 So, before I introduce our guest speaker, I wanted to do a commercial. Is this the part where we read? Not yet. The word vitality contains within it the root word vitas, which means life. And we in the Connecticut conference have, as one of our mission priorities, congregational vitality. We think we're going to experiment with something that has not to our knowledge been done in a very long time. And that is we are going to have a revival. The Connecticut conference of the United Church of Christ is going to have a revival. Now our young people have been having youth revivals for five years and they have an unbelievably good time. Those adults who have been to those revivals would give testimony to the good time that is had at revivals and at the last one the question was posed why do the youth get to have all the fun? So we're going to have fun. The full conference community is going to have some fun. And our first ever adult, you all come revival. November 6th and November 7th. We think it's going to be so good that you're going to come the first night and want to come back for the second night at First Congregational Church in Bloomfield at 7 p.m. Our preacher for the first evening is our own Reverend Michelle Hughes, our ACM. And our preacher for the second night is Reverend Ken Samuel. So we hope that you will come and be revived by the spirit of God. November 6th and 7 p.m. in Bloomfield. It is now my privilege and honor to introduce our speaker this afternoon. Reverend Doerr-Hauer and I met. We were doing the math in 2004 when we were both serving as ACMs, associate conference ministers for Connecticut and the Missouri Mid-South Conference. Do you ever have one of those moments where you meet someone and you know they're going to be your friend? So I had that moment with John and we have been friends since our first meeting. We were commissioned along with Sheldon Culver to work on behalf of the Council of Conference Ministers to work in addressing people who were trying to take churches out of the United Church of Christ. And one of John's books, Steeple Jacking, was a result of the research that we were asked to do and in on behalf of the Council of Conference Ministers, in that encounter I got to go to John's home in St. Louis, Missouri where I discovered lots of things, where I discovered some things about John that I would never have known because when you go to someone's home you learn an awful lot about them. And I discovered that John had either an obsession or a real devotion to collecting sports memorabilia. I am not making this up. He could open a museum of sports memorabilia with a particular emphasis on a particular team called the St. Louis Cardinal. Go Max! Go Max! I got a story in a minute. So I have come to know John as a man of deep faith, a man who loves the United Church of Christ and believes that our best days are in our future and lie ahead. He is a generative thinker. He is a person of deep and abiding vision. He is trustworthy. He is an advocate for justice for all of God's children. And he has a deep commitment to the Spirit's movement in our time. John is, for me, one of the embodiments of what leadership for the Church of God's future looks like. John cares about his family. Ask him about what it's like to become a Grandfather. We share that now. He will show you pictures of Jacob if you request it. You don't have to request it. Today's conversation with us, and there will be some question and answer after John has addressed our gathering, which he has titled, A Future in Which We Matter. So please join me in welcoming my friend and our newly elected General Minister and President, the Reverend Dr. John. So I have a deep appreciation for the rootedness of the Connecticut Conference. But in order to measure imbalance with that, the level of my resentment, I need to know, is this a Yankee crowd, a Red Sox crowd, or a Mets crowd? Go Mets! Go Mets! Go Mets! Go Mets! For the Yankees in the fan, for the Yankee fans in the room, I just want to bring up 1964. For the Red Sox fans, I'll bring up 1967. 1965! Dagger to my heart, 1985. So, and Jell, you mentioned the Mets. I'll have you know, my son is now 30 years old. His first complete sentence, I am so proud, was the Mets are Ponsky. I may or may not have had a t-shirt at the time without the Mets. 2004! Yeah, I knew something was going to be 2004 and 2013, but 1967 has more lasting memories than that. And 2004, first time in 89 years, I would have been a big Red Sox fan, but for the fact that you were playing my beloved Cardinals and swept us in four games. On a more serious matter, I do want to talk about the future of the United Church in Christ and why I keep saying everywhere I go that the Holy Spirit envisions a future in which we matter. This afternoon, I want to talk to you about my commitment in answering the question, how do I see our future unfolding in a way that I say with confidence that our best days are ahead of us? This evening, I'm going to switch from the how to the why. Why the United Church of Christ. And I want to say before I begin in answering the question how that what I'm about to unfold for you is my commitment to living out the future of the United Church of Christ. And I want you to hear as I unfold this a call to you to be risk takers, to be innovators, to use the ingenuity and creativity that you are blessed with to answer the question, what is your commitment to the future of the United Church of Christ? And I also want you to hear before I begin that it's time for our narrative to shift. And when I talk about our narrative, I'm not now just talking about the United Church of Christ, but those of us who remain committed to the proclamation of a gospel that with its ability to change lives will remain relevant and credible and vital to the future, not just of the institutions that we're called to for taking mission on behalf of, but to a world crying out for a shalom yet to be fully realized. It is not my belief that the faithful proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only pathway to shalom, but it is sure my belief that a faithful proclamation of the gospel is a pathway and it's our pathway. We must continue to give ourselves to it as fully and holy as we can. And so here's what I'm inviting under my leadership the United Church of Christ to undertake. I call these my 90-day initiatives. Now please, don't hear me saying that I'm going to pull this off in 90 days. What I am saying is that I want to expend a lot of energy by first 90 days building a firm foundation and infrastructure to realize these goals. And it is my belief that the undertaking of these things, in addition to what other creative, entrepreneurial, inventive minds are going to offer, it's my belief that the undertaking of these things will help secure a strong and firm foundation for the United Church of Christ and the gospel that we're called to proclaim. The first initiative is still speaking 2.0. I promised myself once I was nominated that within the first 90 days I would visit with Michael Jordan and ask him the question, if we were to refresh our brand identity, what would that look like? Michael Jordan, if you don't know, it's not the Chicago Bulls Hall of Fame, it may be a basketball club, I mean he is, there's another Michael Jordan walking around the streets of Manhattan who runs an advertising firm called 31 Lengths. And he was the genius that inspired by Ron Buford and Bob Chase helped launch the first still speaking campaign, which I think to this day remains the single most galvanizing moment in the life of the United Church of Christ. It reminded us what we were birthed to do and gave us a message that not only we were proud of but committed us with one voice, maybe for the first time to doing the same thing with and for each other. It was an amazing moment. Kent talked about us meeting as ACMs in 2004, literally the day we met, still speaking launch and CBS and NBC announced that they would refuse to air the commercials that we had bought at 34. That was the day we met. And our first reaction was how dare they, but a week later we were like, thank you because it turned $1.2 million of advertising into about $14 million worth of advertising. That really is the genius of Michael Jordan. He knew how to capture an audience and captivate a people with a message that articulated what we were about in our core. And so it was that within literally my first three weeks, I flew to Manhattan and had my first meeting with Michael Jordan. It's like he's been waiting for this conversation. He got in on this because he loved what Ron Buford and Bob Chase had to say about what the United Church of Christ was. And you realize that when I talk about keeping the United Church of Christ vital and relevant, I'm not saying that for the sake of preserving the institutional identity of the United Church of Christ, but to make sure that the movement of which were a part remains vital. And Michael's a part of that. He's all in on that. And the 31 lengths, what does that remind anybody in the room of? Somebody has to know this. It's the length by which Secretariat won the third leg of the Triple Crown back in 1973, right? And what Michael Jordan, it's important that you know this because this is who we're asking to do the next round of advertising and public relations and marketing and branding and identity for us. He remembers watching that as a child, as I remember. And Secretariat coming down the stretch was so far ahead of the field that the cameras couldn't get the rest of the field in the picture. And so, whereas you would usually, the producer of that show would focus on the finish line with a close up, the camera kept going back and panning further and further out. And it took a while, but eventually it panned out far enough that the rest of the field was in the picture. And because Secretariat kept expanding the lead, the camera had to keep panning further and further out. And he said, Secretariat made the rest of the field look like they were running backwards. He says that's how he wants to function. He wants to be so far ahead of the field that he makes everybody else look like they're running backwards. And this is the one who's going to develop, still speaking 2.0 for us. We already know a couple of things. First of all, Michael Jordan came last week to Cleveland, interviewed conference ministers, interviewed board of directors, interviewed national staff. He's in the process now of interviewing national leaders. He wants to capture our content and our tone and make sure he gets it right. The first thing that we know about still speaking 2.0 is that we're not going to launch with a national ad campaign. It's a very costly way to do it. And 10 years ago, there was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. And it was, although expensive, it was the most expedient way to get your message out to the masses. Well, we don't need that anymore. What we are going to do is produce a toolkit for local churches. And every local church in the United Church of Christ will be invited to partner with us in rebranding the United Church of Christ 10 years after the still speaking initiative was launched. This is going to do a couple of things. It's going to remind your leaders at 700 Prospect in the national setting of the church that we don't do things to our churches. We do things with our churches. And it's going to provide us with an immediate feedback loop that we really didn't have the first time we launched this. So you're going to be able to tell us in real time what's working for you and what needs to shift in order to make our voice relevant. So still speaking 2.0. The question that Michael is asking in addition to getting our content and tone right is what's the new edge? 10 years ago we were willing to stand in the space and declare marriage equality and LGBT rights a part of the mission life of the church. And for a long time we stood alone in that space. And it's no accident that our doing that as vocally and visibly as we did produced 10 years later the fact that every state in the country is now a marriage equality state. So the question Michael wants to ask is what new ground do you want to break? You who from the days of your birth were breaking ground that others didn't see as tillable. What do you want to do now? We've got a couple of guesses but that's all they are. We are a part now of a movement as I said in which the gospel is a meaningful pathway to God's vision for Shalom. And it's about time that the United Church of Christ express itself in full partnership with our interfaith brothers and sisters around the globe. I'm going to mention this moment in the second initiative but I want to bring it up now. Last week the leaders of your denomination issued a letter that went first to the conference ministers and then all of the churches identifying that in at least 20 cities across this land white supremacists were gathering in one night to present protests outside of mosques, temples and houses of worship for our Muslim brothers and sisters. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a second. That letter within four days got over 90,000 hits on memes that were created on our social media outlets. Now, translate Michael Jordan's brilliance into providing every church in this country with material like that and we've got a possibility now of putting our voice in the marketplace of ideas that I think has the potential to shift the game and make us real players in this movement which brings me to the second initiative. I'm calling upon the leaders of this denomination to organize once a month in the year of 2016. That means 12 events. I'm calling upon the leadership to organize 12 events, one a month in 2016 that calls us to fully realize our call to be a bold public witness. When we speak, things change. When we speak with the integrity of our missional calling and purpose the world has the potential to change. We've seen this over and over and over again. We did it as abolitionists. We did it as suffragists. We did this as leaders in the labor movement. We did this in the civil rights movement. We did it with Black Lives Matter and I want us to ask the question if we're to be taken seriously as a part of this movement with a big bold public voice how do we speak in such a way that the world in fact takes notice of our speech? So a big public event is not an announcement to the press that says the general minister and president John Doar Harrow will be speaking next Tuesday in the Homestad Chapel on the environment and climate change. What I say may be important it may have the potential to change the world but nobody's listening to that. What if instead we called Jim Antal and said Jim Antal on Earth Day we're going to gather outside the U.S. Capitol and we want you to get Elizabeth Warren, Bill McKibben and Desmond Tutu to either show up or produce a statement declaring that climate change is the issue of our day and the United Church of Christ has something to say about it. What if in July, late June early July when the Republican National Convention is held across the street from our headquarters, Marshae Greer, who runs our social media campaign for the national setting creates a Twitter hashtag and a Periscope account and deploys hundreds of youth and young adults to live tweak the Republican Convention. People are going to take notice. So I want us to imagine what 12 months of calculating smartly, sophisticatedly the branding of our voice looks like. Now I'm going to go back to that letter I wrote last week. In addition to doing this we are in the process of writing a 48-hour response protocol which calls upon the leadership of the United Church of Christ when something like Charleston happens when something like Ferguson happens to have a meaningful statement of our churches into the press within 48 hours. Without yet fully realizing those protocols we test drove those last week when Paul Rauschenbush on the Huffington Post produced an article announcing to the United States that not only are these white supremacists gathering outside these Muslim temples there's not a single church voice or denominational voice that's even taken notice or responded. We said we got 48 hours. We exchanged a few emails within the collegium. I was assigned the task of drafting something sent it back to the collegium they've edited, sent it to our pick team they've edited. Forget about 48 hours within 4 hours we had that letter after our conferences. And within the hour we were looking at Facebook posts and tweets talking about that letter and asking one another what's going on in your neighborhood we're going to gather here who's with me. Now again, within 3 days 90,000 people responded to those messages in High Ridge, Missouri about an hour out of St. Louis a small rural town a Muslim family walked into the worship about 10 minutes late. Imagine you're a mother and father with two young children in High Ridge, Missouri imagine if you're that couple the courage it took to open that door walk in interrupt the service and in the middle of the service ask the pastor if you can speak that's what they did they said they saw that letter and were so moved because for the first time in their lives and in the lives of their children they saw a Christian voice standing up in solidarity with them and all they wanted to do was say thank you they stayed for the service they stayed for the fellowship hour afterwards and in the intervening days they've been called by about 12 of those families to see how they're doing and to invite them back for a service sometime we can do this our voice matters and if we remind ourselves we remind ourselves that speaking with clarity with integrity with alacrity and with purpose we can and we will change the world so that's the second initiative the third initiative is already underway we just opened the pilot phase of this yesterday a group of 28 national staff members invited the entire united church of christ in all of their covenant settings into I think it works out to about 189 per and are committed starting November 9th to making random phone calls to every local church in the united church of christ now we didn't realize this until we did the math we can finish calls to every local church at least by next synod possibly within the first year and the point of this conversation we've developed scripts and talking points and templates and protocols is not to give into the temptation in the conversation to say I'm so and so from the national setting of the church let me tell you what I'm doing that you should be excited about which is our default mode right but to ask the question what's going on in your world that you're proud of that you're excited about and that we need to know about and if appropriate at the end of the call say is there anything that you would like us to lift you up in prayer for we gather every Wednesday at Amistad chapel for prayer and we promise to lift those churches up in prayer when we do so and it may be that in that conversation a story or two emerges that we know can't be contained and so we're going to deploy our communications team to write and tell those stories and broadcast them so that we begin to get a feel for what's going on in the life of the United Church of Christ that the Holy Spirit is willing to invest in and so that every one of those whom you deploy in your national setting reminds themselves who it is we do this for and why we do this and again reminding ourselves that we don't do things to our local churches so it's time to rebuild and restore the trust in the covenant partnership between our local church and the wider church and that's intended to do that the fourth initiative is both a by-product of the doctoral work that I did in my privileged studies and one of the reasons why I not only felt called to this position but in then being called to it I had to live out my commitment to this I believe that there are two competencies in this partnership with the Holy Spirit that the United Church of Christ must develop in order to fully realize what the Holy Spirit envisions in our futures part of our mission of undertaking if you've read the book Beyond Resistance you know what the first competency is it's time for Enlightenment Era the traditional minded congregational United Church of Christ people to become culturally competent in the postmodern world because the gospel is as relevant to postmodern years as it was to Enlightenment years and the modalities that the church has utilized successfully for the last 500 years we all know are insufficient to meet the needs of the coming generations so that's the first competency the second competency that I think the United Church of Christ has to fully undertake in order to be relevant, in order to be credible and in order to be successful is to wrestle with white privilege George Lipsitz has written a book called The Possessive Investment in Whiteness we love that title of white privilege is not something that we maintain by accident there is a continuing and ongoing possessive investment in that my research, my doctoral research wasn't just in white privilege studies but specifically white privilege and its effect on the church and we have been a part of an ongoing sacred conversation on race for the better part of the last decade please don't hear this as a replacement of that but a continuation of that commitment to be in sacred conversations on race but focusing this time in particular on the dynamics of white privilege and our ongoing investment in those dynamics and I have promised that by September of 2016 when many of our churches are starting their new Christian education programs that we will provide to every covenant partner in the United Church of Christ curriculum material that affords them the opportunity to engage in safe, meaningful and substantive conversations on the impact and dynamic of white privilege whether this is coincidence or just the spirit working or vision out I don't know but within two weeks of arriving in the office I got a call from Erdman's publishing house and they wanted to produce or to my next book and asked me to pitch a couple of ideas one of them was on white privilege and I now have a contract with Erdman's and the hope is that the book will come out in September of 2016 at the same time that curriculum material will come out so that's the fourth initiative the fifth initiative and we've already begun building the infrastructure for this we've got the blessing of your board of directors last week to undertake this it's a strategic planning initiative that will unfold in two phases and I needed the board to declare whether they wanted phase one to be completed in six months with a report at their March meeting or one year with a report at their October board meeting and they're just I gotta tell you they are alive with excitement about what they see as a new day in the United Church of Christ and they said get that report to us in March we are building for this first phase a task force of under 40s so over 40 need not apply the task force is asked to answer one question now let me pause they're not going to answer the question they're going to uncover the answer to that question and the question is if the United Church of Christ is to be a relevant partner in this movement to change the world what do we need to look like in 10 years we are going to ask them to skew the data under 40 now I want to be very careful here that does not mean we're not interviewing anybody over 40 but we are going to give different way to those under 40 and we're not giving them any more direction than answer the question they'll use our card team to develop survey materials to go out broadly they'll do one-on-one interviews they'll do focus groups and small group discussions and their job is to come back in March to the board meeting with a clear answer to the question what is the relevant United Church of Christ look like in 10 years we're also asking them don't just interview those who are already members of and invested in the United Church of Christ talk to those partners who will be a part of this movement with us and ask them for the sake of the movement what do you need the United Church of Christ to look like in 10 years and I've already said this to our board once we get that we start phase 2 and test their courage because there's two ways to get there right look at what we've got and say how do we take this and figure out a way with this to get there in 10 years or say if you could start over and build the most effective efficient way to get there what would you build now those are big questions and that's phase 2 how do we get from who we are to where we're called to be to be sure there will be challenges risks that require enormous courage and patience because this isn't going to happen with the first try or the second try or the third try or the fourth try I said it said the call to the United Church of Christ is to prepare to fail which doesn't mean our mission will not succeed it will prepare to fail is a call to the innovators among us to start taking risks I can remember this is almost 15 years ago driving down the highway and there was somebody paid for those black and white billboards black background white script and it was a pithy quote it was always God or Jesus and the one that I passed read what would you be willing to do if I told you you wouldn't fail that's the question put to us today what are we willing to do put the question to you for the sake of the gospel in partnership with the Holy Spirit who has not and will not abandon us what are you willing to do