 Good morning again. We're in an unprecedented time, not only in the life of our country and the world, but also in the life of the church. Things have changed dramatically over the last six months. So we began to change even how we would begin to focus the work of this annual conference and what we would do, especially the theme. And I'd like to set the stage for you with a text that we've been using from the prophet Isaiah from the 43rd chapter. These are the words that have formed much of what we have chosen to do during this time. Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Sometimes we need to be reminded about what really is happening when we read just a small text like this from the prophet Isaiah or any other prophet or any other reading that we may do in the Bible. What's happened is, is a group of people, in fact, if we were to sort of describe them, the upper and the middle income folks have been carted off into exile in Babylon. It's because they were defeated. And so they find themselves among people whom they do not know, who do not share the same kinds of religious practices that all of people whom they think simply are not really anything akin to them. And they are like strangers in a foreign land. And they long for home. Where do we worship now? They're in exile. And I would imagine they began to think about what is home? What are we doing here? Can you imagine what it's like? In some respects, they have a large liminal space. I'll talk about that more in a few moments. And that is, is they are in a strange foreign land. How will they sing the Lord's song there? How will they even worship in ways that they never thought they could? Do some of those questions sound somewhat familiar? Susan Beaumont over a number of years, because of what's happening in the church, not just any kind of upheaval of things that we know about, but just the clash of the culture and the church in so many ways, said what we are really in in terms of the church are liminal moments. This is between the no longer, which is not was, and the not yet. The tendency is to look back because we can't see what lies ahead or imagine it, and so we begin to think about what this time is like even in our church. We think if we can just get back together, that's a valuable piece to do, that everything will be all right, but will it? We're between no longer and not yet. And on a couple of occasions, I've heard it described like this, if we could just get back to normal, and normal's different for each one of us. I can remember at times when people would talk about, can we get back to the good old days and I'm reminded of something I learned from my father, it's a little boy, and he said to my brother and me, he said, I remember the good old days, and I remember that our house burned. My father died when I was two. I was raised by my mother and my older brothers and my older sisters. He probably had too many mothers when you think about that. But he knew that they lived in a barn for a couple of years, had a small dairy farm. And he said every time somebody talks about the good old days, they were not good, but it got awfully old. Sometimes returning to what is really is not as good for a lot of people as we think it should be. We don't know how to define normal, but it's normal. There will be no new normal when we are able to sort of move past this time. What we know is what we really don't know much. But I will say is that something of which I've been very proud and has been very inspiring for me is to know that the lady and clergy of the North Texas Conference have responded and lived out in some very imaginative, creative, and faithful ways about what it means to be the church. And they've been able to worship virtually online and I have to admit there are times I wish I could just be with a few more people. But it's not that they've only worshiped virtually online, they have been in mission deeply, passionately, faithfully in the communities in which they are. New ministries, new spaces, even gathering new faces that has required their imagination. There are times there have been failures, but we would never risk anything if we were not aware that we might fail at something too. But what is happening is the broadening and deepening of the faith in creative ways. And I want to say thank you. A simple word of thank you to all of you for the way in which you've continued to live out what it means to be a follower of Jesus the Christ. We gotta think of the church in a way, I've been thinking about it for some time, but in a group that I'm in, studying something else, somebody, one of my colleagues, held up before us a book by Jonathan Sacks, called Morality. Jonathan Sacks was the chief rabbi in the United Kingdom. And he really began to talk the difference between contract and covenant. And we had to talk about it in this way because somehow we've gotten into the idea that our relationships are contracts with each other. That our work together as a church is a contract with each other. When in reality is it a covenant, it is a covenant. In the church, we're prone to see our relationships too often time as a contract. I can see it in a number of ways. I'll just sort of be very quick about the ways I've heard. If you don't get back to worship online, I'm going to another church. Friends, I know it's not what is pleasing, but you're in a covenant and you're all in this together. We're all in this together. Because it's not just about gathering on Sunday. But think about worship is really the rehearsal for what you do in the week. That worship is a rehearsal of life as it is meant to be lived. And this has been the opportunities for the gather virtually, but also even live more boldly and deeply into the communities in which we live. We really want things to be certain in life, don't we? It's really difficult, but we need more than anything as a clarity of our purpose, what it is that God is calling us to do. And knowing that we embark on that journey, that certainty will always elude us. But what happens in the midst of that journey will become clear that we will be continuing and what it means to be faithful stewards. So what did we learn? I must tell you that in March, when I said to the churches in both the districts of these districts, Metro and North Central, that we will cease gathering publicly face to face for a few weeks because of COVID-19. A week later, we said the same things to both the Northwest and East districts. We began to work at home. We began to do online worship through different platforms, and some of us learned a great deal. We knew that we had guiding principles to guide us. For me, always it was this, do good, do no harm, and stay in love with God. And I would offer to you that no church really closed. It just did it differently. The Bible faith of many of our laity and many of our clergy were evident. And just seeing your stories and hearing about some of the things that were being done through emails or word of mouth from a district superintendent really made me think that things will be well, all will be well when this time comes to an end. Well, the number of COVID-19 cases were increasing. You were still deepening your ministry in Jesus to the Christ. In fact, born out of one of our churches or one of our ministers and one of our lay persons began to gather we test, which is a way to test persons and underserved communities and three of our United Methodist churches that chose to host them about testing persons for the COVID-19 bars who are unable to get testing anywhere else. And I want to remind you about exile that there was a group of people who were locked back. And nobody thought about them. And one of the things that we've learned during this pandemic and this virus is there's a group of people that we know and it's become so clear is underserved. And I even unable to get a simple test to know if they were carrier, very symptomatic. I'm grateful to Dr. Reverend Richie Butler, the pastor of St. Luke and Dr. Chris Crow who's a lay member of Highland Park who engineered and recruited volunteers and raised funds. What did we learn? We learned to pass the ministry. We did learn it or it's made more evident. Questions I ask is what differences are we seeing? What's changed in the Christian community? What's changed in our community? And I have to admit there is even for me today that I'm sad that we cannot all gather in this sanctuary at St. Andrew, but we're still the church. What we learned is the United Methodist Connection is not built upon agreement about many things. It's except for the essentials. The United Methodist Church is really connected about its mission. It's mission that we have really begun to recover in some of your alarming, unique ways in the last several months. Related to what John Wesley did in the very beginning where in Bristol he discovered it's not just about saving souls, that was the most important thing. So don't hear me say anything less than that. It is the most important thing. Pissing children on the streets, knowing the fragility of life for so many people. The leaders of the town came to and said, what can you do? Well, we can teach children to read. We can offer ministry and prisons. We can help people's healthcare and those are the things that they did and more. So this connection really is a time in which we had allowed us to focus on our mission in so many unique ways and really explore what it meant to be made more perfect and love in this life. See, growing in perfect love is not how much knowledge we can accumulate, but how much of the love of Christ and the compassion for all of humanity we can get. I've asked it two or three times around the all different people. I said, it would be interesting to know how many meals United Methodist Church has served to people during the last six months or how much food was distributed. I'm reminded of a partnership and there's several of partnership between Lubbers Lane United Methodist Church and Christ Foundry who are close to each other. Dr. Stan Copeland and Espar are the past of those two churches and how they were able to secure produce from East Texas, how they were able to feed several people in the Christ Foundry neighborhood who literally were without a job because of the pandemic and the stay at home moors. And they learned that they could feed so many people between them and what they learned is with that market from East Texas of produce and the generous gifts of so many people and the work of those two congregations and other volunteers, people had something to eat. Looming hunger was a challenge before. It became more apparent during the pandemic and it is something we shall never forget to continue our work. I'm reminded about how many people really needed just a pat on the back on affirmation. Again, my affirmation, my appreciation for all of you but the Calvary Church in Paris, they took it as a step of ministry encouragement and they were looking at who really needs just affirmation in the Paris community. Is the medical community? People work in hospitals, school teachers and so they wrote note cards, they gave gift cards, they found ways to just simply affirm people's being and doing in such a way. How else did it happen? Were so many children now being educated online or learning online, especially in the spring and we know that there were so many people, so many children who probably were simply lost in that transition because of the lack and access to the internet. Their congregations have done some remarkable things, finding ways to run a virtual school. First, I met this church in Mesquite, has been doing it and is committed to doing that to help those in their neighborhood who have no access to help those children to have an education. The church in powderly is looking to do the same thing and how it is they're seeking to make that internet work so that it can be done. These virtual learning centers are way to be helpful to parents, single parents, two parents are working three jobs or any number way with people have no access or help. I think churches have begun to see some of our, see in our communities, see our communities with a greater vision of what it is God may be calling them to be. And while it was not safe together in the person, we've learned of what we could do. We could volunteer at a COVID-19 testing site, we could cook meals, we could distribute food, we could be even more generous and we could learn to use what skills, what skills for the benefit of people in our communities. You know, it's important to remember that Wesley was teaching children, as I said earlier, the prime music was also seeking to provide healthcare as fast as possible to those who didn't have any, but there's something to remember about Wesley and those early Methodists. They were ardent abolitionists in England and Wesley found the slave trade evil. You know, during this time, we've also discovered the deep fissures which exist in our society. We knew them, but now they are front and center. Now, what do I wrote to all of you sometime this spring? I simply said that the sin of racism must be eradicated. You really do not need to read any other than the first chapter of Genesis and the story of God's creation when God simply made man and woman in God's image. That means it doesn't matter the color of a person's skin or his level of income or her inability to find a job that really creates any difference in how we see the person. That is if we see each one with what I call God's eyes, that each and every one of us and even persons whom we sometimes talked about as they for them are as loved by God as you are. And if they're loved by God and then perhaps we will start to think of them as our brothers and sisters, perhaps we begin to see them with God's eyes and we remind ourselves that racism is a challenge, not only for our country and our community, but even for our churches. Even before the incidents of the spring, last summer, I've been having conversations with a number of people about this and about how we really address racism and systemic racism as a church. Those conversations began last summer. We began to sort of think about how it is we would proceed. We knew that it's not something that we could simply have a simple program and say, now we've done it, it's over. In fact, we've done a number of those things before some of them have worked, they've been ongoing and it's time to retool and rethink. And that began in a public way with clergy at the clergy retreat last year, fall with fearless dialogues, which is a very fun way in which to have serious conversations that really speaks to those things that are challenging most of us don't wanna talk about. The things that we don't wanna even talk about at Thanksgiving with our families, what they're important for us to do. Those conversations continued with a vital conversation with Bishop Gregory Palmer being with us, talking about baptism, using the questions of baptism that we asked just a few moments ago about how we eradicate the sin, what do we do to live out what it means to be faithful. Again, that was a conversation of clergy around tables, a rich conversation last January, Covenant Day. But you know, we were all learning what systemic racism is, how it is that the people of God are really called to address that, how it is that we're starting to look at things a little differently and again to hear and understand things that I as a white man born in the 1950s, we just think that one time we had the Civil Rights Act passed, but it goes deeper than that. To the telling thing that happened to me happened, not happened to me, which I was made aware, was really not about George Floyd, although that was a marking point in terms of a deeper understanding, really began with an understanding of what happened to a jogger in New Brunswick, Georgia. A jogger, an African-American man who ran through that particular place in which I have passed through because of being at a Council Bishops meeting several times on St. Simon's Island, who'd run through and always sort of look at the house that was being built. I walk through every house in our neighborhood that's been torn down and has a new one being constructed. I like to see and trying to figure out, what is that room going to be? I imagine he had that kind of curiosity, but it's evidently something that happened a couple of times that so two white men in the neighborhood decided they saw a black man who maybe looked like the somebody they've been hearing about, and so they chased him down with guns. And shooting. And he dies. And the police come. And you want the police to? Well, they know those good old boys. And so they do nothing. Nothing would have happened except Ahmed Arbery's cousin was horrified. And he knew a reporter based in Atlanta for the New York Times. The reporter asked his editor, I'm gonna go cover this story. You have one day you cannot spend the night as during the height of the pandemic, you cannot spend the night and get the story. And he got the story. And only did the outside pressure from around the country and especially in the state of Georgia began to weigh upon them. And now those two white men were arrested. I wonder how this really would have happened for, I don't know perhaps. If it had been two black men who had killed a white man. I think this is where systemic racism comes in. Those two black men would have gone to jail that day and not over two months later as the white men did. You can, we inside a lot of statistics but the African American community suffers from the knowledge that somehow it's not right but they are immediately sucked back. Friends, that is called systemic racism. And it's wrong. And we need to speak out about it. And we need to be clear that all of God's children, all of God's children are making the image of God. So we've begun the work for the journey toward racial justice. It is work in which you will hear about many times over the course of the next year. There are three things in which we choose to do. Vital conversations first. The vision of vital conversations of which I've been apart and some of our clergy have been apart especially at Covenant A, calls us to engage one another in conversations about racism, cultural diversity and institutional injustice in ways that are candid, respectful, holy and transformational. What I've learned more than anything for me to do is to simply listen. Listen more than I speak. And from the musical, Hamilton. Hamilton was told by Aaron Burr. You should smile more. You should talk less, smile more and listen. I think the tendency for those of us who really understand racism is that, yeah, but, and I've discovered that I will never have a conversation for the next several years with yeah, but. Trying to make some kind of justification. Vital conversations are important and we will have many of them throughout the annual conference all over the annual conference in which I hope that you will engage and listen and speak with each other and not to each other. The second thing that we'll be doing is has to do with intercultural competence. One of the things is that we all sort of move through different cultures. And there are times I'm in a culture that I understand somewhat and there are times I am in a culture that it's really challenging to make. How do I navigate this? There are cultures in which I find myself most comfortable. Probably it's because I don't share their language, but I know it. There are times in which I don't understand how things happen, but what I do know is it's not just in Dallas, but throughout the whole North Texas conference. We're becoming a very different looking group of people. I'm not just talking about the church, but in terms of the state of Texas. Hispanic, Anglo, African Americans, people from South Asia, people from East Asia, Southeast Asia, people from Central America, South America. And that's a challenge. And in fact, in terms of intercultural competence, I'm very grateful to Reverend Tommy Palmer in the cocktail church who saw and looked around their community and they realized there are a number of people, a growing population of people who have moved here from India and they're Christians. And so this was a providential moment in which we were able to actually appoint and assign a person there, Samish Jacob, to be the associate pastor, a Methodist from India who will be serving there. It's the way in which we'll begin to make cross-racial appointments. We've done the same thing with two associate ministers who've been appointed to Custer Road United Methodist Church, David Rangel and Daniel Kim. Every neighborhood, every community, or I should say most, are changing in many different ways. But the change as always comes with children of God. The last thing we'll focus on and I have to tell you is one that we really do not know how to get to and we're in conversation with people about how it is we address this. The vision of institutional equity calls us to build systems, policies and processes in the North Texas Conference that level the playing field for all people. We've identified some of those inequities and really are beginning to work and think about how do we address them? What do we do? We work that we will all engage in as a conference because what it is, is we need to remember that God wants to introduce us to people whom we do not know or maybe people we have never met before from that particular region of the world wants to introduce them, us to them, so they may introduce them to the loving God. Frankly, we live in a covenant, not a contract. We live in a covenant with all of God's creation and that includes people who are different than we are. What reminds you about something that Martin Luther King Jr. said in a real sense, all life is interrelated. All are called an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny and whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. We are connected, not just our churches, but with all of God's beloved children. This is the time in which the church and it's not only about racism, the time in the church's life in which we really will be embarking upon a new future. We are already living into it. Virtual worship has drawn more people to our churches than we can begin to imagine. I learned shortly after the pandemic began that some people were discovering many of our churches. They were meeting people virtually online. They'd never seen before people who lived in the community and it's like any crisis or anything that happened. Somehow people find a way as if we are wired to somehow have a relationship with God. And so one Sunday a family joined North Haven United Methodist Church virtually. I did ask the question, we didn't do a virtual baptism, did we? To which the answer was no, for which I was most grateful. But a family had to begin to worship with one of our churches and decided, I wanna be a part of that. And that's not only happened at North Haven, that's happened at any number of our churches and we probably could have testimonies for a period of time of how people have found your church. And it reminds me that no one church can appeal to all people, but all of our churches connected together with the different gifts and grace and the different passions that the lady in the clergy have in those churches really provide another place where someone defined the deep well of grace that resides in the United Methodist Church because of our essential teaching about what it means to understand convenient grace that even when we do not know it, that's how people get drawn to a church during this pandemic, even when we do not know it, that our God is always present, beckoning us into this grace. It's that God is going to meet you at a corner and you do not know. We're really good at justifying grace and knowing that it's the way we talk about this moment. We need to make sure these people have a relationship with Jesus Christ, but that relationship with Jesus Christ, Wesley was really clear. It's not just a one-time moment, but it's the span of life in which one grows more and more into the very likeness and life of Christ. And so it's like they put on the coat of Christ and they become made more perfect in love. And so finally what it really means to be Christian in our tradition is it's not about us. We all have desires and I want them as deeply and badly as most of you do about being in a full sanctuary with people singing, but I may have been as moved by what's happened outside the church as anything in my life. And maybe we've seen some other new things. We've actually broken ground in the new church. The militia United Methodist Church. I love Tommy Brumette and Stacey P. Eakin because I'm telling you they had that thing so we were all socially distanced. You didn't get out of the car without putting your mask on and you didn't get any closer than six feet. And Cammie Gaston, Matt Gaston were there and Ron Henderson were there, Owen Ross was there. And I mean, we were sort of like, we kept our distance and that was the first time I'd seen an event since the pandemic had begun. We were still being and doing the church and some of the ways we always had, but we will be a new church. And it's not that we can go back because it's no longer an either or it is a both and. So what I would say to you today, I think there's the challenge that in this liberal space we may have gotten a glimpse of a future. I pray to God that we have. Because remember, God does want to introduce to you to someone whom you do not know. So you may introduce them to the love of our Christ. I want to thank you again for the way in which you have responded in the last six months. What I thought would be six weeks is now six months. While some of our churches opened around the conference, we will now start beginning to speak with the churches in the messier district about when we will open. But we will do it with the protocols that are outlined. And we'll do it with the grace that is really becoming for who we all are. Do all the good we can. Do no harm. And help people understand that even during this challenging time, we have stayed in love with our God and Christ. God bless you. Thank you for who you are and what you do. I can't tell you how grateful I am to be in ministry with all of you. Thank you.