 So welcome, I'm Owen Ross. I'm the director for the Center for Church Development in the North Texas Conference. And we welcome you here for the Income Generating Ministries webinar that we have. We have some fantastic speakers here with us. We have Neil Mosley, who's the lead consultant for a group called the church photographers who do a lot of work with a lot of churches around the nation and have been focusing on this. And Neil has been doing this work in a number of our churches in the North Texas Conference. We have also with us, Stacey Peeakuen, who is the pastor of Melissa United Methodist Church, who just this past year, or just this year has opened a beautiful church in Melissa, Texas that includes a drive-through coffee shop. So they are pioneering a lot of this work in the North Texas Conference and we'll be sharing about what that journey has been like. We also have with us, Kenneth Wolverton, who's a North Central District Lead Leader, a businessman, someone who has been exploring this work for a time and he'll bring some ideas to us as well. But I want to introduce to you all, Jessica Vargas, who has been coordinating all of this work. And so I will turn over to Jessica to give you a welcome. Hi, good morning, everybody. Welcome to this webinar. This is a very topic that is very interesting. I'm very interested in it and I'm very glad that you are all here and joining us and giving us your time to be able to listen to these wonderful practitioners. If you have any issues, any problems, just let me know, send me a message in the chat and I'll see how I can help you with anything that you're having and issues that you have. So welcome, everybody. And I'm going to leave it to our Assistant Director, Matt, for a welcome prayer. Hey, y'all. It's good to be with you this morning and appreciate you taking the time to jump on. It's good to see so many of your faces. And we're going to be tracking some questions in the chat. So if you have a question that you want to address at the end, just put it in the chat and we'll make sure that we get to it after all of our presenters have had a chance to present. So with that, I will open us in a quick word of prayer. So let's pray. Let's pray. Gracious God, we have built into our theology, God embedded in our theology this belief that you are a generative God, sustainable in grace and love and life. And sustainability is central to the work that we're trying to do as we plant the seeds of the gospel and seek to bring reconciliation and recreation to our communities. And so I just pray that you fill our hearts with a perspective that sees abundance and not scarcity. God that you would fill us with an eagerness to create and innovate and that the idea shared today, the questions asked today would all be part of the church becoming a sustainable generative force in our communities for good. And we ask this in your name, amen. Amen. Amen. Thanks, Matt. And so like Matt said, put your questions in the chat. We're scheduled to be here till 11 o'clock. And so we're trying to allow ample time at the end for questions that you may have. And so join me now in welcoming our first speaker, Neil Mosley. Thanks for being here, Neil. Thanks for having me, y'all. How is everybody? Can y'all hear me all right? Everybody good? Okay. If you can't hear me, if something happens, well, please somebody just start waving. Maybe all of you start waving because I don't know how many of you I actually have on my screen at any given time. So I'm really excited to be here to talk on this very important topic and movement of the spirit in the church. A lot of you I've known for some years and we've worked together on various projects. This notion of generating alternative revenue streams became obvious to me a few years ago when looking at different congregations with whom I was in conversation and realizing that virtually every effort they made, though genuine and prayerful and very often looking outward into the community, it just wasn't quite, they just weren't quite landing. And part of that had to do with the notion that what they were looking to do was create, continue to create programs, continue to create programs that they as a church would imagine, perhaps find some partners in the neighborhood to try to build some energy, but ultimately was being left to volunteers within the congregation to manage. Of course, every one of those things required more energy. They required upkeep in the building that was already the churches to maintain. And all of these obligations kept mounting and mounting and mounting. And I started to feel the despair of the pastors, the despair of the congregations that these things not only were they not relieving burdens but they were actually a lot of times creating additional burdens and with each failure of those initiatives, they felt a little worse about their situation, a little bit worse about their congregation's future. So I wanna put that in a relatively concise form and I was thinking about how I would do this. I decided I wouldn't go as deeply philosophical as I like to do whenever Owen and I meet at Chick-fil-A and tell him all of my opinions of everything. And I thought I actually might just read the introductory pages of a final report that I gave to United Methodist Church recently to encourage their continued discernment process. I'm going to try to omit this church's name, but I'm not that bright, so I might end up saying their name anyway. And if that's the case, I apologize to them, but nobody would be surprised. Okay, so this is my final report. Please excuse me for preaching to the choir for a second. We are in a very difficult time in the United Methodist Church. We're in our previous methods for attracting new congregants, growing our congregations and impacting our neighborhoods are in most contexts, no longer working. Nationally churches are closing by the thousands. Around 12,000 United Methodist churches in the continental United States will likely close by 2030 if they do not take radical action to discover new ways of understanding their mission fields and work with the neighbors they have, not the neighbors they once had and want to have again. Many congregations who once thrived in their context and experienced consistent growth in the mid 20th century now feel saddled with the costs of maintaining large campuses without much prospect of growing their income through worship attendance and offering. Many of these congregations have developed a mindset of scarcity, trimming staff that were committed to age level discipleship programs, deferring much needed maintenance on the physical plant and reducing building use. Church spaces that were designed for specific traditional church activities are not easily or inexpensively updated, especially with new technology that has become a minimum requirement for basic hospitality that has become even more clear in the pandemic, of course. Even though all of these factors are at play, we should not fall deeper into despair. Whatever course of action that faithful congregation chooses should be undertaken with the knowledge that God is always doing something new and extraordinary. God will challenge us in our understanding of our role in the gospel, call us out of our comfort and rituals into conversations with folks who will help us expand our notions of congregational health. Do not be ashamed of your congregations decline as you are not alone. The healthiest churches in our city are either relatively new without institutional memory or historical preferences and priorities or they have already made very difficult decisions to move into a new era of being the church and do not despair that past attempts, pardon me while I flip the page, have not turned everything around as there are no conferences or consultants who have devised a panacea to apply to the wounds of all our congregations, though many have tried and claimed success with this or that methodology. This report reflects my deep commitment to contextual ministry. That is to say that the work of the Holy Spirit through a faith community is most effective when shared in relationships in a close geographic proximity so that people's lives intersect more than just on Sunday mornings in the hallways and pews of a church building. There may be parts of this report that make you feel judged and that you feel don't accurately describe the congregation that you know and love. I am of course an outsider who does not have deep relationships or shared community or history with the many individuals and groups at your church. But know that of the utmost importance in all of my work and reflection has been the future thriving and legacy of your congregation. That legacy will require radical change in mindset and behaviors. So that radical change in mindset and behavior touches on so many of the things that hinder our congregations, right? As our congregations have aged, as our neighborhoods have changed, as our buildings have gotten older and harder to maintain or expensive to maintain. As I mentioned, we tend to get into a mindset of scarcity. We begin to despair of what we can do to reconnect with the community. And so we really do have to think about our preferences as opposed to our purposes. Why were we planted here? Why were we planted in this mission field? And what is happening in this mission field that we need to be listening to and observing that perhaps the church can connect with in new ways? I was previously on the staff of White Rock United Methodist Church and when I joined that staff, the theory of our experimentation was that if we take this largely empty and very expensive building and the burden of paying for it off of the shoulders of the congregation, this congregation that is currently despairing for its future and counting the days until its closure will feel liberated, will find new life, will begin to look around the neighborhood with hope and we believe that that hope would be contagious, right? So I'll give you an example of what I walked into. We had a lovely lay person. She was probably in her 70s and she was very often an usher on Sunday mornings. Well, she introduced herself to everybody at the front door and if she met somebody who was a guest and visiting our congregation for the first time, she would grab that person by the arm and march them straight to the front of the sanctuary to be introduced to the pastors. Now, while lovely, that is a tone of desperation that anybody can sense, right? And so of course what we had to do was we had to deal with that desperation. That desperation was largely financial. The reality I think that we all face is while we are about making disciples, there's always a financial bottom line that we have to deal with and we have to at least try to be in the black every single year. And with younger generations being less committed to church membership, it is harder and harder to project into the future. The continued traditional way that people enter into churches. So over time, as we started looking at, started talking to the neighborhood, listening to what they were up to, asking them questions, asking who was doing what, what are the needs in the neighborhood that you see these were conversations we were having with our congregants, these were conversations we were having with folks that we just met out in the community at this, that or the other meeting, we started to hear our consistent things. The neighborhood does not have enough childcare that people can walk their kids to. There are lots of folks, even though the neighborhood right around the church doesn't seem needy or food insecure, drive down the major thoroughfares. And there are lots of folks who are out panhandling and need assistance to make ends meet. And as we started hearing these, we would also ask those same people, who are serving those needs presently? And there were lots of we identified several nonprofits who were operating all around us. Well, our next step then was to reach out to those nonprofits and ask them what they're doing, how are they doing this? Tell us about your ministry, whether they were faith-based or not, because they were doing good work for our neighbors, right, for our mission field. And in the case some of those, we asked them if they needed more space and if they were looking to scale into different parts of the city or different parts of the neighborhood or what have you. And as those relationships built around listening and starting to share together our commitment to the neighborhood, to the mission field, we began talking to folks about moving into the church spaces and ultimately creating a shared space model that would generate revenue for the church. I tried to slim down some of the basic ideas when I'm looking for a partner who might fit in a congregation. First, I always have to assess the spaces. I see that Jessica put up the Taking the Next Steps document that everybody get that already and hopefully you were able to print it off and look at it. So when I get, when a new congregation pastor, layperson, reaches out to me about our work and about what they're experiencing in their congregation and we have an introductory conversation, this is the document I tend to send them, right? This is the sort of conversation starter. I tell the pastor if it's the pastor of a congregation, pick two or three trusted conversation partners and start asking these questions. Start looking at first to your neighborhood and also to your building. How are you using your spaces? Take an inventory, write down each and every space. What is it used for? How long is it used? By whom? How is it set up? What are the sacred cows in the room? And just start to assess and inventory the usages of your space. And then you're inventorying the neighborhood essentially. You're looking around who's doing what? What are the needs? How are those needs getting met? What are the gaps that you see? There's a lot of very specific questions there about bus stops and transit lines and vegan restaurants and drive-through dry cleaners. The hope is that as congregations we'll start to look with slightly different eyes at our neighborhoods, right? Part of what has affected us in our decline is that one, we've always assumed that because we were fed by our congregations and the discipleship we were participating in and engaged in those spaces that that would naturally translate to other people and that people would come in and because we feel connected and safe and fed by our sacred spaces that so would they. And what we need to do is we need to take off that lens of being a committed member of our own congregation and put on the lens of being a committed member of our mission field. And so looking all around seeing, really seeing how are people going about their day? What are they doing? What are their activities? And then looking at our spaces at the same time and figuring out where those two things might fit together. Here's some criteria that when I talk to congregations about the best kind of partner you're looking for. So one, does that potential partner have a built in client base that will attract new people to your church campus, right? People with whom you are not currently engaged. Does this potential partner already have a base clientele? Do they provide services that represent a real need for your neighbors in your mission field? And does that need or does that ministry, their services, does it dovetail with ministries that already exist? I've worked with congregations who have turned down partnerships with feeding programs because they already have a community pantry, right? A food pantry. I think those two things should work together, right? Not always, it's not always gonna be a good fit but we shouldn't close the door on potential opportunities because we already are serving a specific need. We need to figure out how our ministries work to serve that same need with other folks in the neighborhood who are caring for our neighbors. Also, does in bringing that ministry in, does it present opportunities for the congregation to either volunteer with what they're doing so that you're not in the management of that organization yet you are using them, you're grafting on what they are doing in order to add to the discipleship potential of your own congregation, right? So any of you who have had project transformation on your campus, this is a key part of project transformation, right? You don't have to manage project transformation, it manages itself but it creates an opportunity for your congregants to add to their discipleship through serving children and families in the neighborhood on your campus. Okay, so does this potential partner have a proven track record in their field, in their service and a good reputation with clients? And sometimes this takes a little bit more digging into a particular area in order to hear from other folks as to what this group's reputation is but that's extremely important to find out. I have worked in one congregation where we didn't do that work of asking around and we looked at the product and we thought the product was extraordinary. And then once we brought this partner in, we realized that yes, the product is extraordinary but this person is not good at partnering and not good at shouldering the whole process of making that product. And so it became difficult for our congregants to work alongside that person and actually when we started talking to people in the neighborhood, we realized there were a whole lot of people who had had the same experience we were having with this partner. And basically they had looked at that endeavor as something that they would never engage in because of what they had experienced with this person. So doing a lot of that, asking around, getting a sense from folks who know this organization or their leadership is certainly extremely important. Does it operate when you do that inventory of your spaces and that's a time inventory, on Sunday morning maybe every single space is being used but it's only being used for two hours on Sunday morning for setup for Sunday school and then tear down for Sunday school and then it sits empty. So you're looking for partners who can fit into the slots the time slots that are available. Without a doubt, it will create the conversation and this will without a doubt create some level of anxiety within the congregation about whose use ultimately is most important. If you bring in an after school program and they're there for three days every day after school so they're using it 15 hours while the Sunday school is only using it two hours, whose use is more important? And so those things have to be considered and as you look at bringing in partners and generating revenue, those things will come up. So how does it fit into existing space usages? What sort of updating and renovations will need to take place in order to get there? And then of course, the question after that is does this potential partner have capital on hand to either pay 100% of the renovations that they need in order to occupy the space or does the church need to partner and create a sort of shared cost model so that over time it's mutually beneficial to the partner and the congregation to have that group in? Many of you I am sure have had partners in the building for decades, right? A lot of those, a lot of us have had preschools in our buildings since our inception but those preschools have been managed by the church. Many of us have been in congregations where we had to make the tough decision of shutting down a church school because it was costing far more than it was benefiting the congregation. And so part of what I do is I attempt to get the congregation and the pastor out of the management of those sorts of endeavors, right? Most of us who went to seminary were not taught how to manage a preschool and we shouldn't be the people managing preschool therefore, right? So what we wanna do is we wanna graft on people's expertise, right? And we want to create a sense of mutual benefit, a spirit of mutual benefit and that includes how we share space, how we're going to communicate, how are we going to deal with conflicts when they arise? And then ultimately what's the payment structure the revenue structure that we are going to create that in a lot of cases we're asking people who are entrepreneurial to take a leap of faith and come into our church spaces and in order to encourage them to take that leap of faith we need to be supportive of what they're doing of what their vision is. And so that might mean that you create a rent escalation that just like you would do in a normal retail space for a for-profit company you're looking at charging a lower rent or forgiving rent altogether for the first three months, six months, whatever to allow that organization, that individual to build their clientele to know that they're supported by the congregation and to feel like you're coming alongside them in support. I'll give the example and then I'll kick it on over to our next speaker. When I was at White Rock, I was introduced to one of our neighbors who was at that point running summer camps out of her back house. She had a little one room back house and throughout the summer she would have camps for just a handful of neighborhood kids. She had this idea when she herself had two boys that she realized the camps were a little too expensive for her to do throughout the summer. And so she and a couple other moms decided to create these camps throughout the summer, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. And then after a while, the other moms saw that she was really the one that was doing the majority of the work and had the most creative thoughts about what to offer. And so she made a little business out of it. And this is what she would do. She would plan this all year long. She worked with a couple of preschools during the school year to bring those same sorts of offerings that she would do during summer camps. She would bring them to the schools a couple of days a week as after school options. Well, I was introduced to her and we met for coffee and I heard the passion that she had for the neighborhood, for the kids of the neighborhood and for moms like her who were looking for a lower cost option for meeting those childcare gaps during summers and school holidays and everything like that. And she had not been in a church since her wedding 21 years before. She had been hurt by a church when she was in high school and she had basically left the notion of church behind her. And so it was an extraordinary leap of faith for her to even consider what expansion of the work that she was doing would look like in church spaces. We started off sharing one space for the overwhelming cost of I think $400 a month. We shared a space with her just during the summer for her summer camps to see how it would go. And last time I checked, she was paying the church upwards of $30,000 a year because she has expanded her summer offerings, her holiday offerings, but she is now also the primary provider of STEM learning to DISD. So because we invited her in to expand what she was doing in her back house, to vision it larger and to impact more families, more kids, more parents who were looking for that to fill that childcare gap, she has expanded massively and the church has benefited massively from having thousands of children and their families going through the church spaces. So that's one of the extraordinary examples, exceptional examples of what can happen when we choose a model of sort of mutual benefit and trust and accountability. There was a lot that we had to work through. There was a lot we had to work through with the congregation as they let go of certain spaces and their understanding of certain space uses. But before I keep talking forever, I look forward to any questions that you'll have for me about these ideas. And with that, I'm going to kick it over to Reverend Stacy Piacune at First Melissa so that she can tell us about their work with Connections Coffee. Thanks so much, Neil. Gasha was so much in that that was super helpful and I saw a line with lots of things that I'm going to talk about too. So I'm kind of pull those points of alignment for you. Before I get started, I'm going to put two things in the chat. One is a book that I'm going to reference here right at the very front of what we're going to talk about and the other is the link to Connections Coffee, which is the for-profit coffee shop that we have in Melissa, UMC. And so I'm going to let you take a look at that too. So if you get tired of looking at us talking, there's a great website. Don't order online because I don't think you can get there fast enough while we're sitting on this webinar together. All right, friends, I'm so glad to see so many of you, many of whom I know and have been along a journey of ministry with for a long time, many of you who are new friends. I'm going to give you some context of where we are first, but what I'm going to do before that is kind of point out this book to you that I just referenced, The Coming Revolution in Church Economics. This is by Mark DeMaz and this has been for us in our context a great template of what we're thinking about when we're thinking sustainable church ministry moving into the coming decades. So to give you a kind of quick overview, he sort of says, if you think about the three-legged stool model that there are three legs to that stool and those legs are as follows. The first is a spiritual leg and that's your basic church. It's a nonprofit church entity that's led by pastor, staff and lay leaders. Kathy, look right above you in the chat and it'll be right there. There you go. So this is led by pastor, staff and lay leaders. The primary income for that comes from ties and offerings. So for many of you that are in a local church context, this is the leg of the stool that you already have developed and you know how to do really well is the spiritual leg. The second leg is the social leg and that is a separate nonprofit distinct from the church that serves to do exactly what Neal is talking about and that is do some contextual ministry that meets the needs of something that's happening in the community. But it is important that this is a separate 501C3 that is distinct from all of the faith-based stuff so that you can then apply for grants and donations that are outside the realm of the church. This group is led by an executive director who then has a separate staff that does this separate ministry work and really it's nonprofit work, not necessarily ministry. It's funded by grants and donations. The third leg is the financial leg. This is your for-profit business within the church. It's led by a CEO or a board of directors and it is a for-profit return on investment kind of ministry. So for us and Melissa, this is Connections Coffee. And the way this model works is that you can actually replicate it, right? You've got a church, right? A nonprofit spiritual-based, faith-based organization you could form another one within that. You could partner with a different faith-based organization. You can start multiple social legs, nonprofit entities that are not faith-based, that are meeting the needs of your community. You can start separate for-profit businesses that are helping to offer sustainable income into the church moving into the future. So it's sort of the framework of what we're gonna talk about today, highlighting specifically that for-profit leg. One of the things I loved about kind of what Neil was talking about was talking about being clear about not just what's happening in your context, but also who you are as a church, right? Really claiming those gifts of what it is a congregation does have, thinking from that lens of abundance rather than that lens of scarcity. So a little bit about Melissa UMC. Some of you know some of our story. We're a new church start that is now nearly eight years old. We'll be eight years old next week and we are connected to First United Methodist Church in McKinney, which is a downtown historic church, a hundred plus years of ministry. And that's important in this story because our connection to McKinney, First United Methodist helps make some of what I'm about to tell you possible. A part of the things that are inherent in our DNA from the very beginning is a desire to welcome, encourage, and serve. Those are our three core values. And so that's the filter that we run things through, whether we're partnering with organizations or spinning up something new. Does it offer a spirit of welcome, a spirit of encouragement, and a spirit of service within our community? And there was a really strong desire within this new church start from the very beginning to not turn inward. That's one of the things that actually makes it really appealing to First United Methodist Church of McKinney's leadership as well, is it's a call to see outside of themselves and inherently a call to open spaces to find a way to create ministry in creative ways in space that may or may not fit the needs when you look at it from the surface. So up until April of last year, our church operated out of spaces that were so subpar and we just found ways to make it work, right? How do you do ministry out of a thousand square foot building where the lot line is actually at the lot lines of the building? Well, you use the backyard, right? You find ways to partner with other spaces in town. You just sort of make a way when it doesn't appear as if there's a way and you keep going. You don't get frustrated. You don't get bogged down. You just keep going when you don't see a way forward. So we're working on, we worked on this building project that with the help of John Thornberg who many of you know, we kind of formed the foundation of this building project with three foundational questions. That was, what are the needs of our community? What are the gifts and strengths of our church? And where do those two things align? What are the needs of our community? What are the gifts of our church and where do those two things align or intersect? As a team, we sat with those lists for probably three or four months reworking them, revising them, looking at them, kind of testing them out on folks. When we came out of that, what we actually decided was there were two missional needs in our community that would really help us to develop a contextual ministry. One was the need for sacred space, space that is multi-purpose but is built and set aside to be a space that feels worshipful. And the second was community gathering places. So places that were open to our public where our community could come into, not just a church, but come into a space where they could develop relationships with each other and where they would find a need to just find people who might have conversation with them or offer the opportunity for them to do that with folks. We told lots of stories in the development stage, capital campaign part of this project. One of those stories was this and that was that I strongly believe that someone is going to drive through our coffee shop through the drive-through every week, not really care that it's in a church one way or another because what they're really getting is a great product that's supporting a local business until they get into a spot where they're in a hospital or in a rough place in a relationship and someone says to them, do you have a pastor or a support system that you can call? And their answer might just be, no, I don't, but there's this coffee shop in a church that I visit every week and they're super nice. Maybe they can help. And that that would be the entry point into conversation that might eventually help us to develop relationships with them. So that's sort of the genesis of the project of where we are today. I'm going to show you some pictures now, give you a little break from talking and let you see some things that are happening in Melissa and we'll come back to how we actually formed this coffee shop. We opened in April, outside of our building. Let me move this really quick so I can flip screen so we go. Great playground in the back with turf. One of the things we've discovered with this playground is we have families in our neighborhood that are coming by and picnicking in the evening and letting their kids play on the playground. So we've moved some commercial picnic tables back there. So there's a place for them to be. Here's inside connections coffee. This is as you walk right in the front doors of the church. This is what you see. I skipped over one. There's kind of right where we are, the drive-through window is there to your left. You can see that window there. That's what it looks like from the outside. The drive-through menu, if you actually look on those brick columns, you see a TV that's mounted just like it would be any other drive-through coffee shop. That's where that is mounted there. And the screen turns on and off on the times when we're open. Inside, this is the commons. And so lots of seating here, board games. We rearranged this throughout the week based on what's kind of going on. What we've added since this picture is we actually needed more seating. And where you see this two set right here of a high top table, this is actually moved down and all the high top tables are grouped together. We have kind of a mini booth scenario that's right there in that spot now to provide a little more seating. There are some of the rooms that are available throughout the week for usage. There's a kitchen right here that opens up to our worship space that you see there. And that is cleared during the week. So it can be used for, we've had anything from tennis banquets to a dance team that's come in already and use this space and the outside of the building again. So you kind of get a feel for what things look like there in Melissa. When we had this idea to open the coffee shop, we talked a lot with Union Coffee and Dallas and kind of gleaned a lot of things from their model. Their executive director Josh was super helpful in providing us with some resources that actually helped us design the coffee shop. We also looked throughout the larger connection and talked to coffee shops that were in new church scenarios, that were on college campuses, all kinds of different situations that helped us sort of get an idea of what we were forming. The next thing we did was we utilized some secular resources. I, as a pastor, went to Texas Coffee School and a three-day business workshop for coffee pernures and used that manual to help some of our folks get started. And we looked at some local business partners. We talked with Hugs Cafe in McKinney. That's a 501 C3 nonprofit that does work with special needs population. And we also talked with a funeral home in town. One of their founding members is a member of First United Methodist Church of McKinney and they have a coffee shop within their funeral home that they operate as a separate for-profit business and have offered us space to go in and train. So one of the encouragements I'll give to you is if you see some folks in town who may just be friendly to you, they might be a great place for you to go to learn some things and just a great partner in listening and sort of thinking through what are some pitfalls or some really great ideas and best practices that you can glean from them that will help where you are. What we did to start the coffee shop, we had some options of legally where to start. We looked at some private lawyers in Dallas who would have cost us about $5,000 to $7,000 to do our legal startup paperwork that was way outside of our budget. But if we had to do it, that's what we were gonna do. We actually stumbled upon a resource called startchurch.com that kind of offers you a template and for $1,000 creates for you all of your governing documents, your articles of incorporation, your bylaws that helps you get your EIN, forms a stockholder agreement and certificate and a lot of other things. And so we ended up going that route kind of taking the template that they provided to us and then offering some different additions and changes to that that were truer to our context than the template that just was there. So the legal structure is that startchurch helped us make sure that Connections Coffee was formed as a completely separate legal entity from First United Methodist Church of McKinney. This is where that connection is really important because Melissa UMC is still a multi-site of First United Methodist Church of McKinney. When I talk about how we got approval from our trustees and our church leadership that is getting approval from the larger church in McKinney who isn't here on the ground in Melissa but believes in what's going on. So our Board of Directors for Connections Coffee is a mix of myself as president of the board and members of trustees, finance and leadership both in Melissa and in McKinney. So there's continuity of messaging, continuity of reporting in that way and that everybody's kind of on board with what's happening. We have a separate insurance policy for Connections Coffee and they do pay some things back to the church. I'll kind of walk you through that in a moment by Wally, good to see you too. I'll walk you through that in a moment of how that money part works but it's a completely separate thing. As a for-profit organization, it can make donations and pay rent back to a nonprofit entity. And so that's how that will work in the future as we move forward. People-wise, we hired an hourly systems developer and kind of first manager of our shop. Our coffee school was really helpful in this way, helping us know where to get started. And so this person is not a long-time hire. They will be with us for this year and towards the end of the year, we will work this position into an actual manager of the coffee shop position. But for now, they're writing manuals, training our first baristas, figuring out how we handle volunteers who went to work in the coffee shop which we haven't done a lot of yet. And God bless them, they are managing me as the pastor and president of the board who has graduated from steaming dish soap to actually making a coffee nut latte and a salted caramel mocha yesterday. So I just have to tell you that if this pastor thing doesn't work out, I've got some really great barista skills that I can use all kinds of places. So, you know, marketable thing if you start an investment like this, you're gonna gain some new skills. Our startup expenses for the shop was a really defined investment from First United Methodist McKinney and Melissa UMC that came from our reserves. If you're in a church situation that does not have reserves, you could actually come up with this kind of defined investment from seeking some outside investors who are just really smart business people who believe in what you're doing and can help you put together a business plan that helps you to move forward. For us, the equipment was purchased as a part of our building project. And so the total for that equipment ran about 45 to $50,000. And then the church put in $45,000 of a defined out of our reserve that was a defined investment and connections copy to help us with our startup expenses. August was the first month we were ever open to the public. We opened August 15th. And so we don't even have a full month under our belt yet. But here's what I can tell you. In this full month, the coffee shop has started paying a percentage of the church's internet and a percentage of the church's janitorial that's based on square footage. And so they're kicking a couple of hundred dollars back to the church. It's a small thing, but again, we've been open about three weeks. So they're starting that. We're starting that pattern in September. Once the coffee shop starts to make a profit, we're forgiving rent until they get to the point that they make a profit. When they do start making a profit, 90% of that profit will come back to the church to help replenish those startup expenses. So by the time we get a few years down the road, the coffee shop will have repaid the church in full. 10% of that will actually go to another area nonprofit that our clients to the coffee shop will end up selecting. And so we'll be kicking back to our community and highlighting those nonprofits that our folks will get to choose and kind of promote there from the coffee shop. So the benefits to Melissa UMC and the first United Methodist Church of McKinney are missional and relational first and foremost. It's a forum where we are making connections with people and offering a space for people to connect to people. And ultimately for some of those folks to connect with God as well. Financially, it's a long-term vision that adds an additional source of revenue for the church. And so it's been quite a journey. Our treasurer at First United Methodist McKinney asked me a couple of weeks ago, he said, which do you think was harder? Getting a building built or opening a coffee shop? And I said, well, I'm not sure. They're both pretty challenging, but opening this coffee shop has had some really unforeseen sort of things in the road that we've had to make sure that we're taking good care of both the church and the shop and setting both up for success in the future. So if you're ever up in Melissa, we're open 630 to 1030 every single day, seven days a week. We stay open a little later on Sundays for church. We cater and so you're driving through and you wanna pick up a pump pot. We can cater that for you or we actually have a Presbyterian new church start that we're connected with. They're starting some evening worship services on our campus and they are actually catering and contracting with Connections Coffee for them to open up in the evenings for that. And so we're super excited about all of those things and just glad to kind of get started. Okay, I'm looking at chat, but I know that we'll come back to that in a little bit. One of those questions that came to me and chat is something I actually forgot to tell you. So let me tell you that, let me back up. First time Methodist McKinney is the only shareholder of coffee shop. They own 51% of the shares of the coffee shop and that is reflected in that initial investment that first time Methodist McKinney made in the shop. And so they own the only shareholder certificate. If there was ever a need for the coffee shop to have more additional investment from the church, the church could do that by purchasing additional shares, but this way the church remains the only one and the primary shareholder that actually has the say in owning and controlling the way the shop moves forward. It is a C corp, which for those of you of a business mindset, that will mean something to you. Others of you that won't mean anything at all, but it is a separate corporation and not an LLC. Okay, that was a lot of stuff in 20 minutes. This has been quite a ride. For those of you that are pastors on here, I'm happy to kind of talk to you from that angle of what this has seemed like and let's kind of think through and we can do that in the chat or offline based on your context and what you're sort of thinking, where is there a way forward? Because I can promise you, if you're feeling led and hopeful about an avenue that might be in front of you, there's likely a way for you to move forward in that way. You just gotta find a creative angle to tackle it. So I'm happy to be a thought partner in that in whatever way you'd like. I'm gonna kick it over to Kenneth Wolverton. Kenneth is the district lay leader of the North Central District of the North Texas Conference. He's also a founding member of Grace Avenue United Methodist Church in Frisco and he's gonna kind of kick over some ideas they've got there in Frisco about the way in which they can continue to reach out to their community. Kenneth, pass it over to you. All right, thank you Stacey and good morning everybody, glad to be here. I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and take y'all through sort of a journey that I've been on for about a year now. Started worrying about some of the same things that Neil talked about in terms of other sources of income for churches and how to make churches more sustainable in the future and got the opportunity to really see some of the stuff that Neil and his team did down at White Rock and then also found that there were churches all over our conference that are doing some really unique things and as the district lay leader, I got the opportunity to sort of see some of that and began to think about, okay, what could we do with some of this stuff and how could we pull that together into a model that could be helpful for churches throughout the district? And so I'm gonna pull up a PowerPoint slideshow and sort of take you through a process that I've been through for a while now. So let me just do that. And so as I began to think about what could I, what could we do in churches, I began to sort of say, could I come up with something? And you may be asking yourself the same thing after hearing Neil and Stacey thinking, well, what could our church do or what could we make happen? And so I sort of started with, if we're gonna do a social enterprise, what fundamentally does that social enterprise need to accomplish? And the first thing is, how do we utilize the existing assets of the church? As Owen said, I'm sort of an entrepreneur by heart. I also love efficiency and maximizing assets and maximizing our returns. And so I started thinking, how could we utilize existing assets of the church? Second thing was, could we provide a new service or ministry to our community that doesn't exist? And if you couldn't do that, could we expand on an existing service or ministry? And then I began to think, could this generate revenues to assist in funding new ministries or paying for the operations of our church? Does this offer something unique to families in our community? Or does it allow us to maybe offer something that doesn't exist or difficult to afford as we go forward? And so I started thinking through all of those various items. And as I thought about that, I started with looking at, if I can get my screen to move here, how could it complement other potential social enterprises? So could we come up with something that would lead to something else? So I started with really examining our current assets. So I started looking at everything within our church, our land, our building. I even started looking at our digital assets. A lot of churches have developed enormous digital assets. And could we monetize some of those assets as we move forward? And really where I came down to, as I said, you know what? I'm gonna focus on our worship space or family center space, a large space in which it doesn't have existing pews, but maybe chairs and things that you could begin to move out. And I started thinking about, how do you utilize that space? And I will tell you, I thought about a number of different things and not all of them are great ideas. So square dancing, could we do that? As an enterprise. And then I thought, well, you know, maybe square dancing's not as popular. So maybe clog dancing or something. And I thought, no, that's probably not it. And then I thought about a restaurant, but then I thought, well, I don't know how we go about doing that. So after lots of failures, I've come up with this idea of inflatables within the worship space, which sounds really, really crazy, but the idea is, could we create an open play area or a indoor birthday party kind of program for the community? And so I began to really play around with this. And the more I played around with it, the more questions sort of came to mind. And so as I looked at this, I wanted to say, how does it fit these things? And so does it utilize the existing assets? The answer is yes. Does it provide a new service or ministry? The answer is yes. Could it expand on a service or ministry that we currently have? Well, at Grace Avenue, we have a daycare program. So this would be a new play area for the daycare program. So it's yes. It could generate some additional funding and it could offer something unique in terms of an indoor play area for kids or an indoor birthday party program. And if you think about starting a coffee bar or a coffee house, as Stacy talked about, it could compliment that because you're bringing families into your church as part of the play and the birthdays. So as I sort of look at that, all these other questions sort of came to mind. And we don't have time to go into all these questions, but I just wanted to share with you guys that there are lots of questions when you're trying to figure this stuff out. And so I was sort of at a dilemma. Do I focus on the questions and the answers? Do I focus on trying to model this as a business? Do I focus on a process for how to develop this or put it together? And I really came to the conclusion that what we needed was we needed to develop a social enterprise guide that would help people walk through all of these things, that it would help them with what are the questions that need to be asked? And where could we go to maybe get some of these answers? And then what do we need to do to determine how this business will function and operate? And do we have a modeling tool that we could load things in to see what the potential is for this business? And does this tool allow us to model different scenarios to determine how our decisions could impact the overall business? And the more I thought about this, the more I thought, okay, what I need to do is to develop a social enterprise toolkit around this. And so that's what I've been doing for the last several months is developing a toolkit that will walk people through all of the various pieces that they need to be asking. But at the same time, we'll have a modeling tool that they can begin to plug in different things that'll show the overall expenses, potential revenue and what the overall income might be from such an endeavor. And so I also put together an example within that to look at. And so I just wanna share with you one example. And so in this example, the church would buy four inflatables, inflatables or anywhere between $5,000 and $7,000 a piece. So you're looking at about a $30,000 investment here. They would have open play during the week, but they don't also have birthday party slots on Friday evenings, Saturday during most of the day. And then Sunday evenings, for example. We would only base this based upon filling 65% of those party slots and we would ramp it over a nine month period. We set aside within the model several reserves to do things like building a reserve to buy new inflatables once these got old, setting aside a reserve to refurbish the worship center because of the additional wear and tear and other reserves within the program as well. We put in the complete cost of staffing to run the parties. As Neil said, we didn't wanna rely on the volunteers of the church or staff of the church. We wanted to staff this to run it as a separate business. And the beautiful thing is this particular model showed a net income of 50,000 for year one with around 150,000 a year going forward. And so with that, where do we go next? We're going to start trying to take people through this process of discovery. And we have two churches that have expressed interest in that the first church is Grace Chapel and the second church is actually Stacey's church up at Melissa United Methodist Church. And so if you're interested in just wanting to keep track of the progress that's being made by these two churches or you wanna talk more about the opportunity or if you would like to form a team at your church to go through the discovery process of this particular social enterprise, then let me know. There's my contact info. And with that, I'm gonna quickly turn it back over to Owen and open it up to any questions that you might have for the three of us. So Owen. Well, thank you, Kenneth. Go ahead and I wanna first just thank our three presenters. It was so informative, so helpful. And I've gotten a lot of feedback and private messages about how excellent that these presentations were right now helpful they are. I know people have been putting questions in the chat, continue to do that. Temple has been capturing these. And so I'm gonna turn them over to Matt to start pitching these questions out to our presenters. Yeah, for sure. So I'll start with Neil. When you were sharing Neil, Don Hamilton asked what key performance indicators would you recommend to track change in the church and its operation? Yeah, so one of the things about Kenneth and Stacey mentioned as did I is the fact that all of these things are gonna create lots of questions and they will create anxiety and they will create issues. So one of my key indicators when I'm working with a congregation is what are the conversations that are taking place and are they honest and do they have a tone of pastoral care? And are we finding resolution with them? So this is, I mean, this is an ongoing but it's a very early key indicator. So many of us when we start having these conversations, we find that we keep having sort of the same conversation over and over, we have it with the trustees, we have it in finance committee, but we don't actually ever get anywhere, right? We don't know what our liability would be if we were to bring this partner in. We don't know what it would cost to have the asbestos abated in this space. So we're actually, we're on this cycle of having the same conversations. So first and foremost, this work is about fundamentally, it is about pastoral care and it's about the pastoral care of our congregation. So is that a piece? Are we having more of those honest congregational care conversations? And then after that, are you actually getting to a business plan of sorts? How many spaces, what spaces do we have? How much do those spaces cost us per square foot that we can then look at and say, this is what we would need to get by partnering? Are you doing those things, right? I also listed in the document that got sent around the next steps for conversation. There's also some really basic stuff like digitizing plans. Are you taking real practical steps to better understanding your property, your congregation's use of the property and what spaces are available to be rented out or shared with the community? And of course, then there's natural stuff of are we having conversations and have reach into our mission field that we didn't have a month ago? Are we meeting new people? Who are we engaging with? What are we hearing from them? And then what do we do with those conversations after the factors? We've been taking it back to our leadership teams and saying, here's who I met with. Here's what I heard and starting up additional conversations there. Those are some of my key indicators is seeing how the conversation is changing as we start to investigate and learn more about our buildings, our mission field. Yeah, that's good. Kathy Sweeney wanted to know how you determined sort of the geographical boundaries of your mission field. Yeah, so... Can I give you a little more specific, Neil? Of course, go for it, Kathy. So you have other... Given that you are in the city of Dallas when you were at White Rock, how did you, in that context, how far out did you research the needs and things like that? Yes, so first off, let me just say, every context is very different, right? So if you're in a rural context, you're gonna have, as you're assessing needs and you're assessing the services that your community already has, it's gonna be a totally different boundary. At White Rock, we were not on a major thoroughfare. We were buried in a neighborhood. And so we decided to focus hyper-locally, right? We wanted to be in conversation and get to know as many people immediately around us as possible because we looked around, and part of this was actually the two weeks before I started on staff at White Rock, I just drove the neighborhood from 9 a.m. till noon on Sunday mornings. I wanted to see who's working in their yard, who's walking their dog, whose lights, the house still looks totally buttoned up so they probably either are sleeping in or whatever, who's getting out, looks dressed up, looks like they're heading to church. And what I realized in there is there was massive potential to grow the congregation and connect with neighbors just around the church. We didn't have to go that far to find a massive amount of people who were not participating, apparently not participating in Sunday morning activities, right? When it came to finding partners, so as we started to meet with those folks who were immediately around us and were starting to assess needs and things like that, a lot of what I did beyond that, so say somebody is telling me we don't have enough affordable childcare in our area, I didn't just go to the childcare providers in the area. If I heard of a really successful, impressive childcare provider across town who wasn't in East Dallas, I would reach out to them to see if they wanted to be in East Dallas. And a lot of times that created some really interesting conversation that ultimately didn't pan out to them coming over to White Rock, but then maybe in a couple of years they go into another United Methodist Church that's closer to where they are, right? Maybe they're not ready to scale yet, but in three or four years, they are ready to scale, right? So it's creating the contact, the relationship. I also, I would talk to organizations who would be potential partners, but their space needs and our availability didn't match, but a lot of those actually ended up going to Owenwood, Casa Emanuel, Casa Linda, different other United Methodist churches who I could then reach out to the pastor and say, I have a great relationship with this executive director, I believe in their program, you might have the spaces that they need, right? So that too, that sort of relationship building, groundwork can actually yield benefits years to come. I mean, we have some partners in other congregations I'm working with that I kept up just an email every six months to check in on their organization, see how they were doing, see if there was anything we could do. Who it's only after four or five years, six years of having those contacts that they're actually going into a church space. So sometimes it's just building that too. So I would say, don't worry about the exact geographic boundaries so much as think of the need and assume that every conversation that you have that there's an opportunity in it and I'll stop talking. You're not gonna stop yet because I have more questions for you. Dwight Harry asked, generally, how should a church school be incorporated into the business plans of a church to help ensure it is not a financial burden? Yeah, so a good, good complicated question. So one, if it's an existing school, you wanna do your due diligence on that school. You wanna see their financials, you wanna see how they've been operating. If they've been renting from another church, you wanna talk to that church or in a retail building, you wanna talk to that landlord. You wanna learn as much as you possibly can about how they have functioned in the past. My preferred way of setting it up is basically operating first with starting all the preliminary conversations and creating a memorandum of understanding that basically outlines here's the spirit in which we're engaging in these conversations and here's the expectations we have of each other as we're engaged in these. When ultimately we land on an existing school coming into church property, we then create a full commercial lease with everything stipulated with an MOU, again, to reiterate the spirit in which we're going to work and outline the spaces, outline if there's room for them to grow into, outline in that MOU, here are the spaces, here's a potential growth plan, here's a rent escalation based on additional spaces needed or additional growth in the student body. We work in all of that. Now, as far as how do we as a church work with the school at White Rock, we trusted them to be the experts in what they do. That was their reputation. That was their history and so we looked at it as grafting on their expertise in childcare to our congregation, right? So we evangelized them to the neighborhood. If we met somebody and they had little kids, we would say you need to come to the Children's Center. It's in our church building. It's an awesome program and we would make that introduction to the director of the school. And we asked her if she would get into conversations with people who were looking for a church to evangelize us to let them know that the care that their kids get when they're in the childcare program, the preschool program, that sort of care translates to what we do on Sunday mornings and what we do for the families that are in our congregation. And we actually, there's tons of data that says that having a preschool successful or unsuccessful is not gonna affect your congregation size or addition of young families. And I don't doubt that data at all, but I can say that very intentional work, your clergy becoming truly becoming available as chaplains to those families when things arise or to the staff. I know that at one point, one of the teachers of our preschool husband passed away suddenly and Mitchell was down there doing pastoral care for the entire church, for the entire school staff, right? Following up. We had one teacher who was a longtime teacher in that school who was dealing with cancer treatments. And so there was regular, you know, twice a week popping in to make sure her treatment was going well and letting her know that she was in our thoughts and prayers. It's little touches like that that help connect to the school and to the families without superimposing the desires of the church to manage a school that it has total control over. I don't know if that is a sufficient answer. There's probably some more specific details in there, business details. Shoot me an email. I put my email in the chat. So if there's more specifics, I can give you that. Let me know. Very good. Very good. Yeah. Kathy Sweeney messaged me and just also said, you know, there's checks and balances within our system that can also help in terms of determining some of the impact it will have on your congregation as far as like your building and facility committees, district building committee and stuff like that that you can run leases through as well. Okay, Neil. Last question I got from Jeff Garrett. Can we partner with and rent to for profit organizations? You can. You start getting into some, some grayer area when you do. So let me just, let me just put it there. So for a lot of congregations who are pretty gun shy about property taxes and various other things. Most of us do not do audits ever. And if we do audits, we don't do them with great regularity. You can, but tread very, very lightly. Whenever I talk to a congregation about bringing in for profit companies, I make sure that that company is either essential or very beneficial to the operations of the congregation. So it's not uncommon to find churches that have caterers who operate in their kitchen seven days a week and they either provide lunch for the school kids or for the staff, or they do the community meals every quarter for the church. Figuring out a way to bolster the congregations offerings weekly, quarterly, whatever the running of the church. If a for profit company, if it dovetails with the ministry the congregation is doing, I am much more comfortable advising a congregation to do that. I get a little wary when a congregation looks to a for profit organization just because of the revenue it can bring in. Right. There's a, and of course I'm not assuming that everybody's in Texas because I know Ben's not, I know Kay is not, there's probably a handful of other folks who are not in Texas right now. This isn't just a state thing. This is a county thing. Right. So, so how your county looks at your property taxes, all of that should be taken into account when seeking partners who are for profit. But the simple answer is you can. And since Stacy is basically housing a for profit corporations within their church, I want to ask her to kind of speak to it briefly. Yeah, and I would agree with Neil. I mean, if you're looking to partner with the for profit just because you think it's going to bring more money to the church, I would be cautious and leery of that as well. Alignment with mission, I think is key for me. This is where I'm going to say I'm a pastor and I'm not a CPA or an accountant. So you need to partner not just with someone who's doing regular audits of books, but you also need to partner with experts who can help you in this field. So for connections, coffee, we actually pay hourly. The financial assistant that does the work at first time Methodist McKinney, we pay them from connections separately to manage the separate set of books that is connections coffee. And they are also partnered with an accountant that helps us make sure that we're aligned with everything we need to do as far as tax status and make sure that that is that set up in the appropriate way. So it is possible work with professionals. So you're not putting the church in a compromise status. Thanks, I think Matt. That was it. That was a lot. Actually the last question. So we may have some more questions come in. Just put them in the chat since we have just a few more minutes on here. I want to pitch it quickly to Ben Rigsby if he can share within five minutes about the work that he is doing there because it incorporates a more capital related partnership and doing facilities. So Ben, can you briefly share with the group about your work? Yeah, I'll cover a couple of years in five minutes. No worries, Owen. Basically, we went through a vital merger process where we combined three churches. We all moved into one facility which enabled us to leverage and sell off the other facilities and things of that nature. That gave us sort of a capital to work with. It was put into our mid-Atlantic foundation, which is the same as Texas Methodist down there. And even if we just left that alone and did nothing with it, the income generated off of that very similar to a retirement pension and 5% would still be enough to cover a pastor's salary for a year. So we're trying to use our capital and our property in order to generate income like crazy. We do happen to be in a very lucrative part of the country. We're right outside Baltimore, Washington International Airport. And the land up here is worth a lot, which makes me miss Texas quite a bit. But here we are in a place where the churches are trying to figure out like everybody else, how do we create income? And they're renting out their facility to other churches and anybody that they can rent to. And the idea came up. Well, what if we built a commercial facility and we're able to rent that out on some of the existing property that we have. Meanwhile, building ourselves just a little sliver of that property in order to host worship services, children's playground stuff. I love the bounce house idea. That's actually part of what we're putting into, not bounce houses specifically, but kind of a McDonald's playground on steroids in there, which gives us a great community opportunity to meet and greet with people. And then Stacey, we're going to borrow some of your ideas well and put a coffee house inside that whole building so that while moms are watching their preschoolers bounce around on the houses and stuff, we've got a coffee shop nearby and yours truly will just be making as many friends as I can and inviting people to join us at church or wherever else we happen to go. So, okay, I think I covered most of it there. That might have been two minutes. Well, thank you for that. And I once again, thank all our presenters. I also want to pitch it, we actually have an actual lawyer on here with us. We may have more than one, but we have Tom Stanton who works for both texts, Methodist Foundations and the United Methodist Development Fund and has been exploring this work and so, so that we can have some illegal mind speak to this. I'm going to pitch it to Tom real quick. Well, I've been impressed of course with the incredible wisdom in this group in the chat room as well as the presenters and just really grateful. I will tell you that there are legal issues and they are not insurmountable. And there was a marvelous comment made to connect it with still do the mission alignment work. I would only add to that when you do document it, because churches were a type of public charity under the way the IRS looks at it. And because of the group letter ruling, we're not really on the radar screen for the IRS, but the day may come when the IRS gets a little bit more proactive. And if you have documents that can show alignment with this for-profit work as well as the church, then you're going to be in much better shape. So really talk about, put your pastoral minds on and your kindability minds and just be sure to have real writing about what you did and why you did it because that becomes a really key place. Kristi Denner made a really marvelous point and that is even though we're a type of non-profit association of churches slash public charity, we churches, that there can be an unrelated business income tax issue there. So both with that issue as well as the property tax issue, my recommendation to you is to plan that in as Ken would say with his business mind, plan it into the model and take an affirmative position with your county. And that is to say, and Stacy, I haven't been to your place, but I would say as we look at our entire footprint of our church property, we're going to assign 3% of that footprint to this coffee shop operation or to this other operation. And we are going to affirmatively make a report for property tax and pay the property tax on that. And once the way, frankly, government entities work, you've budgeted that in, you have a good faith reason to do what you did and you're really through that hurdle. So I would say as a recovering chancellor for a decade and now as general counsel for TMF and Wesleyan Investive, the legal issues are not insurmountable. And the legal issues, this is funny coming from a lawyer, should not be driving the boat here. Your pastoral insight, your notion of kingdom building and being good stewards of your property can drive the boat. And I think that the legal issues can are all ways it can be handled. I'll tell you, I'm just stunned at the wonderful work that you all are doing in the North Texas Conference. And Owen, thanks so much for leadership and all of you all on this. This is really good stuff, you guys. Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing. And also a reminder me. UMDF is now the Wesleyan Investive. And so I appreciate the good work that you're doing through that. I'm going to pitch it to, we've now had a lawyer. I'm going to pitch it to a CPA. And our conference treasurer and leader of the Center for Connectional Resources, Christy Drenner, who will have the last word today. Christy. Thank you. I just want to echo what Tom said. I am so encouraged by this work and this training was just phenomenal. You know, the good work being done in our conference is really exciting. And to Tom's point, I do not want the tax issues to be a stumbling bot for the local church. You need to be mindful of them. You need to ask the questions. You need to make sure you have the right person in the room. But to echo what he said, as long as you draw the lines for what your building is about and which sections of it are devoted to different types of work, then it's just a decision tree after that point of how are we going to move forward with this? And I would highly encourage you to explore the avenues, explore the options, get the right people. And it can be some really exciting revenue opportunities for churches. So thank you so much for letting me have the last word. I'm excited to see what all you guys come up with. Sorry, this is my first time on Zoom. But I do thank everyone and join me in thanking all of our presenters. Give them a round of applause. And I thank all of you all for being here and for engaging and leaning into this work. You're going to be getting and follow-up email that's going to have the resources on here as well as a survey asking how the Center for Church Development can continue to best serve the churches of the North Texas Conference and equip the ministries that God has called you to. So may God bless you, may God prosper you, and thank you for your time here today. Blessings.