2026 Annual Conference Breakout Sessions

In this breakout participants will be offered both biblical encouragement and practical guidance for churches that long to see God do a fresh work in their midst. This session is designed to help pastors, leaders, and laypeople understand how the seeds they sow in the present can help prepare the ground for God’s renewing work in the future. With biblical inspiration and practical application, this breakout will help participants think about revival not only as something to hope for, but as something to prayerfully and faithfully prepare for. “Sowing Seeds For Revival” will encourage and equip anyone who longs to see the local church awakened, renewed, and ready for what God wants to do next.

The Church is called, equipped, commissioned, and SENT to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Yet many congregations struggle to move from sincere intention to sustainable disciple multiplication. Without structural alignment, disciple multiplication remains occasional rather than reproducible. Churches do not become sending churches by adding programs. They become sending churches by aligning culture, language, leadership, and systems around the Great Commission. Culture, not activity, determines whether disciple multiplication becomes normal or accidental. In this session, a pastor and certified lay minister share the early-stage implementation of a disciple-making ecosystem designed to move a congregation from maintenance patterns toward a sustainable culture of sending. Participants will examine how structural clarity supports the Church’s obedience to be SENT.

This breakout session will 1) encourage participants to envision a calling to strategic engagement in the Great Commission and 2) mobilize them and their districts and churches to cross-cultural missions by introducing Global Methodist Church missional vision and, specifically, the Engage training.

This breakout will equip Church leaders, small group leaders, and lay members to live as those sent into a conflicted world as ministers of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). Rather than avoiding conflict, attendees will learn how to engage it as an opportunity for disciple-making, embodying Christ’s peace in real relationships and will receive practical tools to navigate conflict and multiply healthy discipleship practices.

Every follower of Jesus is called—and every disciple can help others recognize and respond to God’s call. Yet many believers struggle to discern their own calling or to encourage it in others. This interactive workshop introduces a simple, biblical framework for understanding and multiplying calling using three movements: Abide in Christ, Belong in community, and Cooperate with the Holy Spirit. Participants will explore how calling develops through relationship with Christ, confirmation within the body of Christ, and responsiveness to the Spirit’s prompting. Through practical tools, reflective exercises, and guided conversation, attendees will learn how to recognize the early signs of calling in themselves and others, ask catalytic questions that draw out God’s work in a person’s life, and help people take their next faithful step in mission.

In this breakout, participants will explore the re-emerging power of the Methodist movement – banded discipleship. Early on, Wesley organized his people into class and band meetings. Class meetings were typically 7-12 people and Band meetings were 3-5 people. Faith is not a solo sport and neither is discipleship. In a culture where loneliness has reached epidemic levels and so many Christians struggle to appropriate and put into practice the things they say they believe, discipleship banding is an answer to both issues. The true work of faith, the place where awakening happens, is not in a large gathering of people on a Sunday morning. It is in the gathering of a few people who are open and honest before each other and before the Lord. Bands are a place to form deep connections and experience transformation. Participants will explore the origin and practice of both the Class meeting and the Band meeting.

Proverbs 22:6 says “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” Yet many in our local churches today struggle with discerning the best ways to reach and disciple the next generation. This breakouts goal is to equip leaders and volunteers to move from surface level engagement to making disciples of our children.