Sarah McGinnis' Reflections on The Gathering 2026

November 04, 2026

2026 UMC Leadership Gathering Reflection

In August of 2025, I received a text message from our Bishop, Rev. David Graves, asking if there was a good time to chat about an opportunity. The Council of Bishops for the United Methodist Church was convening a leadership gathering to take place in the fall of 2026 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Each bishop was tasked with selecting three leaders from their episcopal area–at least one person of color, one person under the age of 35, and only one of the three could be clergy. I was invited to represent the Kentucky Annual Conference as a layperson. If you ask Bishop Graves, he will share with a small chuckle and smile that my response to his invitation was, “Bishop, will this gathering make a difference, or will it just be another meeting?” He responded, “Sarah, I truly hope this gathering will make a difference."

Indeed, this gathering was unlike many other United Methodist events I have attended. It was not a legislative meeting. No resolutions were drafted and Robert’s Rules of Order was nowhere to be found. Instead, 281 leaders from the worldwide connection came together to spend time in holy listening, faithful imagination, and prayerful discernment, speaking face to face and heart to heart.

While the full council of bishops was present at the gathering, they did not preside over our time together and rarely were they seen from the stage. Instead, they were faithful participants alongside clergy and laity alike. As someone who has been to larger legislative meetings like Jurisdictional Conference, engaging with our bishops as fellow United Methodists who care deeply about the future of the Church and our denomination was refreshing. In a system like ours, institutional hierarchy impacts relationships, and it can be easy to reduce leaders to their titles. But the three bishops I had the opportunity to work alongside in prayer and conversation were fully human and fully in love with God. I’m thankful for the opportunity I had to partner with them in our work.

But what did this work look like? The design team for the gathering identified five categories that would guide our discussions about the present and future of the UMC: discipleship, leadership, impact, stewardship, and accountability. Prior to the gathering, each participant was assigned to a group that would spend its time discussing one of those categories. These groups were called cohorts. Within each cohort, we were divided into covenant groups that would explore their cohort assignment through the lens of innovative disciple formation, empowering younger generations, or amplifying global voices.

I participated in the Discipleship cohort through the lens of empowering younger generations. As a parent of a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, I was honored to be able to participate in conversations that centered around how we as the UMC can do a better job at empowering younger generations in the life of the Church and our denomination. I also have the immense privilege to work and be in relationship with young adult leaders in the Kentucky Annual Conference on a regular basis. As I listened and shared in our covenant group, the faces of my kids and those young adults were at the forefront of my mind, reminding me who I was there to prioritize.

Each covenant group was asked to name a reality facing the UMC and to craft a statement of recommendation to address that reality. The discipleship covenant group, focusing on empowering younger generations, named that at various levels of leadership, there exists a gap between our older and younger generations that makes it difficult to create meaningful relationships, opportunities for leadership, spiritual formation, and flourishing for children, youth, and young adults.

In light of that reality, our covenant group recommended that The United Methodist Church accompany younger generations (inside and outside the church) in the power of the Holy Spirit toward their emotional, spiritual, and physical flourishing grounded in Jesus.

What does accompanying younger generations look like? Here are some ideas from our group:

• New Pathways of Leadership: We must find ways to ease the pathway toward lay leadership, licensed pastoring, and ordained ministry, while also maintaining a high standard for how those leaders are equipped.

• Participation at all levels: If we are to truly empower younger generations, they need opportunities to lead now, not only in the future.

• Renewal and Recommitment of Spiritual Disciplines: Young adults from the gathering named that they are hungry for rhythms of spiritual discipline. The UMC, therefore, needs to reclaim its tradition of spiritual disciplines, teaching and adapting those disciplines to engage younger generations more fully in spiritual growth.

• Reverse Mentorship: We believe older generations would benefit from intentionally engaging in mentorship that would allow younger generations to educate and inform them about their realities, challenges, and hopes.

These statements as they exist now are far too broad. I wish I could offer you every conversation that shaped the words I just shared but I trust that this recommendation, and the sixteen others that were offered will spur deeper conversations and concrete ideas throughout our connection as the work of this gathering becomes more widely shared.

I have one more moment I would like to highlight from the gathering. One of the first addresses we heard was from Bishop Saenz, co-convener of the gathering, and he said something that has stuck with me. He said, “A church that is concerned with saving itself has little to offer a frightened world.” So much of what our denomination has been through over the past 10 years has resulted in a reduction of churches, clergy, laity, and finances. It has left us feeling unmoored. A boat no longer protected by the safety of the harbor, sailing on stormy seas that we aren’t sure how to navigate, sometimes scrambling for ways to keep the boat afloat. However, the sense that I walked away with was that people are ready to let the boat sink if it means we get to swim to new shores.

So, you may be wondering, what comes next? While a formal report will be released by the Council of Bishops in January 2027, many at the gathering wondered if anything would truly come of this work before our next General Conference in 2028. I wondered that myself, but here is the good news: we don’t need to wait. Yes, there are many issues within our denomination that can only be dealt with through our formal governing body. This can feel extremely limiting, but so many of the ideas I heard at this gathering are ideas that start here, in the local church, with our laity and our clergy working together to form disciples of Jesus Christ.

We are already called to that work. The question is, will we do the work? Will we learn and grow, led by the Holy Spirit, so that we can better serve and lead in our local communities? Will we untether ourselves from self-preservation so that we might have something good and true to offer a frightened world? May it be so.