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The General Conference shall have full legislative power over all matters distinctively connectional, and in the exercise of this power shall have authority as follows: 1. To define and fix the conditions, privileges, and duties of Church membership, which shall in every case be without reference to race, gender, or status. 2. To define and fix the powers and duties of elders, deacons, supply preachers, local preachers, exhorters, deaconesses, and home missioners. 3. To define and fix the powers and duties of annual conferences, provisional annual conferences, missionary conferences and missions, and of central conferences, district conferences, charge conferences, and congregational meetings. 4. To provide for the organization, promotion, and administration of the work of the Church outside the United States of America. 5. To define and fix the powers, duties, and privileges of the episcopacy, to adopt a plan for the support of the bishops, to provide a uniform rule for their retirement, and to provide for the discontinuance of a bishop because of inefficiency or unacceptability. 6. To provide and revise the hymnal and ritual of the Church and to regulate all matters relating to the form and mode of worship, subject to the limitations of the first and second Restrictive Rules. 7. To provide a judicial system and a method of judicial procedure for the Church, except as herein otherwise prescribed. 8. To initiate and to direct all connectional enterprises of the Church and to provide boards for their promotion and administration. 9. To determine and provide for raising and distributing funds necessary to carry on the work of the Church. 10. To fix a uniform basis upon which bishops shall be elected by the jurisdictional conferences and to determine the number of bishops that may be elected by central conferences. 11. To select its presiding officers from the bishops, through a committee, provided that the bishops shall select from their own number the presiding officer of the opening session. 12. To change the number and the boundaries of jurisdictional conferences upon the consent of a majority of the annual conferences in each jurisdictional conference involved. 13. To establish such commissions for the general work of the Church as may be deemed advisable. 14. To secure the rights and privileges of membership in all agencies, programs, and institutions in The United Methodist Church regardless of race, gender, or status. 15. To allow the annual conferences to utilize structures unique to their mission, other mandated structures notwithstanding. 16. To enact such other legislation as may be necessary, subject to the limitations and restrictions of the Constitution of the Church.