 I got appointed to White Rock United Methodist Church as a part-time local pastor in July of 2012. And so when I walked into that environment, it was quiet. Outside of the hours of 9 to noon on a Sunday morning, there was very little activity in the building. Room after room that was empty, and it was cavernous. Like, it was just empty. Well, it was a church that had probably been in decline for 30-plus years, partly because the neighborhood got older, therefore the congregation got older. And a great many people began to pass away, and so the income that was lost by that versus newcomer's income didn't compare. The church had been living off of an endowment, a foundation for several years, I was blown away by the amount of money we were spending to keep the church's doors open, the staff paid, and the lights on. We had an old building that needed a lot of work, a lot of deferred maintenance in the facility. We had no relationship to our neighborhood, and we had really no direction. The congregation was worn out, they were tired. For the past three years, they've been really kind of embattled in this fight to stay open. The general attitude was, we're going to stay right here, we're not going to change, we're going to say it to the better end. Well, if we've told the community that we were going to close, we did a really good job of that. But what we didn't do was tell the community that we didn't close. So my goal for that year was to invite the community at least recognize that we were not closed, that we were in fact alive. I think Mitchell is just naturally sort of charismatic, and so I liked him instantly. It took his time about innovating change, bringing on a different type of staff. Definitely when I came in, I sensed that Mitchell was committed to building relationships with real people one at a time or two at a time in a way that was authentic. My calling as well is to build relationship through song, through teaching, through writing, through poetry. Mitchell had said, you know, I'd like to talk to you about some of the ideas that we share about church revitalization. We agreed to meet over here so that he could show me the space. I totally saw it at that moment, what it could be. The thing we tackled first was the narrative that our church building was a liability. White Rock's physical space is a great asset. It's actually the thing that can help us survive. And that meant finding community partners to come into our building and lease space from us. You look around and try to create a couple things to start off that will attract people into the space. What kind of change can we make in the community if we decide that we're not going to just sit inside our building, but we're going to build new places for communities to happen. The first one that we came up with was a community garden. The idea that it would go on a parking lot, that it would be very, very visible, was a pointed attempt to show the neighborhood that, yes, the church is still here. There are things going on. And at that early stage, it was an invitation for people to envision what other spaces would become. I began to wonder, like, what could we put in this building that would make our space come alive? There was a real sense of that giving each of those spaces a new vision, a new purpose would be relatively easy. We partnered with organizations that were going to do things better than we ever could. So we knew we couldn't run a kid's theater like Andrew Hunter can run a kid's theater. We knew we could run a preschool like the Children's Center runs a preschool. We knew we couldn't create a co-working space because we've never done co-working, so we had to find a partner that would help us create that. We had an article written in the Dallas-Murray News saying that the church was open essentially for use. We started taking every community meeting we possibly could. We got with the Mission of Wisdom Foundation with the co-working space and co-created that. We spent a lot of time pouring over leases. We spent a lot of time finding the right community partner. We spent a lot of time in the neighborhood getting to know folks. Once we began to have some runners, then it sort of multiplied itself. People began to say, oh, well, heck, I'd like to have space in that building as well. Studio Bella, Arts for Kids. Music Together. Music Together, Rays of Light. The Children's Center. A Hottie Sewing Collective, Mixed Co-Working, Epiphany Dance Studio, Neighborhood Teams. Neighborhood Associations. Little Forest Hills Neighborhood Association, Casa Linda Neighborhood Association, Finger Elementary Benefits from our classroom. Cooperative, lots of individual artists, lots of individual designers, workers. It's a busy place. Congregational buy-in was easy, right? And it was easy because they realized that we had to do something drastic to stay open. They were so close to death that they were really willing to try just about anything. There are several things that I've had supported as a clergy person. I've been involved with cohorts that are geared towards young clergy and developing young clergy and civic engagement. It's allowing me to go through in-depth training on harnessing an idea and then making it reality. I have Neal and Rebecca and Cam and Becky and Sabrina and Jason on staff, right? But the realization that it takes two people to do this work is absolutely the most important thing. Neither one of us could have affected the change that we've seen here if we had not had the other to bounce ideas off of, to basically congratulate one another when things worked, to console one another when things didn't work. Two full-time paid positions flattening the leadership structure, cleaning out classrooms that are full of stuff that will never be used again. Finding the leaders within a community and spending all your time trying to get meetings with those leaders and then make yourself available to listen. It's innovative in some ways, but really I think it's just being more open to the possibility that the community has much more to offer than the church, than we often give it credit. So getting rid of our expectations of the end result and just focusing on authentic, simple relationships that we build over time, I think is one of the best things about White Rock. We really just wanted to make the community feel like they had a space again. We wanted to return to being a parish in the neighborhood.