 Welcome to NTC News, where your story is our story. This is the first segment of our fall season and we are glad to have you on board. In this particular episode, we will travel all over the annual conference to bring you news about United Methodist, starting off with young people who went through a summer of transformation, all the way to some senior adults who are national champions in we bowling. But at first, a celebration for our own, the Reverend Gary Muller, who is now Bishop Gary Muller of the Arkansas Episcopal Area. Take a look. This afternoon has been awesome. It's been so great to say goodbye to Bishop Muller, but it's also exciting to see and know the things that he's going to do. He's already talked to me as a layperson to let me know that he's made contact with his future conference lay leader in Arkansas, and they're planning to do big things. So it's a mixed blessing to say goodbye, but it's also great to know that he's going to be doing great things in Arkansas for Methodism. I'm just feeling some really mixed emotions. I'm so happy for Gary and proud of him and excited for Wink to go to Arkansas, but so sad that we are losing him for North Texas Conference. It's just been a really good gathering to bring us together. It's a holy moment, and we've also had a lot of fun. This is a crozier that the North Texas Conference delegation had custom made for Bishop Gary Muller for him to take to Arkansas. A crozier is the symbol of the bishop, which he uses at all official functions. This is really a great day for the North Texas Conference. We're able to celebrate the work of the conference, the fact that we've elected three bishops out of this conference in the last three quadrennium. Scott Jones, Jim Dorff and now Gary Muller, and I think it speaks volumes about the quality of the people here in the North Texas Conference that the South Central jurisdiction would elect three bishops from our conference in the last eight years. Friends, here is the future of Methodism, project transformation, and we were on hand for their annual end of summer gala, a time to celebrate the young adults and all their fine work across the annual conference. They were mentors, teachers, and most of all, they showed the love and the power of Jesus Christ. Hi, my name is Lexi Vreen, and this summer I did something incredibly exciting. I was intern for project transformation, so this summer has been an incredible experience for me, and it's been incredibly humbling because I've been working with high schoolers who don't know what the word resume is and getting to teach them about that and trying to offer as many life skills as I possibly can, but they've also been teaching me, and I think the number one thing that I've learned from them is just the ability to live life to the fullest and be flexible. I'm Michelle Vasquez, and I just want to say like how amazing this program is and how blessing it is and just to build strong relationships with the church and with families and the children, and they've just transported me as much as I transformed them, and I just hope that the plant that sees that we planted in the children will grow into something really beautiful. Hi, my name is Luis Ortega, I am a student at the University of Texas at Arlington pursuing music education degree. This summer I had the opportunity to work with youth at Plaza Mount UMC. In the past I've worked with elementary youth ages at Oaklet UMC. The difference this year is that I was able to work with youth and make relationships and connections with them. I was able to mentor them and educate them through different aspects in life, and I've just enjoyed it so much and just kind of spoken to me through them, and I kind of used me to speak to them. My name is Leah Randolph, I attend the University of North Texas at Dallas. I've had the pleasure of serving at Christ Fanger, a psych coordinator, Wesley Rankin, and also a pleasure man in my three years been in this program. It's been a very much an honor to be part of this program and really serve the communities. Hi, my name is James Lawrence, and I'm from Cusker Road United Methodist Church here in the North Texas Conference. I'm 20 years old and I just finished my freshman year at the University of Arkansas. I just finished out my summer, well my summer is almost finished here at Project Transformation, where I was a mountain biking coordinator for the program, teaching kids to bike, and I think that I was absolutely blessed throughout this summer. I've had kids cry in front of me and just pour out their lives, and very thankful that I got this opportunity, and I'm going to spend this next school year, next summer as part of the after-school program at Project Transformation as a psych coordinator. I'm just really looking forward to this next year and it'll be a great blessing to me. Let's put these words together. Hi Tech, Internet, National Champion, what do you get? You get the Young Strikers, a nationally known bowling team at the CC Young Senior Adult Living Center. We spent time with these champions and were blown away by their courage, their skill, and their love for the Lord. I found that I was looking on the Internet and found a league for seniors and said hey let's let's do it. You know I can make a team and we can get a team together. So we ended up getting a team together. We started with just two and then now we have eight plus and we're just just our third season into the tournament basically. So it's you know we're still a young team but we're already up in the rankings to be a young team. So we'll eventually get to where we have multiple teams and you know maybe we'll end up having our own tournament at CC Young and bring community members out and you know have our own tournament here you know. So we'll work hard, we'll keep us over on the pace. We have played against the Manning in a long time and we have been there for a long time. Lisa, I told them that I wee-bowled and I said what's that all about? I ended up talking about wee-bowling instead of what I'm at the place for. I tell them and they want to know well how do you do that? Tell them. They want to know what seniors do. An important part of this is I've always enjoyed school and it's good to know that with technology there are games that aging people can still play. Besides just cough. I think it's like Paul was saying earlier this is one where it is competitive enough and you feel like you still have a little of that competitive spirit and that makes you feel not quite so old. After a fun day with the bowlers over at CC Young we also spend some time with communicators who gathered from all over the annual conference here at the annual conference ministry center for a day-long training session on things like social media advertising PR things to make their churches even better. Let's take a look. Hello my name is Liliana Pena. Hi I'm Gloria Fowler and we're here to talk about what we liked about church media transformation. One of the things that I really enjoyed about church media transformation was that we got to interact with other people and get to know their different stories within their churches and how they're using media to be able to reach out to the mission field and will show us a lot of different techniques in ways that we can also reach the mission field and how we can use those tools to reach them. We got to learn about things like Google analytics that shows us the statistics of our website flows and how many people are coming to visit what topics are attracting our mission field so that we can know better how to use those tools. The last thing I think that we enjoyed was that we got to do a type of 30 seconds video kind of like what we're doing right now. We got to do it and he got to shoot it for our center and just kind of show us how to shoot a very basic video in such a short time. It's something that we can work and do within our churches really quick. I hope that you can also join the seminar when we'll provide it next time so you can learn about reaching mission field and reaching the new people through these different tools that can help us.