 Well, at conference, actually before conference, I contacted Stan, Donna Whitehead, actually, and I just invited us, I guess, I don't know. I said to Donna, I said, Donna, do you think Stan would host us? And she said, well, I bet he would, and the conversation went on, and here we are today. So, Stan, we appreciate your hospitality for us today, the food, the gathering, the room, the space, and most of all, we thank you for your presence with us. Right. Thank you, Tom, and welcome to all of you. Y'all can come back here anytime. Just let us know. I did get these questions ahead of time, so I've thought about them. I want to just give you a little bit of background that led me to my ordination in 1986. I grew up in the Texas Conference in East Texas, in a little town of Chandler, not far from Tyler. And so I grew up in a rural church background, and I went to Lon Morris College. I'm at the school, two-year school, that no longer exists. And I went to Centenary College for the rest of my undergraduate, and then I went to St. Paul's School of Theology in Kansas City. And St. Paul was, it was very instrumental, Keith's an alum back there, too, in my development of really what I was interested in, which was basically being the church and society, the church in the world. That was my passion. I was a sociology major at Centenary, and St. Paul at that time had a pretty aggressive church and society program, and that's what attracted me there. I told Tammy we married, I graduated, we married the next week, and the next week we headed to Kansas City. That was in 1981, and I told her if we didn't like it, we could always come back to Perkins, because I'd had nothing against Perkins, but just realized that we'd been raised about and educated within a hundred miles of the house, and it was time to leave home, so that sent us to Kansas City. I graduated in 1984, I told the bishop in our conference, actually the district superintendent, that I really wanted an inner city church, because I was going to go to Washington, D.C., and do a Ph.D. in social ethics in 1987. And so I just needed to touch base a couple of years, and then I was going to be gone again to school. In March of 1986, I developed leukemia, and it was a terminal form of leukemia. It was set up by genetic mutation and there was no treatment, and I was in Henderson, Texas, and they saw fit to appoint me to the first United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, where Bill Henson was the pastor, and I was his associate for seven years, but back to the question of 1986. When I was ordained in May, after being diagnosed with terminal illness in March, I remember very vividly I've got the picture on my wall upstairs, Ben Oliphant ordained me, and everybody in the conference knew I was sick, and how sick I was. And you know, today, I wonder, would I have been ordained knowing that in essence, you know, I had about a three year to live sentence in essence, and so in 1986, when I knelt at the altar at first United Methodist Church in Houston, Ben Oliphant put his hand on me and my wife also, and pastors and my district superintendent. I felt a lot of prayers about taking authority, and I didn't know exactly what that was going to mean. My main concern was getting well if I could, and so I entered an experimental drug protocol at MD Anderson Hospital, and it worked for me. I was young and otherwise very healthy. Only 2% of the people who were on the drug responded to it. It was a failed protocol, but I stayed on that drug for five more years and stayed at First Church Houston for five years. And as I began to get well and to work at First Church Houston, that issue of taking authority took on more and more meaning. And Bill Henson gave me good responsibilities, lots of responsibilities. I did evangelism there. We were bringing in somewhere close to 700 people a year. So I really learned how to do evangelism while I was at First Church Houston, and before I left I was given the responsibility to start the West Campus, which was the first dual campus or extended campus ministry in Methodism. I know that because I did my doctorate at United Theological Seminary back in the early 1990s, and my project was to write about the dual campus ministry. And there was no United Methodist Church doing ministry in two locations, so I had to study the Mount Perrin Church of God, which was a Pentecostal Church of God in Atlanta, Georgia, to write my paper really on that particular model. And now today, you know, fast forward 25 or 30 years, and it is the primary way we start churches now. You know, the old parachute drop is no longer appropriate. We usually call on churches to help start churches. So that's kind of a long way of saying that to some degree, my ordination and taking authority is a fog. But I will say that I grew into it and grew to understand what that meant and how important it was for me to take authority. I was an associate, I was talking to one of my young associates yesterday, trying to talk him into, he's got a really good job. I was an associate for, let's see, for 12 years, nearly 13 years before I ever served a church, and Lovers Lanes my second. But in sitting at the feet of a very dynamic pastor, I learned that the most important responsibility that we have is casting vision. I think that's especially true in large churches where the congregations are so diverse, and you have folks from, like Lovers Lane is very eclectic, as you said, Tom. And, you know, I took that to Tyler, which was my first appointment, and was there nearly five years before being appointed here to Lovers Lane on April Fool's Day, 1998. And I came into this conference and never felt anything but welcome, really, in this conference. It was a very difficult move for me because I did not intend to leave the Texas conference. But when Bishop Odin did call me, I felt very strongly, and I did, that this was where I needed to be. And Lovers Lane was at a place, I think, in their history, having had two pastors for nearly 50 years. You know, Tom Ship, who preached in this room, he never saw the sanctuary. He died when the sanctuary was being built, died right back there in 1977. He was a pastor here for 31 years, and Don Benton followed him for another 18. So for the better part of 50 years, this church only had two full-time senior pastors. And Bill Brine was my successor. He was only here for a short time. But I think Bill Brine really did kind of raise... He raised the awareness of Lovers Lane that we needed to find out who we were. And that Lovers Lane was an important church to the greater Dallas community, not just to Methodism. And you know, that's a word that's not easy to hear when you think everything's going all right the way it is, right? But part of what I did in taking authority was, as a 38-year-old upon my appointment and very afraid, my second church was this one, the pastor, I started looking into who this church had been in its beginning days and when it was growing at its greatest. And you know Lovers Lane's history better than I, some of you firsthand. But Lovers Lane, with the young Tom Ship, 26, I think, when he was appointed here, he had a passion for people who struggled with alcoholism. And so in that day, people who were alcoholics weren't welcome in the church. You know, the church is for nice people, right? But this church, through Tom's leadership, through him taking authority, basically said this church is going to be a different church. The first people who left Lovers Lane, and there have been plenty through the years who hadn't liked it who've left since then, but the first two people who left the church, and I read their letter, it was in our archives, left because they didn't want to be a part of a church that would be known as the first alcoholic church of Dallas. But I think that that sentiment and Tom's passion, his vision, him taking authority in that way, led to kind of a uniqueness, kind of a coloring outside the lines, doing things different. I mean, he was an associate at Highland Park. I think he struggled in his younger days. I mean, you can go and see Lovers Lane on Lovers Lane, and it looks like a mini Highland Park. But I think in some ways, he was struggling with, well, who are we? We're in the shadows of Highland Park. Highland Park's really all I know. We built a building that looked a lot like Highland Park. But I think Tom was struggling to be a church that was unique. 1960, the first African-American was brought into the membership of the church, and people left then. Ms. Bernice Jones became a member of Lovers Lane in 1960, and Tom intentionally received her into the church. And so when I started looking at the church's history, what I saw was a church that, as it was said about Tom, his favorite scripture to preach on was Zikeas. And he said the church needs to be up a tree and out on a limb. And on this stage Sunday, we had our children's musical, and they did a musical called What's Up, Zach. And they all had little t-shirts on and said, up a tree out on a limb. This is our 75th anniversary, and that's the way they wanted to celebrate it. But it was a musical about how excluded some people were, including Zikeas, including the beggars. You know, we want to have a party for Jesus when he comes to town. But, of course, the good news of the musical was that, of course, Zikeas was welcomed, and the beggars were welcomed, and everyone who was excluded from the church was welcomed. And that musical, Up a Tree and Out on a Limb, that slogan, is really what I tried to embrace after I'd been here for several years after the first building project. And I think that taking authority from me meant that I had to be the visionary leader with visionary leaders who were laypeople. And we needed to discover who we were and live into that and not look over our shoulders to the park cities and try to be a Highland Park or up the Toa Way and try to be a suburban church. Lubbers Lane wasn't created to be another church. It was created to be who it is. And Sunday, we had Dr. Zanne Holmes preach. We had a revival this past week. On Friday and Saturday, we had Hamilton Park here on Saturday with Dr. Sharon Patterson and their choir and congregation. And on Friday, we had Mike Bowie here with St. Luke Community and their choir and congregation. And then on Sunday, we had Zanne. And Zanne preached a very powerful sermon. They all did. But Zanne's point was that we can't forget our picture. We can't forget the picture of the church. We need to look like our picture. And he talked about and read from Acts 1 about the picture of the church. And his sermon was about how the church has been called to be unique and unified. Not have uniformity, but to be unified in our uniqueness, in our diversity. And then pointed to the way the early church lived into that. Very different racially, culturally. Different languages, as we know. Different aspects. But that was who the church was called to be. So I think living into authority means that we have to speak the vision. We have to preach the vision. We have to cast the vision. I think it's a very important question. You know, maybe when you look at the early church, you saw a church, a picture of a church that was transforming society, right? After three centuries, the society had transformed into a Christian society. Don Underwood said something that I didn't want to believe, but he really is right. Don said, when I interviewed him when we were writing our book called Together, he said that the church always follows the culture. Now we'd like to think that the church transforms the culture, but I don't think we need to brag on ourselves that much. The church always follows the culture, and that can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. It's a good thing, I think, when we see the changes in the culture and we find ways to embrace those changes and live into those changes in ways that the church can do things new and different and effective. It's a bad thing when the church starts looking like the society in general related to the divisions of society and related to some of the conflicts that we see today in the United States. Now I daresay that we are in a time that is to some degree very disconcerting when you look at what's going on in this country in the divisions and you look at what's going on in the United Methodist Church in our divisions. And I'm not talking about just the issues of sexuality, but other issues as well. And that is an aspect of the culture that I don't think we want to reflect. That's not our picture. And so I think that without being political, we have to be prophetic. That's hard to do, but I think sometimes it means that you have to call out politicians. That's not easy to do from the pulpit. But I do think that we cannot afford to just be reflective of culture and some ways of conflict, when those ways of conflict really are far from the values of Christianity and far from our picture. And so I would say that, you know, today, well, for example, I tried to get a screen in the sanctuary for 22 years. And we have two right now, and they're big old screens. And Jimmy Emery is our music director and he does no wrong. So I just call him Jimbo Trons and I tell him that Jim, Jimmy was the one who had the big idea. They all know that's not true. But, you know, when you start seeing screens in funeral homes and you're still wondering whether you need them in your church, and it took me, I can't tell you how long, you know, and how they laughed at it because it became so persistent. I'd, you know, preach on Sunday and I'd say, be nice to be able to put that on the screen. Oh, we don't have a screen. And then we saw in here, you know, we've had screens for 20 years and we can do things in here. We can do things in the chapel that we couldn't do in the sanctuary. Now, that's a, you know, the technological revolution if we don't realize that the way people communicate with screens, with internet, with texting, with, you know, evangelism is so much different than it was when I had it as my primary job. If I did it the way I did it then, it would not be successful. And it was very successful back then. You have to engage in social media, you have to meet people where they aren't in a large church like I was down and sitting there. Some people expect to be called and they're usually our age. And most people want you to text them if you want to tell them how much you enjoyed them being in church, you better text them because they want to choose whether they talk to you or not or text you back. So I think being nimble and being able to adjust to revolutions as they were and to see how that can enhance bringing people into the church is one thing. The other side of that, I think we're in the midst of somewhat of a disturbing revolution right now and I'm talking issues in El Paso and Dayton. What does the church say? Nothing? I think there is an evil of omission and I think that we have to become sensitive to issues that the church must address and we must try to force our politicians into addressing some of these things that they're so reluctant to address. Wow. You know, Bill Henson used to say the church doesn't revolute, it evalutes. And I think that's right. And if the church isn't evolving, then the church is dying, right? So, oh, me. Lovers Lane, when I came to Lovers Lane in 1998, looked like any church in North Dallas or any church in suburban Houston. It was, they had great needs related to their facility. They couldn't do what they wanted to do in the facility that they had. So we first did a building campaign that changed the east side and a few years later we did one on the west side. So I found myself in the first six or eight years doing building projects that changed the church and therefore the culture and the ability for us to do that. The church hadn't done a capital campaign in 20 years when I got here. I'd done two in four years in Tyler. And if there was a church that needed to re-examine their campus, it was this one. I won't go into all the details. But when we started changing the campus, it enabled us to do things we couldn't do before. You know, we wondered, why don't we have any youth and children? Well, have you been down in the youth and children's department? And then the west side development gave us a completely different campus. It allowed us to start our school. The 12th Steppe Ministry, which was, you know, it was six groups when I got here. It's 85 now. There's 950 people dealing with addictions that go across the street now. That's an evolving that it just continues to baffle me. We had a little special needs ministry we called Night Lights. And now it's a corporation that the church owns. And every Friday night, five Friday nights a week, you know, the church is caring for special needs kids so that their parents can go on a date. And that's happening here. And it's happening at Christ Foundry. It's happening at White Rock Lake. But a ministry that evolved. It started with one kid named Austin and one little night light that followed him to Sunday School and shadowed and he shadowed. And now it's hundreds of kids and their siblings. And it's just a powerful ministry. Another aspect of evolving. In 2005, we did an ad campaign called Wanna Know Why dot com. And so you would see a picture of a librarian man named Peter Weato who joined the church in 1995 when Bill Bryan was here. And underneath it says, you can find your sanctuary in ours, Wanna Know Why. Wanna Know Why dot com. And so you went on there not knowing where it was coming from. You clicked on Peter Weato's story and Peter told about how he was shot during the Liberian Revolution outside of John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia and he was left for dead. They picked him up through him in a dump truck dumped him on the beaches with 30 dead bodies. He dug himself out. He spent the night at the Nigerian Embassy. Went home that next day at sunrise. His home was burned to the ground. The neighbor said they've killed Betty and the five children so he flees to refugee camp. They're not dead. They're in a refugee camp. He makes it to Dallas to Lovers Lane and he finds out two and a half years later that his wife and kids are alive. And they come here. And he said, I found, my family found their sanctuary at Lovers Lane. In Liberian people particularly, but African people in general, started coming to this church like we had never seen before. It was such a rush that we had six, I think it was six students at Perkins School of Theology, two Kenyans, one in Golan, one Ugandan, no West Africans. They were all East Africans. They helped us start what was the heart of Africa Fellowship. And it changed this church. And then a Zimbabwean Fellowship came. They needed a place to stay, just to have worship. And they became part of Lovers Lane. And so all of a sudden Lovers Lane is becoming very culturally different and it's very obvious. And it's changing our church spiritually. And we also had on that want to know why dot com, we had the story from a deaf mother and her deaf son. And we had deaf people start coming from everywhere. And we have a large deaf ministry here today. We talked about a person who, you know, went across the street to the 12th step program. That was when it was really small. Well, it all of a sudden started growing in great ways, especially when we started addressing sexual addictions. That's when it exploded. And an evolution of sorts. We talked about our prison, one of our members who we served in prison. We've taken the alpha program to about 8,000 men and women in the past 21 years. And when they get out, a lot of them come here. And so if we're going to serve them inside prison walls, we better be open to serving them when they get out. So I can't point to anything that brought about evolution of Lovers Lane, except for that. And our becoming warm to that, that really did bring about a change. And I dare say this, that we had started a worship service in here. It was a regular modern service. And we started seeing a lot of LGBTQ folks coming to this service. And we had a pastor at the time and one of the LGBTQ folk asked if they could move their Bible study here to Lovers Lane because they had been meeting for years in their home and had outgrown their living room. And she said, what am I going to do? What am I going to tell these people? I said, well, tell them I want to go to lunch with them. So we went over to Snuffers. We met with three gay young men and they talked to me about their Bible study. And I said, well, I just, I have to ask you a question. I said, you know, why wouldn't you go to Cathedral of Hope, which is just around the corners, largest gay church in Dallas for sure and maybe in the country? Well, you know, there it's just, you know, it's all about social issues is what he said. Well, what about one of our reconciling churches? And I named a couple and they said, well, we've been there. And I said, well, why Lovers Lane? And they said, it's because of your mission loving all people into relationship with Jesus Christ. He said, that's what our Bible study is about. So I said, well, come on. And we found a place for 25 mainly gay, a few lesbian and a few straight who were part of that Bible study. And they content, you know what? I have never seen friendship evangelism like happened when that happened. They were so hungry to find a place that would accept them. They just started telling their friends. And then all of a sudden we have an issue. This room is full of probably a couple of hundred gay and lesbian people when we were at our peak in this room. And at that time Donna and I were doing evangelism and everybody had to go through evangelism class and everybody had to be interviewed by Donna or somebody and Donna would simply ask the question, well, tell me your story. What's your story? So the point is these people weren't sneaking in and so we started emphasizing baptism. You know, I'm theologically, I'm more evangelical than not. That's the way I was when I came and that's the way I still am. So when we did the east side development, we built a fountain. I said, make sure it's deep enough to baptize. And we started having baptism Sundays. And our profession of faith started changing from what was, you know, the average 33% of most methods to nearly 70% of our new members were coming by profession of faith. You know who they were? They were largely African refugees and people who felt rejected by the church and they were getting into the same water. We weren't changing the water out when one group got out. And it started changing this church. A lot of the folk who were coming from LGBTQ spectrum, you know, they're from very conservative backgrounds. Pentecostals, Baptists, Church of Christ. And they came here because they resonated theologically. But they also came here because the church continued to welcome and they, the Africans, the deaf, the former offenders, they changed this church. It wasn't a big vision that I had, or the lady, lay leadership had. It was responding to what the Holy Spirit was doing. And then we developed a vision. We want to be one diverse community, passionately engaging the Bible, uplifting Jesus in worship and loving service and challenging in love that which divides. That's our vision. And so we keep that vision before this congregation all the time. And you know, if you were to read that and you'd say, uplifting Jesus in worship and loving service, well, that sounds like a conservative church. What we say about the Bible that we believe sounds like conservative church. But being that picture of diversity or uniqueness and unified knowing that we're not all here at Lovers Lane, we're very eclectic. We're not all of one mind. We have a few little squabbles. Some people didn't like when the church started changing colors and they left. And some people didn't like when they saw people who were different related to human sexuality and they left. But you know what? More people started coming because of who we were and they couldn't find a church exactly like it. So back to the point. You have to evolve to your uniqueness. And when you do, I think that's when the Holy Spirit starts blessing your work. Well, you could add another P word and put pastor up there. A pastor, prophet and priest. This is the balance that I think we have to bring. And it's really not multiple choice. I think there are times when the Holy Spirit calls us to be prophetic and to lay it out there and take the lumps. I think we're always called to be priestly and pastoral. And I think when we are that, we open the hearts and the ears to hearing us when we have to be more prophetic and more direct. You know, the immigration issue, for example, we have so many immigrants here at Lubbers Lane. I don't know that we've ever counted them. They're coming from not from south of the border, but they're coming from African nations, about 16 or 18 African nations. And so when we talk about the issue of immigration, we're not talking about somebody else's issue. We're talking about people we know and love. And so reminding people from the priestly perspective as to who we are and who we're called to be and our uniqueness. And every church is unique. Not just Lubbers Lane, every church has unique. But I just think that that's so important today that you have to find that rub. I got to tell you a quick story. When the church started changing, we had a conflict in the choir. Has anybody ever had conflict in the choir? Whoo! It was bad. It was ugly. And I was at my wits end. And we had a very influential couple leave the church and talk to me before they did. And basically said, you know, we love you. We love Tammy. We love the church. But we're looking for more of a neighborhood church. We never have been a neighborhood church, but okay. And they were gone. And I called up Rhymes Moncure. This was about it for me. I mean, I'd had it. This family had given $3 million in our last capital campaign. I said, good gosh, how am I going to... You know, what's Bishop going to think? I mean, he's already got a letter on his desk from my choir director about how I ought to be defrocked or whatever. So I called Rhymes, my bishop, and I said, I just started babbling, just telling him everything, you know, talking fast. You know, it's really okay. You know, things aren't really that bad. And then on the other end of the phone, I hear this. I'm about to cry driving around in Highland Park talking to my bishop. And I hear this. And then Rhymes Moncure said, stand, stand, stand. Lovers Lane ain't your church. Lovers Lane ain't, and he named the family. It ain't their church. Lovers Lane is God's church. So you get down there and you just continue to serve God's church. Do you hear me? And that probably saved my ministry. I had an exit plan and I was ready to go. I'd be fine. But Rhymes reminded me, we don't serve our church. Rhymes ain't my church. It's God's church, and we have to be sensitive to where God's leading His church. That's not easy. Sometimes people leave. But then we did a capital campaign a few months later, and I got two $3 million gifts and didn't need the other one to achieve our goal. So again I was reminded, this time by the Holy Spirit, not Rhymes Moncure, that this isn't anybody else's church but God's. And if God wants this to happen, it happens. You can't chart the course sometimes. You have to walk the walk and follow wherever the Spirit's leading. I won't spend much time on this, but yes I am. I turned 60 this year. And I was 38 when I came. I came on April Fool's Day, and the conference counted 1998 as a year, and then conference came at June. They counted that as a year, so I'd been here three months and I was here for two years. But I do, I have thought about, when am I going to retire? When am I going to do something different? When can I retire and do something different? So it's not out of my mind. You know a lot of larger churches today are in essence, this doesn't sound very methodist, but I'm telling you it happens, naming successors and grooming successors. And I think in some large churches it's necessary. I used to have a saying, and I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but that I wanted to build a church that no DS in his right mind would want to serve. And that was all about that I didn't want to be a DS. So if I could build a church that no DS in his right mind would want to serve, or her right mind would want to serve, then I'd be fine. But then you build a church that you start thinking about well who can serve it? That's not my primary job, that's the bishops, right? That's the district of pretendants, right? But I have to start preparing this church for the fact that this is about lay leadership. That's one thing we've done well, is uplifted lay leadership. This is your church. It's God's church, but it's God's church through you. And so, you know, thinking in terms of what kind of pastor will lead this church into its next decade is something we're starting to think about now. You know, it's more important, I think, on this matter, rather than naming people is to draw a profile of a pastor that we think would meet the needs of the congregation and who the congregations become. And it probably doesn't need to look just like Stan Copeland. It probably needs to look a lot different than Stan Copeland because, you know, somebody can have a different skill set and you just surround that person with people with skill sets that compliment them in churches like this. And so, I don't have a... Stan, let me... Let me ask you a little... It's the same question, but in a little different format. Next spring, we will meet at General Conference. And we had, of course, the Interim General Conference. Is there anything you can say about where you think the church might be going, where the church should be going, or how do we meet the challenges that we think are coming? How do we... The church will split. I think that's a given. The question is how much will it split? I think those who follow the traditional plan will eventually find a way to be a different denomination. We're trying to work those things out now. What I hope is that there's one church remaining, not two or three or four, because I think what's important to Methodism is that we have that, not uniformity, but that we're united in the midst of our differences. We want Methodist people to choose churches that fit their theological perspective. We're not all going to be the same. And oddly enough, there are people on the far, far left and people on the far, far right that are closest to leaving. And so the bigger the middle can be and the broader the middle can be, really, is what I've been working toward and what I hope will happen. So I also hope that the United States will eventually become its own central conference. Now, the traditional folks won't go for that right now. But I think you make a case with central conference delegations. You say, let's don't talk about human sexuality. Let's talk about the fairness of you in Africa and you in Europe being able to operate in a way that you feel fits your culture with a different discipline. You call your own central conference shots. And yet when the general conference gathers, the whole global church calls the shots for us. It's not fair. And yet it's been kept intact because, well, of just politics and it needs to change. And I do think there might be some sensitivity to that kind of change. And that's what I'm hoping that eventually we'll have a US central conference that will be a global church. Central conferences don't want the church to split. They want there to be a United Methodist church. But they also know and are being courted further to the right by those that they resonate with more theologically. So anyway. Stan, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed your comments today and your presentation. Well, the pleasure was mine. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. Okay, well, we... and just all that brought this about, Stan, thank you.