The United Methodist Church is celebrating 200 years of Methodist mission. The bicentennial website launched Sept. 1. 

Discovering your ancestry has become nearly as easy as clicking a few menu items on your mobile device. In just a few minutes, you can learn about the origins of your family name and the geographic location of your most distant relatives. Learning who we are and where we come from deeply connects us to our place in the world, our core values, and our faith. Learning about our roots is work worth doing and something to be celebrated.

Over the next two years, we as The United Methodist Church and its partners will have much to celebrate as we rediscover 200 years of Methodist mission. The Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the earliest predecessor of Global Ministries will celebrate its bicentennial in 2019. We will also celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, which is the predecessor of United Methodist Women, as well as the 200th anniversary of the British Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society.

We will kick off this series of celebrations September 1, 2017, by launching http://methodistmission200.org/, where you will be invited to dig into your church’s and annual conference’s rich mission history and to tell your own mission story. These stories can be shared as written text, audio compilations, or short videos. Our goal is to collect and share these stories each month as we lead up to the bicentennial celebration in 2019.

The bicentennial celebration will also include a world conference of mission leaders and scholars, Answering the Call: Hearing God’s Voice in Methodist Mission Past, Present, and Future, to be held April 8–10, 2019, at the Emory University Conference Center Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. .

Last Updated on December 29, 2022