The 2026 General Conference would focus on re-establishing connection within the United Methodist Church, lamenting, healing and recasting the mission and vision for the mainline denomination after years of strife over the ordination and marriage of its LGBTQ members, according to a press release published Monday (May 8) on the Council of Bishops’ website.

CHICAGO (RNS) — United Methodist bishops have proposed a five-day meeting of the denomination’s global decision-making body, the General Conference, in May 2026.
The announcement comes at the end of the Council of Bishops’ spring meeting last week in Chicago and a weekend that saw hundreds of United Methodist churches in the United States leave the denomination.
The 2026 General Conference would focus on re-establishing connection within the United Methodist Church, lamenting, healing and recasting the mission and vision for the mainline denomination after years of strife over the ordination and marriage of its LGBTQ members, according to a press release published Monday (May 8) on the Council of Bishops’ website.
Delegates to the General Conference also would consider a more regional governance structure to better support the remaining denomination, which currently numbers about 30,000 U.S. churches.
“I admit to you I’m eager to get past all this. I want us to stop talking about disaffiliations,” Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops, said during the bishops’ meeting, which ran April 30 to May 5.
“I’m worried genuinely that we’ve spent more time on those that are leaving than focusing our energy on those who are staying.”
Delegates to the 2020 General Conference meeting had been expected to consider a proposal to split the denomination over its disagreement on sexuality and help create a new, theologically conservative denomination called the Global Methodist Church. That would allow the United Methodist Church to change language in its Book of Discipline that bars same-sex marriages and LGBTQ clergy.
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We fight sin. We battle it. We kill it. But anyone who has waged this kind of war will tell you that the removal of any sinful habit, especially one we hold closely to our hearts, leaves an incredible void in its absence. We wonder if we can even go on, for we’ve come to look forward to that sin. We crave it. We think about it and nurture it. What can fill the void left by mortification? Vivification.

A couple of definitions today might be helpful right off the bat since you probably haven’t used either of these words in casual conversation today. I know I have not.
Mortification is about death. Killing sin as violently and as often as necessary. It’s waging all out war against what is contrary to life in Christ. Now anyone who has been a Christian for more than five minutes knows the reality of mortification. It was the great Puritan John Owen who famously said, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”
To put it in specifically biblical terms, we see a passage like this:
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:1-5).
In those verses we see first the reality – that we died when we came into Christ. And yet the remnants of that former self still cling doggedly to us, and that’s why we must also “put to death.” In other words, because we have died, we must daily die. That’s mortification, and it involves the daily battle against the self.
Vivification is more positive.
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May we never turn our back on our heavenly Father, with the camera focused upon our pathetic selves. God forbid that he would ever become a background picture for the glorification of self. May our first request to our Father in heaven, “Hallowed be your name,” put him back at the center of our Christian prayers and service. And may it put us on the lower periphery—the happiest, truest, and best place to be—looking upward and inward to our heavenly Father with praise and adoration. And may he hear our prayer, that many of the lost will come and join us in his praise.

If the Louvre is Paris’s most popular tourist destination, Leonardo da Vinci’s La Joconde is easily the most popular exhibit within the museum.
I first saw the Mona Lisa in 1985. I remember a crowd taking photos with their 35mm cameras. Every time a flash went off, an attendant would futilely wag their finger. This scene repeated about every five seconds.
In 2018 I noticed a big change. There was the same-size crowd, and people were also taking photos. But they were not taking photos of the Mona Lisa. They were taking photos of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa.
Which means that they had their backs to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.
This new phenomenon is not explained by the difference in device—the old cameras were also capable of self-portraits.
The phenomenon is explained by a difference in attitude.
In the past, people took a photo of a painting to show others. The intention was that others be able to look at and admire the art.
Today, people take a photo of themselves in front of the painting to show others. The intention is that others be able to look at and admire the photographer. Admire the selfie-artiste, who is gorgeous and cultured.
And so in 1985 the signs around the Mona Lisa warned against damaging the painting with camera flashes. In 2019 the signs warn against self-portraitists damaging each other with elbows and selfie-sticks. It’s a picture of our world, our obsession with self, and our miserable struggle to admire anything outside of us, except in its capacity to bring admiration to ourselves.
This is a caricature of course. No one is entirely selfish, and we are surrounded and blessed by the countless selfless acts of others. But it is undeniably a growing and powerful tendency in our society, a tendency that sows only frustration and misery.
What is the primary purpose of Christianity?
What is the character of our Christianity? Is its primary purpose myself? What I get out of it? Selfishness is the air we breathe, and just as it infects and damages our relationships with others, it infects and damages our relationship with our heavenly Father.
Jesus exposes, challenges, and disintegrates this selfishness with the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, Hallowed be your name (Matt. 6:9; all Scripture quotes from NIV).
In order to understand this fully, it helps to engage briefly with three languages: English, Greek, and Latin, and no prior experience required.
“Hallowed be your name” reminds us of the importance of treating God’s name as holy.
The English “hallow” is a verb that means “to make holy.” So “Hallowe’en” was originally the “eve” before the holiday that celebrated the “hallowed” ones, the saints. “Holiday” itself comes from “holy day,” a day to cease work in order to worship. You can hear the similar “hal” and “hol” sounds in these related words. “Hallowed be your name” therefore means, “May your name be hallowed, may your name be treated as holy.”
The Greek original gives further important context. The verb hagiazō correlates with the noun hagios, almost always translated by the English words “holy,” “holy one,” or “holy place.” The link can be seen in the rare English word “hagiography,” which is a biography of a saint or a biography that attempts to portray someone as saintly. And this introduces a set of words built on the Latin sanctus, including “saint,” “sanctuary,” “sanctify,” “sacred,” and “consecrate.”
These are three language-groups of words that refer to the same thing: the English “hallow” and “holy,” the Greek hagiazō and hagios, and the Latin “sanctify” and “sacred.” Putting these words together like this gives us a more rounded understanding of their meaning.
Let’s come back to hagiazō, the original language word in the Lord’s Prayer. This verb was used in three basic ways:

To set apart, consecrate, hallow something for a ritual purpose. So Jesus talks about the altar that “consecrates” a sacrifice, that “makes the gift sacred” (Matt. 23:19). And Paul talks about food that is “consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:5).

To purify something, “to eliminate that which is incompatible with holiness.” Thus, Paul says of Christians, “You were washed, you were sanctified [hallowed], you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 6:11). And he describes husbands who are to love their wives like Christ loved the church and hallowed it by “the washing of water with the word” (Eph. 5:26). Christians are those who have been “sanctified [hallowed] in Christ Jesus and called to be holy” (1 Cor. 1:2).

To treat something or someone as holy, to reverence something. Peter commands Christians, in their hearts, “to revere [set apart/sanctify/hallow] Christ as Lord” (1 Peter 3:15). Christ is to be given a unique and revered place in our hearts.

This third sense of hagiazō is what Jesus means when he teaches us to pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” We pray that God’s name will be hallowed, treated as holy, reverenced, and sanctified.
“Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD Almighty!”
It is important at this point to recall the idea of holiness in the Old Testament. In Exodus 3:5, at the burning bush, God commanded Moses to “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” God was present, and so the ground was to be hallowed, treated as different, with reverence. Footwear off.
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