This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
At a Uniting Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, running from 26 April to 10 May 1939, three separate Methodist bodies became one. The Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which had split from it in 1844 over slavery, and the Methodist Protestant Church merged into a single body, The Methodist Church, reversing the 1844 division after ninety five years apart.
Reunion was possible only because the southern church's delegates required a compromise. The new church created a sixth jurisdiction, the Central Jurisdiction, organized by race rather than geography, covering nineteen Black annual conferences and held administratively apart from the five geographic jurisdictions that covered white members across the reunited church.
That compromise outlived the reunion itself by decades. The Central Jurisdiction was not dissolved until the 1968 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which made its abolition a condition of the new union, ending a racially separate structure that had stood inside the reunified church for almost thirty years.
What the 1939 Uniting Conference changed for Methodism's spread was healing a ninety five year old division born of slavery, but only by writing a new racial line into the reunited church's own structure, a line American Methodism would carry until a second merger forced its removal in 1968.