 Welcome to Columbus, Ohio. I'm Reverend John Edgar, the pastor of the United Methodist Church for all people. All of our ministries, they're grounded in the concept of asset-based community development. The concept's really simple. We look to see the assets, the resources, that are in our own community, and then we begin to try to dream God's dream of what we could do to improve quality of life. Yes, it's about welcoming people into our congregation. It's also listening to people as they dream their dreams of wanting a better place to live, a job that pays a living wage, people who want to be healthy and want to see their kids prosper and thrive in school. An asset-based community development says we can do any and all those things if we just draw upon the partnerships, the resources, the gifts that are right here. And as we have impact in a small area of ministry, it draws new partners, and ultimately we can transform the quality of life of the whole community into something that's beautiful and helps us to know we live inside a divine economy of abundance. We're standing in front of the Ministry Center for the United Methodist Church for all people. This Ministry Center includes a primary care medical home It's part of a partnership we do with a Roman Catholic hospital system that provides medical care to people on a sliding scale. Across the street is an abandoned drive-thru liquor store that we're about to turn into doubling of the space for our fresh market that provides fruits and vegetables to hundreds of families each week. We run a bicycle shop, all kinds of things that help to improve quality of life. But it's all grounded in a faith community that's inclusive and welcomes everybody in this amazingly diverse community. Now all the ministries of the United Methodist Church for all people find their origin in what's known as the United Methodist Freestore. The Freestore was launched in January of 1999. It was originally a ministry of the Columbus South District of the United Methodist Church. And we had a real simple idea. We invited people to donate gently used clothing and household items and we then rented a storefront in an inner city neighborhood on the south side of Columbus. And we invited the folks who had gathered up the materials to follow their donations into this inner city neighborhood and to then volunteer and get to build relationships of mutuality with the people who came to shop. And so we gradually moved into an awareness of what we now call a divine economy of abundance. God made everything in creation. God made it good and God made it abundant. And if we take what we have, no matter how meager it seems to us, God will multiply that for God's purposes. So for us, it was this incredible a-ha experience of coming to an awareness that in this Freestore we had stepped inside of the divine economy of abundance. And then we began to listen and respond to the hopes and dreams of the people all around us. We are committed to concepts called asset-based community development. It's the idea that if we wanna do ministry, we should stop focusing on needs and deficiencies in what's broken and instead turn and focus on what are people's dreams and what are the resources and assets that we already have inside this divine economy of abundance. We had folks struggling with slum landlords, people who just wanted a decent place to live. And then we also had people who were dreaming of going back to work and being able to earn an income for their families. And so we decided to see these things as opportunities. We had all kinds of boarded up, vacant, plighted houses in our community. And we said those are assets, not liabilities in the sense that we ought to be able to figure out how to take one of those houses, take people from the neighborhood who wanted to go to work, put them together and then create a really good place for a family to live. Somebody approached me and said they actually owned a duplex that was vacant and blighted and he turned it over to us and we went to work. And we moved into families and it was the beginning of this journey. And now, 12 years later, starting from that one duplex, we've done $50 million worth of affordable housing in this community. Look around in this neighborhood and it's so clear, we live inside a divine economy of abundance. It's the same model in everything we're about. Welcome to the Residences at Career Gateway. This is a $12 million apartment complex under construction that also has job training space. Now, church for all people isn't a rich church, but through partnerships, we have been able to bring this project to life. It's partnerships with the state of Ohio and Nationwide Children's Hospital. It's not only helping to build these units, but it's promising to train people who live here and in the surrounding community so they can get entry level jobs at the hospital. It's the biggest challenge in any kind of job training to know if there's really a job at the end of the training process. And we're standing in a space that guarantees success. People who move in here will be able to be in a 10 minute walk at the hospital where their new job will be. The training will happen right here where they're living and others from the neighborhood who weren't able to move into these beautiful apartments can still move into the job training experiences and have a chance at a better life. It's amazing what can happen in a divine economy of abundance. Give what you have and then invite partners and it will multiply. Partners who have ties to a community that's dreaming of a better quality of life.