 God has been creating in the church, in the local church and the church beyond. I have served in extension ministry and observed how God has transformed so many lives. One specific is I had an experience with a young man who was addicted to drugs and helped him process through understanding who God is and how much Jesus loves him that he transformed and changed his life by submitting himself to Christ Jesus. And now he is 12 years clean and we celebrate that because only God can make that happen. I see how the church has been effectively involved in the lives of the poor and at the same time helping those who are lost to be able to attain a life, a fruitful life while here on earth. Using those gifts and graces within those persons to build God's kingdom here on earth. I'm excited about the fact that so so many young people are coming to ministry to serve, not only as pastors but to serve in the church. And my hope is in them that Christ Jesus will use them to expand and grow our church to be what God created it to be. Everywhere I look today, every church where I have served, I see God expanding the ministry and the mission work of all the churches. God is changing the focus from being on ourselves to being on others. God is always doing a new thing. For us at First Plano, one of those ways has been in mental health ministry. The United Methodist Reporter had an article in the January-February 2017 edition about mental illness in which the author, Trisha Brown, stated that there is still a real stigma associated with mental health issues even in the church. God began a good work at First Plano back in 2009 that is now Wellspring Counseling Center. Through sliding scale fees, the Center's Christian counselors provide mental health services to persons and families that could not otherwise afford them. It's exciting to see how God created a passion in the heart of one person, Dr. Carolyn Moorer, that sparked an entire ministry, one that meets a basic human need to be heard and understood and through that process to be helped and healed. When I was in seminary, as late as 1994, we were still retrieving information from the green monochrome letters of the gopher servers, wherever they were. Now we carry around the world's libraries and art museums in our pockets the cultural changes that reality has made in our culture and in our churches is still being discovered. Obviously it's a challenge that we're all dealing with, but God is the creator and this is the continuing creation. We can be afraid of it or allow it to immerse us in hope. We have no excuse anymore for being ignorant about injustices happening with regularity to people down the street or about the plight of refugees in Syria or the Sudan. We can allow that knowledge to force us toward our neighbors in love or retreat into the always nearby tombs of fear. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus. The fallacies of old confessional statements and denominational rules have become impediments to growing numbers of people and we must all in our own ways now be about following Jesus to the edges and then right up to the edges of then into the abyss into exactly those same places where Jesus didn't fit in either. It's both an alarming time and an exciting time. There are new questions about God and hallelujah for that. There should always be more questions about God than answers. That makes life interesting and it gives substance. We are all pioneers in the community of heaven on earth. We need more poets and artists and cooks and carpenters and more young people who don't know or care about old rules but who simply want to follow Jesus. And I still see God creating a new ministry in the life of especially lay people who come into the church and learn their ministry, learn their place, their gifts and graces and I've enjoyed being able to mentor them but also other clergy as well. I've worked with the intern program at Perkins over the last 25 years and have enjoyed learning from the students there as well as teaching them. And of course a number of friends, clergy friends that we formed special groups together to nurture and minister one another and probably no bigger part has been played and the friends that I played golf with 25 years ago I was invited by John Shuler to play golf with a group of four, Ben Shen, Ken Shamblin and then later we were joined by Dale Hunt and so for 25 years they've been a resource of mentoring and sharing and carrying me in the ministry and I continue to see God shaping us through the lives of one another. I have seen God creating in the church in so many ways but especially through my colleagues and especially through the women clergy. We have so many generations now of fine and wonderful strong women. I think of all the ones whose shoulders we stand upon, some of whom who are still with us and some of whom who aren't and I remember their courage and then I think of our current colleagues and my wonderful clergy, women friends and colleagues over the years who have been so strong and supportive and encouraging particularly my Covenant sisters Jay and Davis and Val Englert and Ann Willett and Leslie Hersher and Holly Bandel who have all been there for me in times of need and want and joy. And then I think, I see, I know that God is working through these extraordinary young women who are coming behind me and my generation. They are smart, they are dedicated, they are faithful, they are savvy and they are strong. So we are 60 years into women's ordination. We need to get out of their way, pay them justly and turn them loose because the Holy Spirit is alive and well in their presence and in their voices. Well certainly I've seen God creating anew in the church over the course of my ministry. I still have great memories when I was a child in Lowamy, Illinois and in the basement of the local Methodist church and eating Ruth Dodd's date nut bread. Even then I realized it was all about creating community and I think as the church has changed it's just trying to create community in other and new ways and I realize these are scary times in the life of the church in many ways but every time I become a little insensitive to the community that the church is creating I just go down and have a cup of coffee at Union and see all those young adults who are working so hard to create great Christian community. So I think the church is changing but God is putting the right people in place at the right time to shape that change and move it forward. I also want to say that one of the interesting ways that God is continuing to create is through the local pastors. Thanks to Susanna Wesley who insisted that John include local pastors, that's the reason we're here and God continues to create through local pastors an ever increasing need and fulfillment in the United Methodist church not only in rural areas but in specialized areas of ministry beyond the local church. It's my belief that God continues to create a sense of need and people and purpose for these people. It seems to me that a fundamental way God has been creating in the church over the course of my ministry has been to continue to call the church to be more about authenticity than answers more about love than legalities more about acceptance and inclusion than mere assent to assertions or assumptions. I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs, writes American poet Mary Oliver. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what's wrong with, maybe, you wouldn't believe what once or twice I have seen. I'll just tell you this, only if there are angels in your head will you ever possibly see one. I think that God has been creating in the church a deeper understanding that its witness is the strongest that its witness is the most transforming when that witness is freshly born out of active and engaged listening to the world and all its peoples perhaps even angels of whom we have been unaware. The power of trying to be something to somebody or trying to do something for somebody has its real roots in first being with somebody. I think God in Jesus taught us that I believe it's called incarnation and I know it offers new life. My whole ministry, all 20 some odd years of it has been involved with God doing creative and amazing things not just in the lives of people but actually in the relationships of churches with churches. I started out as an urban missionary and I was connecting urban and suburban churches and congregations helping develop relationships among people and it led to Amigos days and I was a big part of early project transformation and the transformation was in the urban church and the idea that people were caring about the urban church and the transformation was in the people from the suburban church that were coming thinking they were going to be doing one thing and discovering what they were really doing was developing a love relationship with people that they didn't know. My ministry has been about building bridges, crossing chasms, bringing together people with different cultures and different backgrounds, different languages and helping them discover not only that they were children, brothers and sisters in Christ but that they had so much in common and that they loved each other and so ministry emerges out of relationship and that's what my ministry has been about and that's what God's creativity in every situation I think has been about. I think especially in North Texas in the last 42 years God has been creating church based on mission rather than security and I know that most clearly from serving the East Alice Cooperative Parish which is a marvelous working together of churches in the East Alice area with the sanitized grandchild of the Ecumenical Institute. Six churches and then 13 churches devoted to serving human need, building community and renewing congregations. I saw God working in cooperatives rather than individual churches. I also am still puzzled why is it something as strong and large and imaginative as the North Texas annual conference can only get excited about one mission project at a time. We should have dozens at the same time rather than having them compete for the tiny spotlight. I think God is still involved in our churches and judging our anti-racism. I see God actively involved in inspiring artists especially in music and in worship and in loving the Eucharist. In the local church as well as beyond that in the district and the annual conference I've seen God's new creation becoming manifest when people actually hear the word of God and do it. Where the poor are being reached, where the sick are being visited and relieved where churches identify the most vulnerable in our society and communities and reach out to make a positive difference in their lives. For me that is a part of God's new creation taking shape through the work and ministry of the local church. When I first got a look at the three questions retirees are responding to for this taping I thought this would be the most difficult question for me to answer for lots of different reasons but as I began to think about it some not so at all and I think I would start by addressing it like this. God has been bringing in and shaping and calling I think just the right kind of leadership for the future and particularly I'm talking about the ability and the success with the help of the spirit here in Methodism in our parts of the world of calling and the church responding to younger generations of leadership. Men and women I have just all kinds of confidence in them as I know them one by one as a particular generational community or two and those not only currently commissioned and ordained local pastors but also those in the pipeline of candidacy I'm just really excited. I think Jesus is going to do all kinds of great things with them. I think the other thing that I've seen God do is create more and more of a welcoming community for all God's people inside the walls of our churches not without struggle but the struggle is worth the doing but the whole idea of becoming much more welcoming much more accepting not only for community's sake but for validation and for inclusiveness and for the purposes of calling and calling forth all of the gifts and graces of God's people in the work of the gospel.