and empower lay people, cultivate their call and give them permission to reach others for Christ.
• Move away from funding ministry in isolation and practice creative collaboration for the sake of the mission.
• Acknowledge that we have not always been faithful stewards of the gifts that have been entrusted to us, repent and create contextually relevant and appropriate tools to steward resources in service of our vision at all levels of our church. This liberates our resources from institutional preservation toward an intergenerational worldwide church that loves boldly, serves joyfully and leads courageously.
• Continuously reimagine our structures and resources to align with our Wesleyan identity and God’s mission, in a changing, diverse worldwide context.
• Reexamine, reclaim and recommit to living out our baptismal vow “to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”
• Allocate significant church resources, spaces and opportunities to impact the life of people under 18.
• Create a short liturgical prayer to be prayed monthly in every United Methodist church around the world that invites reflection and confession over the thoughts and behaviors that makes authoritarianism, racism and tribalism possible.
• Link rural and urban congregations, plant city and campus ministries, equip young adults to lead, and include Deaf people and people with disabilities fully.

Saenz, who also was co-convener of the event’s design team, said the ideas give United Methodists something substantial to work with, and something worth working toward. By January, the Council of Bishops plans to share a Leadership Gathering report with the wider church based on the recommendations.

Kade Rogers, director of mission and ministry at Grace United Methodist Church in Des Moines, Iowa, told those gathered that the week had been life-transforming.

“I will not leave Calgary unchanged by the conversations that I got to have,” he said. He also wrote about his experience for the Iowa Conference.

View more photos

Charmaine Narvadez (left) and Lijah Medina offer Holy Communion during the Leadership Gathering in Calgary, Canada.

See photos from every day of the Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering on UM News’ Flickr page.

Caleb Parker, a member of Duke Memorial United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, and one of the organizers who helped organize LGBTQ delegates at the 2024 General Conference, told UM News that he and all those participating were privileged to be in this space.

He was among an international group of participants invited to join an Oct. 24  panel that responded to the participants’ recommendations. He celebrated that the 2024 General Conference removed harmful language that targeted LGBTQ members. At the same time, he told those gathered: “The United Methodist Church is not yet reconciled with queer people. But we can be.”

Bishop Ande Emmanuel, who leads United Methodists in Nigeria, Senegal and Cameroon, in responding to the recommendations, urged those gathered to see the church in Africa as equal partners.

“We need to move from dependency towards a mutual respect, accountability and shared ministry within our own projects,” he said. He added that just as people in the U.S. and Europe wrestle with racism, Africa also wrestles with tribalism. “We have to be a church that welcomes everybody,” he said.

Celeste Eubanks, a deaconess and director of Candler Center for Christian Leadership at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, said when the covenant groups met, that’s where the rich and holy moments happened.

She added that the time for praise and worship was also powerful. “Despite our differences on things, despite our different contexts and ethnicities,” she said, “we can always come together in worship.”

Micheal Pope, California-Nevada Conference lay leader and one of the event’s organizers, said she appreciated learning about the ministry of United Methodists around the globe.

“The U.S. context always seems to swallow up the conversation,” she said. “But when we are in a space like this, we say, ‘Wait a minute. Our siblings live in a different reality.’ So, we need to give them more room to share with us, so we can learn.”

One thing she said she learned is that while the United Methodist churches across the African continent often struggle for resources, they know how to draw an abundance of young people.

Unlike General Conference, there was no legislating. However, Andy Hendren said he would like to see the denomination’s top lawmaking assembly have more informal small group discussions unburdened from legislating.

Hendren is the top executive of Wespath, the denomination’s retirement and benefits agency that helped with event planning and provided substantial funding for the Leadership Gathering.

“If we put some sort of time like this at the front end of General Conference or regional conferences to just be church together and talk about maybe a few of the difficult things that are coming,” he said, “I think we’d have a better way of doing this.”

West Angola Bishop Gaspar João Domingos told UM News at the beginning of the gathering that he thanked God that after all the months of planning, United Methodists from four continents could come together.

“The United Methodist Church gives us many perspectives that we can use to analyze what’s happening around us in the world,” Domingos, who speaks Portuguese, said through an interpreter.

His prayer was for the Holy Spirit to “really be present in this and strengthen us and strengthen our ability to communicate the message, to really live out the Gospel message, no matter where we’re actually located.”

Saenz told those gathered and watching online that the recommendations offer an invitation to all United Methodists.

“The church yet to be will take shape in congregations, classrooms, homes, neighborhoods and communities far beyond Calgary,” he said. “God’s reign and God’s future is already breaking in. Our calling is to recognize it, receive its challenge and participate with joy.”

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.