Key points:
- Organizers of The United Methodist Church’s top legislative meeting have set the total number of delegates for the 2028 General Conference in Minneapolis.
- The delegate count they set is both smaller and more international than previous General Conference sessions.
- The organizers are looking for ways to ensure all elected delegates can participate even if they cannot get visas to the U.S.
No matter what the next General Conference decides, The United Methodist Church’s top legislative assembly planned in 2028 is already groundbreaking.
For the first time in The United Methodist Church’s history, a majority of delegates at General Conference will come from outside the United States.
The international group that plans the assembly voted Nov. 11 to set the number of 2028 General Conference delegates at 708 — with 46% from the U.S. and 54% from Africa, the Philippines, Europe and concordat churches that have close ties to The United Methodist Church. The big meeting, which typically meets every four years, will bring together lay and clergy delegates from four continents whose decisions set the denomination’s direction for years to come.
“We are a worldwide church,” said the Rev. Aleze M. Fulbright, the secretary of General Conference. “We are living into what we say about being United Methodist.”
She also celebrated that the commission set the count just a week after the Council of Bishops announced the ratification of regionalization — a denominational restructuring aimed at de-centering the U.S.
However, the total number of delegates also marks a significant decrease from recent General Conference sessions that had an allotment of between 850 to nearly 1,000 delegates. The Book of Discipline, the denomination’s policy book, says the commission must set the number of General Conference delegates between 600 and 1,000.
The Rev. Andy Call, commission chair, said that budgetary constraints led the commission to opt for the lower end of that scale. The commission has been looking for ways to reduce costs and help make up for a $1.8 million budget deficit inherited from multiple earlier General Conference sessions.
“The church has been looking to us for some fiscal responsibility,” said Call, who is also lead pastor of Christ of the Saviour United Methodist Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
“So, the number is smaller, and yet we are also seeing this increased representation from outside the U.S.,” he added. “And I think both things happening at the same time are to our advantage.”
The Commission on the General Conference made the decision while meeting in downtown Minneapolis — the same city where the commission has contracted to host the next General Conference on May 8-18, 2028.
Before COVID-caused delays forced the move of last year’s General Conference to Charlotte, North Carolina, Minneapolis was to be the host of 2020 General Conference. Making good on the initial Minneapolis plans also helps the commission with significant cost savings.
Bishop Lanette Plambeck, who leads the Dakotas and Minnesota conferences, told the commission she knows that choosing Minneapolis was in part about unfulfilled contracts. But she added that she saw more at work than just that concern,
“For the people called United Methodist in Minnesota, they are talking about the return of General Conference as a sacred promise,” she said in leading worship Nov. 12. “I want you to hear that one, that there was something sacred about being selected, and there is something sacred about fulfilling this movement called the General Conference that will have happen in 2028.”
Nevertheless, commission members also discussed the increasing challenges and long waits faced by people seeking visas to travel to the U.S.
Learn more
Read press release on the delegate count.
Monalisa S. Tuitahi, the commission’s vice chair and an immigration attorney, gave an overview of current U.S. policies related to visa applications and immigration enforcement.
“As a Commission, we strive to provide a place for holy conferencing that allows the ministry of The UMC to move forward, while also caring for the body, mind and soul of attendees,” she said in a report shared with the commission. “This task is layered and complicated in every quadrennium, but it is especially challenging in the current political and social landscape of the U.S.”
With that in mind, the commission is exploring the possibility of operating a site outside the U.S. so elected delegates who cannot get visas still can participate in the body’s decision-making.
Both Fulbright and Call were clear that the General Conference organizers would strive to ensure that all 708 delegates are able to meet together in Minneapolis. But they also want to assure as much participation as possible.
“If the need arises, we’re just going to be extending the bar beyond Minneapolis, and that will be the understanding we are working toward,” Fulbright said.
The commission is just beginning to investigate the potential of using a site beyond Minneapolis.
For now, with the overall count determined, Fulbright plans to notify each of the annual conference secretaries how many delegates their conferences can elect based on a formula in the Discipline.
Annual conferences — the denomination’s basic organizing unit — consist of lay and clergy voters from multiples churches. Each is responsible for electing delegates. Half of those chosen must be lay and half clergy, with laity electing the lay delegates, and clergy electing their fellow clergy.
Under the Discipline, the denomination’s 137 annual conferences can start electing delegates when they meet next year. The commission has been encouraging particularly annual conferences in Africa to hold their elections in 2026 — increasing the chances that those elected have the time to get their visas even amid the long waits.
In collaboration with United Methodist Communications, the commission plans to have a tracker on the General Conference website showing the number of delegates elected and the number of invitation letters sent enabling delegates to begin the visa-application process.
Annual conference secretaries must notify the General Conference office who will serve on their delegations within 30 days of the elections. Fulbright, in turn, said her office must send delegates their invitation letters within 30 days of receiving that notification.
As a baseline, each annual conference gets one lay and one clergy delegate. Beyond this mandatory minimum, the Discipline’s formula allots conferences their delegate slates based on their number of active and retired clergy and their number of lay professing members, relative to the whole denomination.
Under the count approved by the commission, the allocations for delegates will be:
- 284 from Africa
- 56 from the Philippines
- 32 from Europe
- 326 from the U.S.
- 10 from concordat churches, which are The Methodist Church of Great Britain; The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas; The Methodist Church of Mexico and The Methodist Church of Puerto Rico.
Fulbright plans to share the delegate breakdown by individual annual conferences early next year.
The delegate distribution reflects broader membership shifts in the denomination. United Methodist membership in the U.S. has declined in recent years because of church disaffiliations, while membership has grown significantly in the Philippines and especially on the continent of Africa.
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As of 2024, the General Council on Finance and Administration reports, the denomination had slightly less than 4 million members in the U.S. and about 7.3 million total members in Africa, Philippines and Europe.
To calculate slates of delegates, the Discipline requires the General Conference secretary to use annual conference journals submitted to the General Council on Finance and Administration.
One challenge the commission faced was how to deal with some conferences’ inconsistent reporting in the statistical data. Looking at trends going back to 2012, Fulbright said, some conferences reported spikes in membership that looked dramatically different than anything that came before. In such cases, she used an average to reflect the increase.
“If there was a significant spike that looked inconsistent to anything,” she said, “then it’s a matter of needing to make a rational decision.”
The General Council on Finance and Administration is working with annual conferences to try to get more consistent data, especially trying to ensure all regions of the denomination are using the same definition of professing membership. But for the current calculations, Fulbright needed to use the latest information available up to 2025.
The commission also had to decide whether to allocate delegates to Côte d’Ivoire. Last year, the Côte d’Ivoire Conference held a vote to leave The United Methodist Church, citing opposition to recent General Conference actions. The conference subsequently registered with the West African nation’s government as an independent Methodist church.
However, Fulbright said, Côte d’Ivoire has yet to take advantage of the Discipline’s process to become autonomous. With that in mind, the commission still considers Côte d’Ivoire part of the denomination and therefore part of the delegate count.
Even amid all the challenges and complexities General Conference organizers face, Fulbright sees much to celebrate.
“We celebrate the moving of God’s Spirit that has led to growth in and throughout Africa,” she told the commission. “We celebrate that there have been new regional conferences established with new annual conferences created. We also celebrate the ways regionalization will continue to inform how we will be The United Methodist Church into God’s faithful future.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
