 pluses. For the most part, we haven't used SWOT analysis in our strategic planning here through the years. I'd like that we follow Lenci Elmi or anything else, but I thought there are times when a SWOT analysis is really, really powerful, and this was one of those times. So I'm kind of a running SWOT analysis from the very beginning, and it's interesting when we look back at this, because I remember the first time I wrote, we might not be, it was several weeks before Easter, we may not have Easter worship in house, and that was a radical thought at the time, but eventually I could have never foreseen we wouldn't be meeting in house, for instance, in July. But anyway, one of the, one of the announces I did as we start, as I started reading a lot from around the country, a lot of great stuff has been written about the tactical work that needs to be done in order to open for the first time. And that's when I started worrying about the strategic implications of some of that, and I started thinking about the five audiences. So Mary, if you'll put the five audiences up there, there are a lot of ways to dice and slice your congregation if you look at cohorts within your congregation, but this is one that I made based on their likelihood to return to worship, to in-house worship. And so you've seen this, I won't take a lot of time on it, but the highly engaged and unafraid, these are people, they're the ones that are emailing you and calling you and saying, when are we going to come back to worship? And some of you may have already written, returned to worship, but they're, they're probably at most 15 to 20% of your congregation, and they can't wait, they'll be there the moment the doors are open. The next is what I call the highly engaged, you know what I'm talking about? These are reasonably active people in the life of your church, regardless of the size of your church, but highly engaged, but cautious. These are people who, for whatever reason, temperament, age, children, potential exposure to vulnerable audiences for whatever reason, they're much more cautious about coming back. So they plan on coming back, they, they've spent a lot of their lives in your church, they want to come back, but they're going to come back when they feel confident and safe. The third audience is, let's go, there we go, Mario. The third audience is a really important audience, the one that got my attention when I started looking at this, the highly engaged who will potentially never return or rarely return. Hopefully that's a negative perspective, but this is an audience primarily of seniors, but it could be other people as well with legitimate anxiety about the disease when they've got underlying conditions or whatever, or maybe they're just much more cautious, but your seniors, primarily, if you look at this audience, if you look at your above 60s audience cohort in your church, this is the group demographically, at least, that's least likely to come back and may never come back until they feel really safe. That's really effective therapeutics are a vaccine. If you look at your giving records, you'll find that they probably give about 60% of your annual revenue. These are generous people have been highly engaged and we don't want to forget them. The less engaged, these are people have been not as active in your church in terms of showing up and doing things. We know from our church because we've done a lot of research that these people love their church. They just don't feel like they need to be. If you're not aware of this, if you've been in your church very long, you probably have a lot of people who love you, love your church, love your ministry. If they meet somebody out there, they love to tell you that they go to First Methodist church, you know, Bowie or whatever, but they're not necessarily engaged. At one time, they would have been disaffected. A lot of the times these days, they are highly affectionate. And then the last group here is the newly reached. Those who you may have engaged since doing online worship only and they found you and they like what they see and we don't know whether they will return or not. Although maybe later on we'll talk about some hints I can give you about that. Hey, I just want to invite you to answer a few questions. And so if you all want to put Don Underwood on the speaker view, that might be helpful. So the first question I have for you is what concerns that you have that prompted this piece? Yeah, I think when I started writing it, I saw the potential, all the tactical work, almost obsessive work on tactics, which has been really important. And we did a webinar here a week or two ago. Kim Hale has done a lot of this on our staff. There have been people around the country that written a lot about it about what we do when we come back. And I know that if your church is anything like mine, there are a lot of people who are begging to come back. They're really excited. And what occurred to me is that there's a strategic booby trap there. And that is that when you do open for in-house worship for the first time, that there'll be so much energy and focus around opening. And those who are coming back, that you will accidentally marginalize 80% of your congregation. I think this is really a serious issue. Think about, let's take that middle group, your demographic over 60, and they're saying, you know what, I love watching my preacher preach in my pajamas. This is easy. I don't have to get my, you've got some people say, I don't get my cane or I walk her out. I don't have to worry about the umbrella. And it can be really easy for the energy around reopening to be focused on those who are there. And all of a sudden, these people who've been at the very heart and soul of your church in every way, your educational ministries, your serving ministries, your prayer ministries. All of a sudden, they start feeling like they're left out or second class citizens. So that applies for really all groups two and four as well. But especially number three, I think it's really important to segment these cohorts so that you are, so two things. One is that when you're doing your general communication, what you've got to do, we're going to open on the 16th of July or the first weekend Sunday, it's looking more like May 3 right now, but whenever it is, when you do your general communication, it's real important that somehow you make that communication inclusive. So you don't have a 60 year old who's one of your great givers and members and servers sitting there. Well, I'm sorry, but she's not talking to me. I'm left out here. So that general communication has to be inclusive. In addition to that, I recommend that you do some specific kind of tailored communication for each of these groups, starting with number three, where you continue to let them know you're doing this in your offering time probably, or you continue to let them know how very, very vital and important they are in the life of your church. Yeah. So I want you to talk just a little bit more about the statement. It's important for various cohorts to hear from their church. So you so talk just a little bit more deeply about what's at stake and what are the messages you think they need to hear? Yeah. Well, I think everything is at stake. So the way I look at this period of time that we're in strategically is how do we stay strong and get as strong as we can to aim for one day? And that is the day that we can say that this pandemic is kind of is pretty much behind us. All of our churches, we're really kind of in spring training now, if you will, or two days, whatever you want to call it. One of these days, this will be over. And when it's over, it could be that the paradigm for how we are doing ministry has changed at least somewhat forever. It's possible. But certainly, we will go back to in-house worship. And it's important that we plan for that moment in a way in which we come out of this as strong as possible. So and I'm very focused. Part of what I'm doing at Christ Church these days is don't a relation. So I'm very focused on financial vitality. I want to encourage you to embrace and affirm those two words, financial vitality, because it's part of what will enable you to have ministry vitality, not only through the pandemic, but when we leave. So a lot of work that needs to be done in this time to maintain all of that is messaging. I've got another little project that I'm working on. And I'll just share this with you. I was talking to Kami a little bit earlier. I think we could be saying I'm not positive, but I think we could be seeing the paradigm for what it means to minister to church shifts somewhat from leader back to the old fashioned concept of pastor. Most of my life has been leading and organizing, managing, visioning for a large church. But in the last few years, I found myself doing more old fashioned pastoring. And I've really found myself doing that during this time. So I think there may be a shift in what people need. And so I think the personal touch as much as possible in group communications whether it's a letter, or a video, those personal touches are really important. I think ministries in your church where you're regularly touching people, how are you doing, what kind of care ministries you have pages on this call and our care ministries have some pretty powerful stuff going in terms of just calling people. I've been calling people a lot rather than texting them. I found that people love it. At least most people. So in each of those, the message is somewhat different with your that that cohort number three, just know we continue to value you and we know how important you are in the life of the church. I just wrote a letter to that cohort in our church in which I said, you know, we worked hard and long 30 years ago to relocate our church and we had a vision and the sacrifices we made. But who knew that we would find a moment where the church was closed like this? And can you believe the innovative ways in which your church has managed to stay in ministry? Now I said, but now we need you. I think that's one of the message. Now we need you as much as ever. We are turning over a lot of the leadership to other generations to younger generations. But guess what? That younger generation needs us more than ever. They need our involvement. They need our prayers. And they need our financial generosity because that's what's going to keep our church strong through the next year. So that's an example of a kind of tailored message. I think tailored for that cohort and tailored around the issue of maintaining vitality in the life of the church. One of the things you and I talked about a couple weeks ago when we first looked at this piece was that you had a concern about not giving the wrong messages. Possibly giving as people returning possibly to the buildings, some deciding they're going to stay and watch it on worship online or engage in small groups online. What kind of message tailoring needs to happen so that you don't give the wrong message? You want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I can. When we first started live streaming and really through the through the end of my time in the pulpit this past spring, I had a terrible, difficult, terribly difficult time. I was just so much a preacher of habit of preaching and a lot of it extra perenniously to the people in the pews. I really had a hard time being inclusive of people that were live streaming. We did some work with a satellite when we had one in Princeton at difficult time there. It is extremely crucial now that when you when you do your welcoming, whatever it is when you do your offer, when you do your sermon that the pastor is 100% inclusive, trying as best you can to make that that engaged member that has always been in your cues, trying to make them feel as much as possible as if they're still in your pews, that the people in your pews are no more important than they. Same thing, you won't know who they are, but maybe a newly engaged person, even in a large church like Christchurch, I can look out at the congregation and see if there's a first time visitor there, most of the time. And you know, you focus on those people. And you said, man, I hope I got a good sermon for a first time visitor because you want them to come back at least give you a second try, right? Well, you've got that same thing going on right now. So by you stumbled onto you online, and you want to be inclusive. This is stuff I was never very good at. Chris Dowell is a lot better at it than I am. You want to be inclusive, saying you may be worshipping with us for the very first time. And we want you know, addressing those people. So the smooth to virtual ministry has been a really important and a big one. And it's not going to go away. I have written and this may be a conversation for another time. But I think probably we're in a paradigm now where we were having in house worship augmented by live streaming. I think the better way to think of our paradigm now is that we are virtual churches that will maybe be maybe started, but we're virtual story churches that that will be augmented by in house worship once again. I think if a pastor is not thinking that way, you may end up with the cart before the horse. We've a lot of things have been inverted. I'm going to ask you a deeper question about that in just a minute. But I'm seeing Mark Buford ask the question if you can share some sample examples. Yeah, I saw the chat there. Yeah, thank you very much. I can if let me give you all my email address, because I can't give it to you right now. But it's done at CUMC Charlie United Mama Charlie dot com. And if you'll email me, I'll be happy to send you a sample of a letter that I've sent out. And you can adapt it for your own purposes. And I invite you to send any other questions as well. Kimmy knows that I I have a job and had a really good job as pastor emeritus, but I committed to came to the Bishop to do some pro bono coaching for anybody in the conference that asked for it during the year. So it doesn't have to be coaching. But if you got questions, I've got plenty of time and energy and I'll be glad to help in any way I can. Hey, thanks for that. So you you jumped right into the next question I was going to ask you. So I'm just going to make it a little more specific. You would you speak a little bit more about this whole idea of how building an infrastructure challenge? And you said that you wanted to consider inverting the worship paradigm where the house of worship augments online worship rather than the other way around. And it's interesting, like this morning, I was listening to my husband to an online devotion. And one of the things I've noticed is that we have upped our game big time in everyday ministry. And as soon as everybody got on the people were coming in to listen to the devotion, he was saying, Oh, hey, Nancy, how are you doing? I'm glad you're here. Oh, hey, so and so I'm glad you're much of said every single person's name. And, and it was so pastoral in that he that that it was as if they were the only ones, you know, and on the call. And so I do think that there's this new way of interacting that that you've brought to our attention. And we've all seen. But so what does it look like to to invert that relationship? And yeah, it's it's really fascinating. I'll make two points. One is I've said for a long time I read a book several years ago about developing habits, breaking habits and developing new habits. Remember the name of the book right now. But I've said for some time that in order to form a new habit, you do the same thing at the same time for 21 days. And you've got a new habit. So when I encourage people to develop an exercise routine, I say, look, do it for 21 days in a row or a spiritual discipline, do it for 21 days in a row. And, and more, you probably have a habit so that you will depend upon. So what we've seen now is that people are developing new worship habits, and new small group habits. So that's gonna lead to the second point that I will make. I was talking to somebody in our church the other day, longtime members of Sunday School, a real close Sunday school class. And I mean, she was witnessing testifying about how powerful their Zoom meetings have been, and about how somebody who never opens up in a live class meeting, it was on the screen, but being very, very open and very emotional and how powerful that was. So I see the bishops on the meeting, he and I have both complained about the number of Zoom meetings we've had to do. And on the one hand, we've done plenty of them. But on the other hand, we should not, we should not be saying one about the fact that this is a very powerful medium. And that some of our small groups have continued to meet by Zoom, our Facebook or other technologies I'm not familiar with, in ways that are extremely powerful. So the reality is that, as I mentioned, the older couple that says, you know, we've been struggling with the walkers or whatever, or they ride the bus from the retirement home, or the assisted living home. This really works for us. Let me just tell you this, the first time we know, we video our services now on Friday, really during the week, but we don't video them on Sunday. The first time I sat with my wife and watched a Chris Down sermon on a Sunday morning, I thought, wow, this is, this is great. I can see him better. I can hear every word which in our sanctuary, any large sanctuary that you typically can't do. If you're just going for the sermon, you just have to admit this, if you've got good live streaming. If you're just going for the sermon, it's better. Live stream or virtual worship as a total is not better. No doubt about it. The community, the communal experience, the choir, all of that. But my point is that you've got a lot of people who are saying, I love this live streaming thing. In our church, the worship team and the communication team have done extremely creative things over the last few weeks. They're, they are videoing on, on, on location. They're, they're going to do a sermon this coming Sunday from Chris Downs backyard about the National Park system. They're putting in extra slides to make it interesting. So I think that a lot of people are very eager to come back and they will. But I do think there's at least a possibility that there are large numbers for whom worship will be and maybe some small group work will be the primary go to will be live stream. Bishop, you got a question? Well, you know, I just, I don't want to take over anything, but I just want to, this sort of dovetails and does another conversation you had with the central district pastors meetings come up. I think, I, I think Don is right. Don is right about we're going to be worshiping in two venues. One's going to be live. Any other one's going to be virtually. The reason why virtually is going to be important for a considerable amount of time, I believe, is another reason is because we have too many people who are simply have compromising health conditions that, that prevent them from going to worship. And so if we do not, first of all, if we don't do the virtual reality piece for worship, one is, is we're excluding the significant number of our church. But the second thing I'd say about this when we go back and down, you said this so clearly that they didn't so well, and that is that everybody has to mask. And the way you, and I'll let you sort of frame it basically what I took from it was, if we really believe everyone's welcome at one of our churches, then the masking makes everyone welcome. Yes, thank you. I think Cammy put up on her resource, your resources page on the website, a one page, it's three paragraphs about the importance of masking. And so I will be redundant about the safety issues. You know what the safety issues are, in spite of leadership that we're, political leadership that we're seeing that has been ambivalent or unclear about the wearing of mask. The medical research is unambiguous. So the safety factors, one reason, the two reasons that maybe you may not have thought about, but I think are really important. There is no way for you to claim to be a United Methodist inclusive pastor and inclusive worship congregation if you don't wear a mask. You, you open your work, I think you know how strongly I feel about this. You open your sanctuary, don't require a mask. You are inviting the person, and they may not be coming anyway, but the symbolism, you're inviting the person who's over 75, who's been such an important part of your church. You're telling them they're not invited. You're telling the pregnant mother that she's not invited. You're telling the wife of a husband who is on chemotherapy, and she can't afford to get to get sick because it will likely kill her husband. You're telling her don't you come to this church. So the inclusive, which is as as much of inclusiveness as as much a United Methodist value as anything I can think of. It's, there are very few times when I, and look, I'm not running Christ Church these days, and as Kristal would say, spoken as a retired, a retired pastor. So I don't have to take the heat on this, but there are very few times where I would just say, look, this is the way it is if you, but I wouldn't do this. I don't care who it is. If you want to go to a church without wearing masks, there are plenty of churches to go to because you compromise your entire theology of inclusiveness by saying we don't, we're not really worried about public health, about community health, and we're in, and look, if you've got an underlying condition, or you live with someone who has an underlying condition, we just really don't care whether you come to our church. Sorry, I got off of that. That's number two. Number three is just liability and branding. I was talking with Tom Berlin, a lot of you know Tom Berlin a few weeks ago, and he, he was struggling with this issue, but he, but he was, he was worried he needed to be, he just needed to hear me say it. We both thought this was so strong, but this, these are his words. He said, if somebody comes to my church and gets sick and gets sick and dies, nobody will say, well, it was their choice to come. They'll say you invited them. So there's no 100% guarantee on this, but if you have a worship service and there is the spread of disease associated with your worship service, you have two huge issues. One is liability, and it's a real issue. And you're going to have to explain when they start doing discovery for your civil lawsuit, you're going to have to explain why you chose not to follow CDC guidelines. And then the second issue is branding. If you think it's hard to open the first time, think about how difficult it will be to open the second time after your church has become known as a super spreader event. So I'm sorry, I've been able to be a little bit more subtle about this, but wear a mask. As you were talking, it's interesting the tone change that, that this is part of where we find ourselves right now, that, that you were talking a little bit about the opportunity to, to be creative online, the backyard kind of thing that was going on. And it's, it's just an interesting place to be in because you're both thinking about, we're all thinking about what that creative thing is that we could do, and we're also thinking about the protection and what could possibly happen in our buildings. And so as I was thinking about prompting you for the next question, it's, you know, how, how do you anticipate holding both of those audiences or all of those five audiences on, that are, that are engaging either online or at the church in a way that helps the whole ecosystem of your church be healthy, be able to think about their, their life in Christ, and continue to be the church? Well, that's a great question. And I think it's really, really challenging. This journal that I started back in February, and I've kind of continued to update it, it's fun to go back and read it because of all the life that I was being very foreseeing, and, and maybe was comparatively speaking, there's so many things that we couldn't anticipate. And so one of the rules that we need to be thinking about right now is that we really can't think too far into the future with certainty. We need to be thinking about the future, but we're not going to be able to forecast it. And so it's really important to have principles to be able to have principles that guide us and guide our leadership team, even when the tactics are constantly changing. I'll just give you an example. Some of you maybe have already opened or you know when you're going to open. We don't, in this church, yet as far as I know, that decision has not been made. And, and it's very likely that numbers coming out of Collin County and Dallas County over the next week, or two weeks, is going to push that back much, much further. So it's really challenging, Candy, to think about what I sometimes refer to as the church ecosystem. But I would say that part of that keeping it healthy is what we've been talking about. Good, good communication, generalized communication. We're not letting anybody out, but then also specific tailored communication with your different cohorts. And then a lot of one-on-one, I think is really important now, your leaders, you need to stay with them one-on-one. Collin, they got plenty of time. And then the other thing about the ecosystem, back to the, to the, to the mask, I think that, you know, good boundaries is one of the, is one of the dynamics of a healthy organization, a healthy person, healthy organization. So I think clear, strong leadership with good explanations. One of the reasons I wrote the, the piece on the three reasons to wear a mask is because you've got three different motivators there. A lot of people be motivated by the safety factor, but obviously some people aren't. They're the grocery store, you got people, they don't care, you know. But some of those people that don't care about safety may be motivated by, oh, I don't want to exclude my neighbor from coming to church with me. And then some of your business people may be motivated by the business argument or the branding argument. So here's what I think. I think good communication. I think reaffirming and maybe reimagining what it looks like to be a pastor alongside of being a leader is really important right now. Pastoral leadership one-on-one into groups, healthy boundaries, healthy boundaries and clear communication. And then this is really important. I've, I'm starting to write about this a little bit, but principles which will guide you in the midst of the chaos, you may not know when you're going to open. You may not know exactly what it's going to look like when you do. You may not know what Christmas is. We don't know what Christmas is going to look like. And so it's important to acknowledge all that we do not know, but it's also important to figure out what your values are or your principles that will guide you through those decisions, both strategic and tactical decisions. In our church we have had for a long time three values, hospitality, innovation, and well I just, I just lost one. But anyway, those, those principles are, are important to have in your church wherever you are. And so when you're making tactical or even strategic decisions you're thinking does it, is this meeting the standards that we've said in terms of who we want to be as a church? Does it meet the standard I've set about who I want to be as a leader slash pastor? And I think it's important to think about those, acknowledge, vocalize those principles or those values again both personally and with your leadership team at least. If you don't you're going to find yourself like a pinball machine. Things are, that's probably a good metaphor it just came to me. Things are so chaotic there's so much that we don't know right now that you're just going to be a pinball machine just being you know rebounding back and forth all over the place unless you've got some principles or some values that will anchor how you're thinking about everything. So I think on that note I, I was wondering what your theological and scriptural anchors are as you're thinking about this present situation and and how they're guiding you. Yeah great question. On the, on the communication issue I think clearly the letters of Paul the epistles of Paul have made a difference. If you go back and read them it's so clear if you look at the authentic epistles it's so clear that Paul was writing from the same theological position. You know they seem in different stages but he was writing to individual churches. So he's writing to cohorts right he had different audiences so he wrote different things. Some of his letters are happier more joyful thankful letters and I'm not Pauline scholar so don't start pushing me on this but in some of his letters are Laura Eccles is grinning at me because she knows that's so true. Some of his letters are much more challenging. You know we we love reading first Corinthians 1313 but if you read the chapters before that you recognize that Paul was was writing to a church that had divisiveness in it competition and so Paul really sets the standard about how we should write contextually. This is as good a word as any. How we should communicate contextually and so the five audiences five different contexts find your voice for what is existentially important for each of those audiences when you when you write to all of them make sure you're including all of them. So I I think those were the main questions that I had for you today. Laura Eccles Richter wrote a question or two before we had the the gathering today. One of them was what are some of the best practices for connecting to the newly reached. Yeah that's a great question Laura. This group number five this is new for us and it's very great challenging. So I'll tell you what we're discovering. When you live stream of course you can we can tell we ask people to sign in and we can tell that we've got new people live streaming but we don't necessarily know who they are or what the contact information is. It's usually anonymous. But and look this is probably pretty slim right now. You can expect to have hundreds live streaming with you all of a sudden. Look in live streams the great equalizer right. People can get on in live stream with Tom Berlin or Adam Hamilton as easily as they can live stream with you and I mean different people like different preaching styles but my point is live streaming is a great equalizer. So if you're getting somebody new people that's great because you've got a lot of good competition out there a lot of good preachers online these days. But two things we have a lot of you know Angie Rosowski who does hospitality in our church. We've got two people who she's gotten got involved because they started live streaming and reached out to us. To some extent you're dependent on people reaching out to you in both cases they didn't go to the pastor or to Angie. They went to a particular a particular ministry that they were interested in. I think both of these actually were youth. Both of them younger women one just married one with children and when they did we just have we have systems and so when they did Angie got looped in and so you have a your director of children's ministry and your director of hospitality all kind of working together. So when I checked with Angie on this only two people that we know of but this now this is really good news. Look we're a little bit larger church but there's no reason why this isn't taking place in your church. Look at your giving. We have 31 new giving units since we started worshiping virtually and and several of those I've got it color-coded white yellow and green. White is a one first is a one-time gift. Yellow is someone who's given more than once and green is someone who's made a recurring gift. By that we're talking I'm talking about they they've got us they're giving every week or every month through an ACH or however they've got it set up. We're going into those if you've been reading the financial guys Joe Park and others those recurring gifts are really important and we probably got I don't know six seven eight nine of those are recurring gifts it's really powerful. So I'm getting ready to work on this system but when you there's an opportunity I'm bad about saying you should there's an opportunity to look at your first-time gifts first-time donors in my opinion they should always be recognized. A note, an email, a phone call. I made a phone call the one before this meeting and and it is a thank you I mean it's a you know thank you for your gift but start off I know you've got involved in our church that you've been viewing online thank them for that but there are great conversations that can take place you get a lot of information by just going back to the old pastor role and as the bishop says I know the bishop when he was doing local church ministry if he met a new family before they left he knew the names of their children their grandchildren and the names of their dogs and so you can find that out people want to know that you're interested in them and when you find out about them you're finding out a lot about your own church and how your own church is reaching out so look at your giving records I frankly I Laura I admit that I hadn't completely researched this until I saw your question and I went to Brenda today and I said help me because I thought I was getting all our first-time donors but I what I wasn't go to your donors and see who they are do not if somebody gives you money I don't care if it's just 25 dollars I don't care if it's 50 cents if somebody gives you money it's an affirmation of your ministry and call them email them thank them and this is kind of tough I learned it from Mark Craig but it's it's it's you can do this just gosh I noticed where you where you dropped a thousand dollar check in the plate and we're so grateful I'm just curious what is it that prompts such generosity in you um you that's the start of cultivating a donor relationship that can be very very powerful not just the fact that they're funding your ministry but the fact that you're supporting their spiritual life it's just extremely important so um it's some for some people it's it was hard for me to learn how to do it it can be but start that spirit it's I think that's a spiritual journey start that spiritual journey it'll be good for you be good for your church it'll be really good for those people that you minister to so we have about 13 minutes for just specific questions and answers from folks so um why don't why don't you anybody that has a question why don't you uh simply ask don the question or if you have a comment I think I I'd kind of like to know as people are thinking of their questions if um Laura has a response to how she asked you the question how do we redefine the metrics of engagement and attendance I'd be curious to know if Grace Avenue has decided what they're going to do about that Laura can you speak is she there Marielle have you got our unmuted there you go sorry my mouse was not working um we just continue our um tech and media people have been trying to track how many devices and other things that we have um on screen and we're trying to do that realistically I mean people scroll by facebook live all the time but that's we're trying to get realistic expectations about what some of those are but it's also about then the deeper engagement of how we have people engaged in small groups um how we're reaching out to them pastorally one-on-one and so and that giving that generosity factor is so important but we just we are very clear that the the understanding of metrics is all changing um what we have done in the past is not how we can check that engagement in the future and what Don said I think is so important because we really are beginning to look at as we move forward that we're going to be online first that the focus is always going to be that we're focused on the online community because that's going to be the greater um number of people that we're going to be reaching and that's going to feel very different because it used to be the online people were just the extension of what we were doing in person and so um I just continue to want to see how we're going to live into that together um for metrics across the board moving forward and that piece of people joining us that we can't see that we don't know what Don said when he said he looks out at the congregation and kind of can see who's new we've lived by that for so long and now when people are joining us on facebook live um if they haven't followed us then we don't know who it is we don't have their names and so trying to figure out how do we capture that how do we lean into that and I know there are people who are um far more have far more expertise than I do about how to do that and so we just continue to try to learn from the people who have some knowledge in those areas about how we truly can continue to engage I think our bishop has something she something he wants to say I want to follow up on that metrics piece that Laura talked about I do think that one of the things that I've learned is the proliferation of small groups in many of our churches not all in many of our churches that have been actually eclipsed anything that I ever thought was possible and one of the things that it means to me it means to me is that we may be recovering the very beginning of our methodist roots in terms of the importance of small group the classes that were formed in both in the early church and in the united states after the revolution and of course of the societies in Britain and so I think that engagement I've been thinking this for some time this is a conversation that Don and I've had for several years that measuring engagement is more than just measuring the number of people who are accused but measuring engagement in terms of those small groups and other and avenues for mission service and acts of mercy anything you want you want to call it and how we capture that is going to be very important it's also how we I think engage people more deeply than uh then coming in and worshiping almost sunday morning by the way I'm all for worship I'm not saying no to that but I do think this has presented us an alternative for some significant alternatives for what will be a new reality for for the church in the coming years so I do think that's I do think that's very important hey can't be somebody asked a question is really about the opening of the east and northwest district churches and how that was going can I just comment on that real quickly well first I know they would not really talk about that this conflict when you when you practice the the guidelines that we had adopted in the north texas conference and we are going to start requiring masks and it the people are not flooding our churches simply because the the social distancing that needs to take back somebody's applied to 25 percent rule to churches that was done to restaurants in the very beginning and 25 percent will make your churches more full than the than the social distancing of six feet or or more and I know that christ's church actually did Plano Kim Hill and I talked about it did sort of a dry run about how many people that would really be and it's sort of alarming and how many people that church will normally see of it does not begin to approach anywhere near that number so so I want to say that in terms of those churches some of them are not opening yet and I'm even getting emails today about churches in collin county that are not going to open this month after work so we're beginning to look at the data we know it was not we look at the data every day about the cases the numbers don't lie we know that Dallas is off limits for a while and by while we won't even talk about it till august if then and that we know that probably we may be coming back and saying something the church is the north central district that's not a thread it's not a promise it's not anything it's just we want you to know that we're gonna be ever vigilant about the spread of COVID-19 to ensure and something I wrote the other day to a lot of people that the health of our clergy and laity are uppermost in the decisions that I make about this and it's not a political statement on a part it's just the idea for the well-being and the health of the communities that we serve to do anything less would be to I think would abrogate our responsibilities and duties as a faithful Christian. Thank you Bishop. Kimmy I want to jump in just quickly on the comments about metrics and Laura's question about metrics and engagement. I was ordained in 71 so I've been doing this for a long time and for years we measured engagement with worship attendance right and I remember it's probably been at least 10 years I was sitting with Gil Rendell and Gil down in Austin at Blake Travis and Gil and I had an extended conversation about this and he was telling me something which I already knew but I didn't want to hear it you know and he just he said unambiguously he said attendance in the Methodist Church is going to continue to go down and you have to start measuring engagement rather than attendance and he was exactly right and every one of us for people that are younger maybe that's not quite as as paradigm shifting as it is for somebody like me but we have to find we should in fact be thinking about ways of engagement rather than just attendance which should be one metric of course but on those audiences so this is just a little bit of a caveat like that number four audience members highly affectionate but not necessarily engaged that's not necessarily true in a sense they may be highly engaged in some ways that you do not yet know about if you look at those numbers pretty carefully I'm pretty sure you'll find some people that are certainly engaged in terms of their practice of generosity so I noticed that Bentley Foster had a really interesting question I've been thinking about this too he's just curious about your virtual worship and in-person worship will you record the virtual service and then live stream your in-person or will the service focus online with a live audience feel that whole kind of shift of who's of maybe overseeing the the worship experience do you have a comment about that Don yeah what a look this is a $64,000 question I was talking about it Chris is on vacation we've got some in the can for it next week and we've upped our game I'm using we editorially it's somebody else that's doing all the hard lifting here but in terms of the virtual experience being able to film on location and do some I mean they've been to Texama been to Paris Texas slash Paris France last week got more interesting graphics we've upped our game on this a lot and so honestly this is what we're trying to figure out again I'm speaking editorially how do we maintain the enhancements that we've made to virtual worship and still bring people back for the live experience we don't think we've talked some this has been my turn you know having a studio audience like a live show with a studio audience pardon me that that won't work so we're thinking in terms of a hybrid of Bentley for lack of a better word but I don't think anybody's got it figured out yet and it's really really challenging I have time for maybe one more questions that we can be finished before too anybody else have a question comment do you have a closing word Don you'd like to offer I'll just say that I know it's the Bishop nailed the book the power of habit why we do what we do in life and business that was the book that I read on the beach at Gulf shores probably ever many years ago it was and which is where I was playing on being today Gulf shores no I would just say that it is really important to think creatively in this time and I do think that the SWAT analysis if you're not familiar with the SWAT analysis it's pretty easy you can you can probably google that and figure out how to do it it's it's strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and I think that's a really good thing we have to be able to think of this time that we're and we're clear what the threats are and what the challenges are we have to think about ways of mitigating our weaknesses and the threats but also think about opportunities and there are opportunities that we've been talking about in terms of virtual worship going forward so I think thinking real creatively and then again something we haven't gotten into and I I wouldn't be able to leave this conversation right now because I'm still thinking about it but how we anchor our thinking and our planning right now in principles that help us at least stay even though we may be you know varying a little bit at least we can stay reasonably do north rather than finding ourselves just tossed around by the by the by the winds in the seas and the changes that are taking place culturally so that's something that I encourage everybody to be thinking and some of you will be ahead of me on this and I will say one other thing I mentioned to Kimmy as we were beginning I I think this in terms of opportunities I spent the last 37 years in a large church but there's a tremendous opportunity for small churches here if you're pastoring a small church you have opportunities that large churches don't have and that mid-sized churches don't have sorry Marty the possibility Mark Craig and I used to wonder about this whether the winds would shift if we would go back to small churches I wouldn't sure it would ever happen but I think possibly it can happen if you're a good pastor and you're creative energetic and you're pastoring a small church I think there are tremendous opportunities to strengthen your church going through this pandemic and come out really really strong if you're in a community or small town do it better than anybody else and you'll become the best church in town sorry about my competitiveness there but I have a streak of it so I appreciate you so much Don I didn't say this before but Don has been a pastor for 48 years lots of wisdom and experience I appreciate your giving today and all the years of service you've done for the church this five audience piece really does speak to how it is that we have become a lot of small groups small churches in one and our ecosystem of understanding how we are so much different is really important so if you haven't read the piece go back and read it as Don said he's available for any coaching a follow-up you've got his email in the chat and we're just so thankful that you joined us today so thanks everybody for your great workout in the mission field thank you to the lay people I see a bunch of lay people and Tom and Lauren I'm so glad that you're here today Rosie it's good to see you back on and come back again for another webinar appreciate your presence