World Methodist Council

The body dates itself from the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference, held at Wesley's Chapel in City Road, London, in September 1881. The word ecumenical there means Methodist worldwide rather than inter-denominational: British and American Methodism had by then divided repeatedly, and the point of the meeting was to get the fragments into one room. The conference met roughly every ten years thereafter, and a continuing organisation took shape around it, adopting the name World Methodist Council in 1951.

Its headquarters is at Lake Junaluska in North Carolina, with a European office, and its membership is a list of denominations rather than of individuals: something over eighty churches in more than a hundred countries, together representing tens of millions of people who would describe themselves as Methodist, Wesleyan, Nazarene, United, or one of the several African Methodist Episcopal traditions.

The World Methodist Conference, held every five years, is the public face of it, and there is a permanent staff, a set of standing committees, and a World Methodist Peace Award given annually. None of that carries authority. The Council is a place where a family of churches meets itself, and what it does with that is mostly study, exchange, and the maintenance of relationships that no single member church could sustain alone.

The Council holds no authority over any member church. It cannot ordain, cannot discipline, cannot settle a doctrinal dispute, and cannot prevent a member from dividing, merging or leaving. Divisions among Methodist churches are settled by those churches under their own polity, and the Council's membership list simply records the outcome afterwards.

What a consultative body can do is negotiate on behalf of a family that has no other single voice. The Council maintains standing bilateral dialogues with the Catholic Church, with the Anglican Communion, with the Lutheran World Federation, with the Orthodox churches and with the Reformed and Baptist families, and those conversations have produced a long run of agreed statements on ministry, on the eucharist and on authority.

Its most consequential single act outside Methodism came in July 2006 at Seoul, when it associated itself with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church that declared the sixteenth century condemnations on justification no longer applicable to the parties as they now teach. The Methodist association added a third world communion to a two-party agreement, and it was possible only because a body existed that could speak for the family as a whole. That is the argument for having one, and it is more or less the only thing such a body can offer that its members cannot do individually.