General Conference 101: All You Ever Wanted to Know

A UMNS Report
By J. Richard Peck*
July 6, 2007

The United Methodist Church’s top legislative assembly, the General Conference, will meet in 2008 to set direction for the denomination for the following four years. This guide provides an overview of the gathering, how it works and its significance in the life of the church.

What is General Conference?

As the top policy-making body of the international United Methodist Church, General Conference is the only body that officially speaks for the 11.5-million member denomination (13 million if including baptized children who have not become members).

During the nine-day session, 992 delegates will revise the Book of Discipline, which regulates the manner in which local churches, annual conferences and general agencies are organized. The book also sets policies regarding church membership, ordination, administration, property and judicial procedures. The assembly may modify most disciplinary paragraphs by majority vote, but the Constitution can only be amended by a two-thirds affirmative vote, followed by a two-thirds affirmative vote of the aggregate number of members voting in annual conference session. Delegates may not revoke or change the Articles of Religion or the Confession of Faith unless two-thirds of the delegates agree to change this provision and three-fourths of the annual conference members also agree.

Delegates also revise the Book of Resolutions, a volume declaring the church’s stance on a wide variety of social justice issues. The book contains more than 300 resolutions that are considered instructive and persuasive, but are not binding on members.

When will the gathering be held?

The assembly meets once every four years in the months of April or May unless a special session to deal with a particular issue is called by the Council of Bishops or General Conference.

The 2008 General Conference will be held April 23-May 2 at the Fort Worth Convention Center. A UMNS photo courtesy of the Fort Worth Convention Center.

The next session will be April 23-May 2, 2008. The nine-day session is two fewer than in the preceding quadrennium, reducing the cost of the assembly by $163,000. Normally, delegates have a free day on Sunday, but delegates to the 2008 session will worship together in the morning and be back in legislative sessions or plenary for the remainder of the day. Central Texas Annual Conference, host of the assembly, will provide a special program on Sunday evening.

Who are the delegates?

The 992 delegates to the 2008 gathering are United Methodists elected by their annual conferences. Annual conferences consist of ordained clergypersons and an equal number of laypersons elected by their local churches.

Once every four years, annual conferences elect equal numbers of lay and clergy members to represent them at General Conference. Lay members vote for lay delegates and clergy for clergy delegates. The number of delegates from each conference is based on the number of clergy members and the number of lay members. However, even conferences with few lay and clergy members are guaranteed one clergy and one lay delegate. The Constitution permits General Conference to be composed of at least 600 and no more than 1,000 delegates.

Churches in the Southeastern Jurisdiction will have the largest number of delegates from the United States. However, because of membership increases in central conferences (outside the United States), that jurisdiction will have only 252 delegates, down from 278 at the 2004 gathering. North Central will have 138, down from 164; Northeastern, 126, down from 144; South Central, 148, down from 170; and Western, 40, down from 44.

The central conferences will have 278 delegates, up 100 from the 2004 assembly and up 136 from the gathering in 2000. Africa will be represented by 186 of the central conference delegates, up 94 from 2004. The 21 annual conferences in the Philippines will have 42 delegates. An additional 10 delegates will come from "concordat" churches with which the denomination has a formal relationship.

The number of U.S. delegates to the 2008 assembly would have decreased even more if Judicial Council had ruled that the 579,000-member Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Methodist Church was a full member of the denomination. The 2004 General Conference accepted the African church as a member but declared the new annual conference would only be allowed one lay and one clergy delegate to the 2008 General Conference.

The secretary of General Conference normally would have allocated more than 40 delegates to Cote d’Ivoire, so the Commission on General Conference asked the denomination's top court to rule on the legality of assigning the conference only two delegates. In October 2006, the Judicial Council ruled that the Cote d’Ivoire Conference was not yet a full member of the denomination since other steps were contemplated in the membership process. Four of the seven Judicial Council members disagreed, but it takes six members to declare a General Conference action unconstitutional. The decision was reaffirmed in April 2007.

What is the conference theme?

The theme of the 2008 General Conference will be "A Future With Hope."

"We’re trying to move General Conference from what it now is––an exercise in the management of petitions––to a genuine Christian conferencing with high quality conversation about the most important issues facing the church and the world," said Gail Murphy-Geiss, chairwoman of the Commission on General Conference. "We hope the conference will be more positive and uniting––a movement toward a 'future with hope.'" The commission is asking the conference to change the constitution to limit the number of delegates from a 1,000 maximum to a 600 maximum in order to increase dialogue and reduce costs.