Connexion: How a Methodist Church Is Governed

Methodism calls its structure a connexion, and the word is doing work. A congregation is not a self-standing body that has chosen to associate with others; it is a local expression of one church, and the arrangements follow from that.

Clergy are members of an annual conference rather than of a congregation, and they are appointed to a charge by a bishop rather than called by the people they will serve. The system is called itinerancy and it descends directly from Wesley practice of moving preachers around a circuit. Property is held under a trust clause, so a building belongs to the denomination even though a local congregation paid for it and maintains it, which is why leaving is a legal question and not only a spiritual one.

Above the annual conference sits the General Conference, which meets every four years and is the only body that may speak for the church. Bishops preside but have no vote there, which is unusual among episcopal churches. A Judicial Council rules on whether an act of the General Conference or of a bishop is constitutional. Outside the United States the church is organised into central conferences with authority to adapt parts of the Discipline to their own legal and cultural situations, and roughly a third of the membership before the recent separation was outside the United States, mostly in Africa.