 So, why don't you introduce yourselves? I am Diane Montecotena, and I'm the pastor of the Salisbury Congregational Church in Northwest Connecticut. Welcome, Diane. Thank you. Hi. I'm Reverend Sarah Smith. I'm senior minister at United Carnation Church in downtown Bridgeport. And I'm chair of the Board of Directors and founder of the Norma Frame Urban Outreach Initiatives, Inc., our not-for-profit. Great. Welcome, Sarah. Hi. I'm Reverend Bridget Piddler, and I'm the pastor of First Church of Christ Congregational in Southfield, Connecticut. Welcome, Bridget. Hi. I'm Eric Vistler, and I'm the pastor of the West Southfield Congregational Church in West Southfield, Connecticut. And we welcome, Eric, to our gathering. Thank you all for being here for this edition of Vantage Point. We're talking about our vision here in the Connecticut Conference, and that vision is about interdependence and about connecting with each other. All four of you are part of partnerships with your churches, and so we wanted to let our listeners and viewers today hear a little bit about what's happening with your churches. So I'm going to invite Diane to start and tell us what's happening between you and Sarah's congregation. We started a number of years ago. Sarah and I had met in a clergy group, and I heard what was happening in Bridgeport, what kind of programs they were working on, and it was the same time that in Salisbury we were looking for opportunities to turn outward from the church, to look out into the community, to find ways to live our faith. And Bridgeport was able to provide that for us. So we help with dinners, with food drives, with a variety of activities. Great. And Sarah, what's your perspective on what's going on? Well, we thought we needed to, the only way we would work is to throw our doors open and help our neighbors, but we can't do it alone. And we all need to support the biggest city on the East Coast. So we were looking for mission partners, and I got to know this one, and we hit it off, and so we just started talking. And I want to make sure, though, it's a two-way street. They help us. They give us funding to do our programs. They come and volunteer, but we give them a chance to be transformed. And that has been what's been so marvelous about our, and so we are our covenant, which is a good UCC thing to do. We're interdependent, which makes our conference minister happy. And what we're living it at, our people know each other. Now we're getting ready to do this big joint retreat at our Silver Lake Conference Center, where we come and teach them a little bit about global music and how folks other than white folks sing. And it's going to be good. And so it goes both ways, and it's just enlivened all of us. That's wonderful. It's exciting to hear about what's developing and about the interdependence and the mutuality that's being built. And using Silver Lake, a place where our churches can gather together. So thanks for sharing a little bit about what's happening between your two congregations. Bridget, would you tell us a little bit about your partnership? So Eric and I have been working together for about four-and-a-half years, born out of necessity. I don't like working alone. And I was working alone. And I look at my neighbors regardless of denomination as collaborators. And so Eric and I were a natural team. Our churches were once one church. And in many ways, we don't see the division anymore. So we started out talking about youth and how we could support one another because they had adult volunteers and we had kids. And somehow that seemed like a natural collaboration. Didn't actually work out that well, but it didn't deter us. We just kept trying out different things. And so we started doing Cathedral in the Night. We've just in Northampton. And we just did one of those where both churches served that in that outdoor church ministry and food mission. We do Bible study together. We are going to be doing London study together. So we just naturally begin to think about doing everything together because we are up until recently I was a solo minister. And Eric is also working on his own. Great. Eric, how about your comments about this partnership? Yeah, I mean, I echo a lot of what Bridget said. Same thing is that we work very well together. And part of it is also recognizing the demographic of Suffield. I mean, the nature of New England is you can't swing a cap without hitting a UCC church. And that's just the nature of it. But unfortunately, the landscape of ministry is changing. And so we have to work together. And Bridget and I see that and a lot of the folks in our church see it is that we either work together or we decline separately. But together we grow in the divisions, the things that separated our church was the first great awakening. Well, we've come a couple of years and things have changed since that. You know, since Jonathan Edwards came and was preaching sinners in the hands of an angry God. So also recognizing that we were also finding that the history of our church was some people would get upset at one of our churches. They marched down to the other one. They get upset at that one. They marched down to the other. But when we looked at our church, as we said, listen, like, we're siblings here. Why shouldn't we bring it back into the family? And the incredible thing that I've seen is the response from the congregation is they love it so that every time that we collaborate and we begin to do things together as opposed to resisting it, there's such a joy that they're doing it with friends or sometimes family members that belong to the other church. And as Bridget said, we're doing Bible study together. There's more people there. We're doing mission together and there's more people there. I mean, and so we're able to have a more critical mass, which then makes the experience that much more enjoyable. And it's incredible to see the different ways. It was wonderful to hear the other churches talk about how there's a mutuality there. And that's exactly what we have, is that each of our congregations has different gifts to offer the other. And to also see that sometimes things work and sometimes they don't, but we're constantly saying, well, what are we going to do together next? Wonderful. Well, I am grateful to you all for sharing your stories. One of the things that we're doing as we talk about meeting one another, about mutuality, about interdependence is finding churches that are engaged and cooperating in ways like these examples here today. So we're grateful for your ministries. We're grateful for you being experimenters, out front leaders in this idea that we actually need each other. Thank you and blessings to you and your ministries. Thank you.