This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By the late nineteenth century Methodism had multiplied into dozens of separate connexions and denominations across Britain, America and the mission field, each tracing its own line back to the Wesleys but governing itself independently of the others. Roughly four hundred delegates from thirty of these Methodist bodies gathered at Wesley's own chapel in London in 1881 for the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference, seeking closer fraternal ties toward what the delegates themselves called the conversion of the world, a shared missionary purpose strong enough to draw thirty separate churches back into the same room.
The conference met every ten years afterward, a rhythm that held through decades of continued denominational multiplication. In 1931 its delegates resolved to organise a standing Council, so that Methodism's common ideals could be expressed continuously rather than only once a decade at a single gathering. The Second World War delayed that plan for two full decades beyond the original resolution.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the creation, out of a movement that had fragmented into dozens of independent bodies as it spread across three continents, of a lasting structure for expressing what those bodies still held in common. When the standing body finally convened in 1951 it took its present name, the World Methodist Council, and began meeting every five years, turning a once a decade conference into a continuous institution for a worldwide family of churches.