Methodism in this region runs along two streams that finally became one.
One stream is Spanish-speaking. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South began appointing preachers to El Paso and San Antonio as early as 1859, through the Rio Grande Mission Conference. Those efforts grew — across the Mexican Conference of the Southwest and, from 1948, the Rio Grande Conference — into a distinct, largely Spanish-language Methodist body that carried its ministry through the formation of The United Methodist Church in 1968.
The other stream is the Southwest Texas Conference, the English-language conference whose own lineage reaches back through the German Mission Conference (1874–1918) and the West Texas Conference of nineteenth-century frontier Methodism.
Effective January 1, 2015, these two conferences — the former Rio Grande and Southwest Texas — united to form the Río Texas Annual Conference, holding its first session in Corpus Christi in June 2015. The 2026 gathering is the twelfth session of the united conference.
The resident bishop of the San Antonio Area is Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey.
— Source: 2025 Río Texas Conference Journal (Historical Sessions of the Annual Conferences).