Global Ministries is the mission and humanitarian assistance agency for The United Methodist Church, facilitating mission in more than 130 countries and leading the church’s work in global health. Global Ministries includes the United Methodist Committee on Relief, or UMCOR, providing nonsectarian disaster response and sustainable development worldwide.
Recognizing that the context for mission is always changing, the Strategic Plan includes six strategic directions, which seek to respond adaptively to the times in which we live:
- Engaging more broadly with annual conferences and congregations and exploring with them new ways to serve and support their work in mission.
- Building relationships and capacities among global mission partners to help enable how they establish, lead and grow the church in their regions.
- Emphasizing the importance of global missionaries, young adult and other missionaries, and the laity who are called to serve as volunteers by increasing recruitment and places of assignment.
- Promoting abundant health for all, especially children, and establishing and expanding lifesaving and health-promoting measures, with special attention to the economically vulnerable.
- Increasing humanitarian assistance more fully and regularly by integrating immediate disaster response with long-range sustainable development.
- Strengthening internal operations and finance to ensure that programs function cost-effectively and deliver the greatest possible value to the church and its constituents.
Global Ministries refined these Strategic Directions to harmonize with its historical, long-standing mission goals and vision and, most importantly, to reflect the agency’s theology of mission, which acknowledges that the church exists to engage in God’s mission. The Strategic Directions also demonstrate accountability and responsiveness to the Four Areas of Focus of The United Methodist Church, the United Methodist Book of Discipline and the Book of Resolutions, as adopted and prescribed by the United Methodist General Conference.