The body dates itself from the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference, held at Wesley's Chapel in City Road, London, in September 1881. The word ecumenical there means Methodist worldwide rather than inter-denominational: British and American Methodism had by then divided repeatedly, and the point of the meeting was to get the fragments into one room. The conference met roughly every ten years thereafter, and a continuing organisation took shape around it, adopting the name World Methodist Council in 1951.
Its headquarters is at Lake Junaluska in North Carolina, with a European office, and its membership is a list of denominations rather than of individuals: something over eighty churches in more than a hundred countries, together representing tens of millions of people who would describe themselves as Methodist, Wesleyan, Nazarene, United, or one of the several African Methodist Episcopal traditions.
The World Methodist Conference, held every five years, is the public face of it, and there is a permanent staff, a set of standing committees, and a World Methodist Peace Award given annually. None of that carries authority. The Council is a place where a family of churches meets itself, and what it does with that is mostly study, exchange, and the maintenance of relationships that no single member church could sustain alone.