The membership statistics the Conference publishes are the most useful thing it produces for anyone trying to understand the tradition, because they contradict the picture most outsiders carry. The Anabaptist world is no longer European or North American in its centre of gravity. Well over half of baptised members are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the single largest member body is the Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia, which is larger than any Mennonite body in the country the movement began in or in the country that most tourists associate it with.
That shift is recent and fast, and it changes what the assemblies are for. A global gathering held roughly every six years, meeting in Zimbabwe, in Paraguay, in Indonesia, in Ethiopia, is not the same event as a European commemoration, and the questions brought to it, on polygamy, on healing, on relations with the state, on wealth, are not the questions the founders of 1925 expected.
The Conference also carries the tradition's ecumenical business. In 2010 the Lutheran World Federation, meeting at Stuttgart, formally asked forgiveness of Mennonites for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutheran authorities in the sixteenth century and for the condemnations of them carried in Lutheran confessional documents. Mennonite World Conference received that act on behalf of its member churches, which is the sort of thing only a body that speaks for a whole communion can do.