 Good morning, everyone. I think we're going to begin our time with prayer, but before we pray, I just want to say welcome to everyone. Welcome to our time with Reverend Dr. Kevin, Kevin Muriel, who has continually blessed us, blessed us even on yesterday by preaching at, I would say, St. Luke for their 87th anniversary, and he did an awesome job. I've heard lots of comments from people that listen in. So we're going to also let Reverend Dr. Owen Ross greet you this morning because he is a man of just a few words, so I know he wants to say hello. And then once he greets you, if Debra, would you open us up with prayer? Good morning, everyone, and it is an honor to be here with you and appreciate the work that has gone into making this possible. Reverend Masterson, appreciate Dr. Muriel and taking time to be in with us. And I can just be inspired how our churches are responding to this new reality that we are living in and assisting our community. So thanks for taking time to be here this morning. I know we'll all be blessed. Thank you. Well, as we move into a time of prayer, I'm pleased to be with all of you. I'm Debra Hobbs Mason, the Metro District Superintendent. Kevin, I've seen you from afar, but we don't know one another. So thank you for being with the group today and for journeying with our pastors on the last couple of years. Different groups. Usually. In this prayer, I'm going to take some moments of silence. Don't worry that I've muted myself or fallen off or anything. Those are moments for you to lift up specific names in silent prayer. As I lift some things up, I think it'll make sense in the midst of the prayer times. If you would please join your hearts with mine as we go to God in prayer. Loving God, your desire is for our wholeness and well-being. We hold in tenderness and prayer the collective suffering of our world at this time. We grieve precious lives lost and vulnerable lives threatened. We ache for ourselves and our neighbors standing before an uncertain future. We pray, oh God, may love not fear go viral inspire our leaders to discern and choose wisely guided by concern for the common good and for all your children. Reveal to us new and creative ways to come together in spirit and in solidarity. Remind us, Lord, of those who suffer every day for whom this crisis is even more devastating. May we who are merely inconvenienced remember those whose lives are at stake. May those who have no risk factors remember those most vulnerable. May we who have the luxury of working from home remember those who must choose between preserving their health or making their rent. May we also remember those for whom more time at home is not comforting, peaceful or safe. Lord, also help us to remember those who have no home to take shelter in. May those who have the flexibility to care for our children when schools close remember those who have no options. May we who are losing our margin money in the tumult of the economic market. Remember those who have no margin at all as fear and anxiety grip our country. Let us choose love. Let us choose love. During this time when we cannot physically wrap our arms around each other. Let us find ways to be the loving embrace of God to our neighbor and our world. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Deborah. Good morning again, everyone. This is our second year of having this cohort with Reverend Dr. Kevin Muriel. Many of you know him. Cammy invited him to come to the clergy retreat. And so he's been there not just for the black pastors, but he's been here for all of us. And I am so honored to call him friend. And Kevin, I want you to know I am now spelling your name correctly. I publicly say that I have misspelled your name. And so it is now I'm doing a better job with that. So I thank you for those that's been a part of the cohort. You will know that we have a very solid and full agenda every time, but we're fluid with that. We'd like to be led by the Holy Spirit, so we're going to be led by the Holy Spirit today. I want to just say as a way of introduction to those of you that may not have been a clergy retreat or a part of the cohort, who he is. He is the pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the largest United Methodist churches in our nation. And one of the churches that's really thriving and I believe he is thriving for two reasons. One, because he's a child of God and he follows the leading of the Holy Spirit. And his gifts and leadership. He's a solid leader, his congregation response to his leading and I am excited about that. He's married, has a beautiful daughter, and is about to have a son just any day right now. And if you talk to him, he'll tell you that he's looking forward to having that son any day. So Cascade is in really good hands and the pastors of the North Texas conference have been in good hands with him. I see Derek on the call, I see Dr. Bowie on the call. I don't see Sharon, but Sharon is going to be on the call. Those were pastors in our cohort last year and they can tell you that we had a really good time. So y'all can just kind of do thumbs up or nod your head. It's really been fun. And our pastors as on the call now that's with him now or Natasha Roberts, I see Miranda. I don't see the others my screen only holds so many, but we have had a really good time this year. So normally I start off with how is it with your soul. But because we're going to be fluid with this time and I know Kami has another appointment. So we're going to ask her to bring some questions about leadership. Leadership is our first thing on the agenda and as she is preparing to speak. Dr. Muriel, is there anything you want to say? Do you bring us greetings from Cascade? We certainly do. Good morning to everyone and it is so good to see my extended family from the North Texas conference. I feel like I spent more time there than I have in North Georgia. But I certainly appreciate the wonderful ministry that you all are exhibiting around the world and certainly honor your leadership. Owen and Diana have done a dynamic job of putting these cohorts together and I see several of those who have participated in the last couple years and I just we've had a phenomenal time. So thank you all for being the trendsetters in this regard and for certainly investing in your clergy. So good to be here. Thank you. Kami? So welcome again Dr. Muriel. We're glad you're here and thanks for all the investments like as Diana said that you've given us. We feel like you are part of a home here. So just call it home. We like that. So yeah I was thinking about you and one of the things that strikes me is that you have such a fresh, real honest and creative way of being a leader. And I just want to say how much that's inspiring and it's been inspiring to me. It was inspiring when you were at the retreat and so thank you for just stepping up. I've been reading a book and just getting started on it called Who Do We Choose To Be, Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanity. And I just had to laugh at that title. But you know I think it's so true. Who are we choosing to be right now? And I wanted just to ask you some questions about really your own way of being and how you're leading in these past six weeks particularly if you don't mind me just probing you a bit. So I was thinking that we could learn from you know someone who as yourself who like I said is fresh, honest and creative. So I've got some categories that I'm thinking about worship, pastoral care, Christian education. I think that later on this afternoon you'll have an opportunity to speak to mission and outreach. So I'm going to pass that one. And the last one is ordering the life of the church and how to keep the church going, right? So I want to know if you could answer the question what decisions have you made during this time that are specific decisions in these certain categories. So what decisive things have you done in the area of worship that have been a change or some significant move that has been reaching the need of people right now? Thanks that's a great question. And I'll first start off by saying that you know I come to this in the same position that all of you are in. I'm a pastor just like you. I care about God's people just like you. I've we have had to make the adjustment just like everybody else. I've had sleepless nights and long days of worry about how things are going to go. We are in week seven of not meeting together and you know that's difficult not to I this is I don't know about you, but this has been my first Easter that I have never been physically at church. And reality set in on that day, not being in the physical space. And, but I realized that many of our buildings had to close for the church to open. I don't believe that anything happens, you know, by mistake I think I think it's it's there's some there's some divine plan somewhere in this that we're going to draw at some point somewhere at some time and I honestly think it's already being seen. I will say, churches have had to churches who did not have online ministries, whether they're broadcasting now from the kitchen or from their backyard or from the dinner table are having to make that adjustment. For years we have tried to get our people to become more innovative and think forward, because as leaders were always thinking ahead and sometimes we think further ahead than our people. And we're trying to bring them on say hey we need to do this. We need because this is the way of the world this is how everybody's shifting. And now. So for me it's been it's answering the question what does it mean to live into a reality to where you're forced to do church differently, all together. You were forced to rethink everything you've always done. And theologically I go back to, and I have really been on this verse I did a lesson on it last week, I talked about the Ministry of Mental Health and I'll talk about that more a moment from the Christian education perspective, but the Ministry of Mental Health and this idea that Paul raises in Romans 12 to about the renewing of the mind. That that we should have a renewed sense of thinking during the season and so what we've had to do honestly is is can we we've had to rethink everything, particularly worship worship has always been our worship has always been our business card calling card if you would more than likely people are going to come to your church through the experience of worship that they have with you. Nobody's going to say I want to join your church because they attend the finance meeting, or because they came to a trustee meetings or they came to admin council meeting it's just not going to happen. The difference now that we're experiencing is that when you go online any given Sunday really or any given moment of the day I guarantee if somebody logged on to Facebook right now you would see some kind of church service in progress. That's the difference now is that churches and I like to use the word use the word competition, but people have more options now than they've ever had to attend church. Because they're doing it virtually doing it from the cell phone during from the computer, or whatever smart device they have and so the question that we have to ask ourselves is, Okay, we know what we do in Atlanta. We know how we distinguish ourselves in the city of Atlanta we know that we have a large following in Atlanta. But when we're on the now at 10 o'clock am we're online with 2000 other ministries. What is going to want. What is it that people are going to see from us that they want to stay on our page. And so that's kind of where we had to begin. I'm glad that we put some of the technological systems in place. Well before this so we've been doing online ministry for a while so we already had an infrastructure. And so some of the hard decisions that we had to make, frankly, is how do we curate a worship experience every week for people that is different and unique and fresh. See that's something we really didn't have to really worry about in the physical space I mean it was a routine again the renewing of the mind. It was a routine right we knew when the call to worship was coming we knew how it was going to come we knew that we were going to do the doxology at a certain point. We knew what requires are going to sing but what happens when you can't get your choirs lined up on a certain Sunday to sing and you know now they're out of rotation. How do you, how do you create a virtual choir right because again people have about and what we've experienced to our analytics, people connected you for about a minute. Before they scroll on to the next thing if you haven't grabbed them in a minute, then good luck your worst attendance numbers may not be online either. So, for us it's been thinking outside of the box it's been making sure that everything that we're doing is intentional. And this is what, and all of these things connect right from worship to pastoral care to Christian ed to ordering life in church. It's all about intentionality. And so I remember the first staff meeting I had with my team. When we knew we're about to close down. And we had a zoom call we didn't meet in person. And I gathered them together and I said, look, here's what we've got to do. Everything that we've always done we need to throw it out of the window, because it really doesn't matter right now. And that was a very difficult thing for me to say, because I didn't want to believe that. Right. So you talk about leadership. I didn't believe that we had to throw out everything and re rethink what it meant to do worship now, fully virtually, because there was always kind of this thought that hey we're going to be back soon, you know, four weeks is going to blow over six weeks. We're going into week seven. We have not hit a peak. I want to want to just want to be honest and real with everybody. We have not hit a peak I don't care what leadership in this country said, we have not hit a peak. My wife works for the CDC. I know we had me to pick. She's answering inquiries from all over the country. She and her team, we have not hit a peak there. And even if we did, there's not a vaccine or treatment that is viable. And you know any vaccine, just look at H1N1 SARS whatever you want to look at, it takes at least six months in the best of circumstances for trials and testing and all that. And these are what medical experts are saying this is not just Kevin. So what does it look like to prepare for for this reality for the next four months, five months. And so that's what I prepared my team for that that's where we're looking we're looking that what if you know we can't get back to normal. So with that in mind that's that's kind of the mindset from which we're operating hammy and how we've been planning and so this is what we're doing. We meet every week. In fact, when we get off this call, I got a meeting with my team, we plan out worship every week in a different way. Sometimes we do it two or three weeks in advance, depending on what the so for Palm Sunday and Easter we obviously had to plan a lot more in advance because we had a lot of moving parts. So we thank God have someone on our team we have a director of technology on our team, a social media person videographer and so we get all the content in terms of and I'll talk more about this when we do the preaching segment, but everybody has a deadline. And if you miss that deadline your part doesn't get in. But, you know, everybody has a deadline because we got to get it in, get it edited so that Sunday morning, it can be pushed out. And then how do you organize all the pieces leading up to that to let people know what's coming for Sunday. So the big word here is intentionality. It's been very intentional. And you say I don't I don't know if you know if I definitely lead differently than anybody else other than I'm just honest with people and I think sometimes we get caught up in this web of dishonesty, even with ourselves. And sometimes you have to just tell your team how it is and you got to be honest with yourself. And the true reality is we're going to be in this for a while. This is our new norm. This is our new reality. And so we've got to learn as the church of Jesus Christ. To make disciples in our new reality. This is not anything that's that's unique to the body of Christ we've always had to do this we've always had to adjust always had to adapt. So, I will say intentionality, honesty and very careful planning around worship. I think I heard you say that you also took a look at what the online product would look like as opposed to what it would look what it looks feels like when you're actually in the space and made some adjustments did I hear that. Yeah, absolutely. So our online product looks significantly different than our in person worship product does. We didn't try to mirror it. I mean, there was no way to do that we tried to get as close as possible by including some of the same elements but we're in a virtual world now. So, whereas a service would have run an hour and a half. You know, we get happy maybe two hours. Now we're going 45 minutes to an hour. We've got a song. So if you're talking about order, we have kind of a pre service song, a welcome offering. And then another song sermon and then we're done. And that's, that's our worst experience. I'm going to tell you why we do it that way, because the reality is and and perhaps some of you have seen your own online engagement. You've probably gotten more views now in your online engagement than you have probably when you're in the physical building. I'm going to tell you why. Number one, it's not just people who are watching you live. It's people who are going to come back and watch you. People who are going to share that video. And so live you may have. I mean, a couple thousand people that have viewed the video. By Monday morning, it may be 5000. The other thing I want to just want to caution us to realize is that now we are, we have all become whether or not you want it to be. We've all become public theologians. All become public theologians. Everyone's content is now shareable. And now everyone's content can be up for a bottle. Everyone's content can really be be proven whether sound or not. And so now that we are in a virtual world, you will find out whose content has been strong or has not been since they've been preaching and teaching. You are now without an audience. And I know this may come up later in the preaching moment without an audience. We must produce strong content. Because now you ain't got folks talking back to you or, or, you know, saying amen and now you can't do the visual engagement. So your content has to be strong and it's got to grab people. And let me just interrupt you once. That's the whole purpose of our two year cohort. I just want to put that in that that's that's what we've been talking about this time. So go on. So your content has to be strong. And then you have to think about your end user. This is what we've done we you have to think about who's going to watch me was going to watch the service watch our church. Know that you're not just preaching to know that you're not just preaching to your congregation anymore. That's those days for at least the foreseeable future are are gone. You're not just preaching to your church family, you're preaching to a broader audience. And that's what you have to realize. So I know it's good to talk to your church family. But what we've done just as always included when we're talking to the cascade family we always say cascade family and friends, because now you got a lot of friends showing up to church. And so if you've always hoped for, you know, having more visitors come to your church. Well, you got your wish. They may not be there physically, but they're virtually, and they're watching. I appreciate that intentionality because you envisioned, like what when you were talking about envisioning the end user. You're, you're talking about how do you meet the spiritual need of that specific person. And, and, and the breadth of those people that are that are coming on. Also the integrity question of your message and the depth of your message and, you know, those are, it takes, I don't know if you found this but it seems like it's taking a lot more emotional and thinking, you know, the energy to actually produce what it is that we're putting out to the public, as you say, public domain. It is. And I don't want to. I don't want to gloss over the fact that this is a pandemic that we're living in. We live through a local national pandemic like this before this is the first time that most pastors have never had to lead through a pandemic before. So I want us to to really live in that tension for a moment and say there's no one size fits all here. I'm literally leading every day with, you know, your, your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds praying and asking God for wisdom and guidance by the spirit to make the right decisions and to do the right things. Leadership, I believe, and I've just discovered this leadership is really proven and known in moments of adversity, not when you're on that. You know if you are an effective leader, when you can lead your people through a valley, or when you are Moses, and you've got Pharaoh behind you and you've got a red sea in front of you. And you're praying to God because you don't know what to do the people are complaining they won't have everything their way. They want to go back to Egypt, and you've got to be the calm in the midst of the storm. When everybody's panicking they're thinking the world is about to fall apart. And you've got to stand in that space. And God say to you, Well, what's in your hand. And in your hand, there's something powerful you got the word. We've got the word of God in our hands we've got the spirit of God on our side and so I think, and no not, I think I know people want their pastors to lead right now. If there was ever a time for pastors to be pastors. It's now. Yeah, Kevin so let me ask you a question, address on that very note because can these topics have all been about leadership. So you said it's time for the pastors to be pastors and on the point of leadership. When you live in a state that the governor says the churches are now open. Can you speak about that and your leadership team have what decision that you make and how did you come about it with your, your leadership team. How did you lead, having gotten that note that announcement from the governor. I mean it was a no brainer for us. I mean it makes no sense right now to to open. I'm going to tell you why it's why it made no sense to us, because when it hits you personal personally. Then you realize what's at stake when you reopen we've had about three. We've had four members who died from COVID-19 for having to stand at the graveside because we've only we're only doing graveside services now. And be with those families and to know the stories behind well we couldn't see our loved one before they died. We couldn't even FaceTime them. The nursing home right down the street from our church that we did ministry at every week we were there we are their church. And I don't know if you all have read the news but this 80% of the residents at the nursing home contracted COVID-19 80% 17 deaths. One of whom was one of my church mother church mothers when I was in seminary and I was a student pastor at a small United Methodist church and she was the SPRC chair there. When Ashley and I got married. This man's Ernestine man she was a prominent educator here in Atlanta. She helped coordinate our wedding and to know that she died and two days later her sister died of this virus. So when when you have politicians who place commerce money and money above people were not ready to open the CDC is housed in Atlanta. And they have constantly and consistently said we are not ready to reopen we need more social distancing we need to be aggressive. And we have on any given Sunday 1500 1700 people that are going to come through our church on a Sunday morning. You know and to put my people at risk. It just wasn't worth it. It's not worth it especially when you know we're doing well online. We're reaching more people online. We're stabilized financially. You know the Lord is blessing us. We people are joining the church. So we really had had no incentive to go back that early. However, I know there are some churches that are smaller in size and they're wondering like how are we going to pay the bills. You know, people aren't gathering. Our members aren't given online. That's probably the plight of most churches. And I understand that. I mean, I get that reality because getting off a pastor, but we have to always live in the tension of protecting our people versus doing what we want to do. And protecting our folks. Then it was it was paramount to me to us. And I will let you know we're going to go back when it's convenient and comfortable for everybody to worship in the space together. You know, free of fear of contracting the virus, however long that takes. So. I think you jumped into my next topic, which was pastoral being the pastor in the midst of this and great question. I appreciate that. Master's because, you know, we oftentimes have to be the voice of reason and and the pastoral voice in in our settings and in our context and you obviously stepped up to do that. And I want to talk a little bit about what other decisions you've made that have been pastoral decisions in your, your present position. Yeah. Connection at this time is important for everybody. So I want to put that as one of the essentials. I'll give you a couple essentials. Number one, intentionality. Be intentional about everything. Don't assume that everything is just going to be like it's always been. You have to be intentional communication. It's huge right now communicating with everybody. If you've got a staff communicating with them communicating with your leadership communicating with your people communicating with your audience in an ongoing manner and I'll talk more about that and get to the preaching component. And the third one is connection. People desire connection right now, albeit virtually right we've got, you know, 30 nearly 40 people on this call, and we're looking at zoom has become our best friend. All of us should have bought stock in in zoom and Netflix or something because zoom had the just and I'm about zoomed out but I love I love it because it is an amazing tool when you're when you're doing something you enjoy now. Some of the, you know, things that you really enjoy doing you got to zoom them, but this has been amazing right because you can connect and even when we can't physically see each other we can connect at least facially. So connection. One of the major decisions that we've made is we went down our well, and this took a long time, but we're still doing it. We gather together all of our lay leaders we have a lay leader and we have four associate lay leaders and our leadership team our pastoral team, and our staff, and we've got we got about 20 volunteers to help with this from our Stevens ministry. This is no use your ministries right you haven't for a reason use them Stevens ministries care and concern ministry. We took our role, and they split up the role, and they just been going down calling people every day. So our goal is to to reach all to reach all of our members with a phone call. And we this it's been very successful, not because we've been able to reach more people but let me tell you why. There was one, one day our outreach coordinator called an older gentleman of our church nobody had heard from him. He was on our caring concern list. And this was about two weeks into the pandemic when folks were really kind of wrestling to go get groceries and paper products tissue, etc, paper towels, etc. And nobody knew that he didn't have any food in his house. He did not made the intentional effort of calling just randomly calling our members. And this man was gentlemen's 85 he lives alone. And you're not very mobile. We don't know what could have happened to him. But now that we know, you know, we've, we've gotten him groceries every week and that's another thing, you know, we've connected with Josef eat hungry we've connected with Atlanta Community Food Bank. You know, we're giving away 500 boxes of food every week, because we know that that's a significant need in our community. And we've got a community fund set up just for that purpose, which has continued to grow. So, I would say intentionality, caring for your people right now make the phone calls. We're all at home, we're all, you know, take about an hour a day connect with I've tried to connect with at least 10 people a day in some kind of way. So that I can just say, Hey, look, it's pastor calling. I just want to see how you're doing you guys need anything everybody's good. That will go so far. We've also done during holy week. I did a prayer call every day every day at noon, but I still have a weekly prayer call every Wednesday morning. 630 am online. I've expanded it now to social media. You know, we had about 700 people call in just to that the call this past Wednesday, because people crave connection. One of our associate pastors is has formed a and you can do all these things right free free conference call dot com set up a conference call line. Our outreach pastor has set up what's called connections. And these are just our long slots every day of the week to members who if they just need to call in and have a conversation with somebody. You know, just to say, Hey, how is it with your soul? Where are you seeing God in the midst of pandemic, and he has those conversations with them daily. And so you would be surprised to know how many people are struggling and wrestling with this thing or you may not be so surprised. We know that domestic violence is on the rise right now because people are our home. People are struggling like us with their children to not only be parents but to be teachers, and that's something else. And so people need a, an outlet, and oftentimes the pastor is that outlet. We, in terms of giving, I know people are wondering about that. How do you continue to accept donations from people. You know, social distancing. Well, these are important things because our church is closed. We have our staff show up every Thursday. So we have a very skeleton staff so it's, you know, our finance director. It's a couple of office staff, and they show up to receive all the donations that have been mailed in for the entire week, because you still got to function and operate like that. So those are decisions that we just had to make that were critical. Anybody else, is that kind of answering along the lines, Kim, of what you're, what you're thinking about in terms of critical decisions. Right. And, you know, you, you're, it's interesting for you to point out the fact that when you are reaching out and I think so many of us sort of were just receiving, right, we're receiving our people into the building. But now we're going out to them and we're connecting in ways that are, you know, real and people's you're hearing about people's lives and they know they're pastor and the people of the church who are Christ to them, and then they become Christ back right. So, so faith becomes alive and then, you know, you kind of, and that intentionality of having systems and strategies that make those connections is really important. So thank you for speaking to that. Also, we're really quick about funerals. Sure. Yeah. That was the most difficult decision that we had to make. Because in when you love people and you want to be with people in their, in their grief, and you can't. It's painful. It really is it's tough. And so what we decided to do. And really, we got some help from this because this is the only thing the funeral homes are willing to do at this point. And that is great side services, 10 or less 10 or fewer people that are spread out. And we've made the commitment that after we come out of this that will have Memorial services for everybody. Yeah, we'll have Memorial services for everybody. It's going to be a lot from because I mean we've had about not just from COVID-19 but you know other people just died. You know that's going to be a commitment but it's something that you just have to do for your people it's it's what's required of us. As pastors, and that's what we do what's what's required of us. The most difficult. One of the most difficult was was when Dr. Lowry died. Dr. Joseph Lowry, who the Dean of the Civil Rights Movement my personal mentor, Pastor mayors of our church, and, you know, not to be able to have like just an amazing funeral for Dr. Lowry celebration of life, and having to, you know, have a big side service with, you know, 10 people and family over zoom call. It was very meaningful. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great service. But, you know, this is, this is Joseph Lowry, right. So we're going to honor him in October I mean, you know, we're going to have a huge celebration of life for him, because that's what that's what he deserved. That's just one of the, and most and let me affirm this and you guys to most people would never know how painful that is for you as pastors. This is a deeply intense, deeply painful time. You know, it's tough, particularly when you love your people. And it hits the pastor just like it hits the people and so, you know, I'm not I'm not trying to have a counseling call here I'm just saying it this is this is serious stuff. And so, don't, don't be afraid to reach out to those people in your inner circle, who you have to just bounce some things off of to say look this week was tough. You know, in a span of a week, you know, we lost Dr. Lowry we lost another very close member to coven 19. And we just had a lot of other stuff going on I mean you talking about, are you going to have to furlough people are you going to have to, you know, look, you don't know what your finances are going to look like. You know, those are very difficult moments. And so, I hope you have an outlet as a pastor, I hope you have somebody to pastor you during this time. I just wanted to lift that up. You know, I appreciate the fact that you're also lifting up the, the truth that every created person of God should shall be honored in their in the memory and, you know, spending time having a service for them to honor them is it honors the life that God created. And to not say oh it's too late or we're not going to where we passed the time. It's never too late to honor God's people. So I appreciate your decisive, you know, way of dealing with this that does that so appreciate that. And I want to talk. I've got about 10 more minutes for my part can I want to honor that. You talked a little bit about offerings and and that's ordering the life of the church. And are there other areas of ordering the life of the church that you have been thinking about working on that are connected to your work. Yeah, you've made. Well, let's start financially. I know that look at the end of the day, the church salvation is free but ministry costs. You know, we need we have to still support the work of the church. That is, it is what it is. And we have to do that in the season where people are being laid off. Unemployment lump numbers are through the roof. And people are really living in this season of uncertainty so how do you continue to operate in your kind of space with not all the resources that you would have if you were meeting physically and all was well in this wonderful economy that we have so what we had to do is we had to. I've never had to do this at a church before and I just thank God I have dynamic leaders who are, and this is another thing. All this goes back to the decisions that we make as pastors. Early on to do things and get systems in place. You know you have a strong foundation and strong system, not when it's breezy and beautiful outside but when the storm hits. You know whether or not you've got strong systems in place. So here's a left here's a lesson if the storm hits and things collapse, then you need to change your systems. Or you need to look at getting better people in these positions who know how to help you weather the storm. I promise you, Kevin is not weathering this storm by himself. No, I've got a team of people around me who have been through the storm and the rain, and they are able to say look, we made it through worse, we're going to make it through this so let's just adjust a little bit. And that's what we've had to do we've had to adjust our entire budget, you know, in the first three months of the. And so now we are on a week to week budget, where we are looking at everything week to week. And we have our finance team analyzing where we are, what it's going to take to operate what it's going to take to do this ministry pay staff, all these things week to week. And it's worked great for us. It's allowed us to really discuss to discover some things that we needed to clean up and also to become more efficient in some areas. Well, I'll just give you one example and I'm being transparent so we, most churches, and we still did it to was we did, you know, paper check requests, like if you got an expense or something and you want to fill out a check request to get it paid for, etc. Well, you can't be in person now, and things still have to be done. So, our director technology, who's, you know, dynamic created a an online check request process and has trained all of our leadership, and we will be going for with that from now on and it is just as we get things up, we get things paid, they paid faster. It's just, it's been phenomenal for us. So, but that was a system that was deficient. And so I want to suggest during this time we need to look at what our deficiencies are. Again, intentionality, pay attention, you know, pay attention to what your deficiencies are, what are your strings or your weaknesses. In this time, you have an opportunity to get better at those things. Most of us in our ministry would have never had seven weeks of a pause. This has been a while whereas I hate to hate to see a pandemic. I think for intents and purposes of the church, reimagining, rethinking, reprocessing, revisioning, taking the pause and just being able to stand still for a while to look at our ministry has been for us, it's been a blessing. And I want to suggest that you do the very same that you look at everything that you've been doing well that you haven't been doing well and you'd be honest with yourself as leaders. Back to in a minute, some decisions that we've had to make, but as leaders, I think even personally, you should spend some time taking an examination of you, of your ministry, of your gifts, of, you know, I've found some deficiencies in my leadership, that things I need to work on, things that I need to get better at, things that could help even further the mission of the church. And I had to be very honest about those things, because we can think we're so strong and the best pastors, you know, since life's bread. But the truth is, we all have things we can work on and I thank God for this season of pause and reset. So that's been the first thing we look week to week. The next thing I will say in terms of, of ordering the life of the church is, when you think about coming back. We still have property. And so we're going to be worshiping in facilities. So do you have a facilities plan when the church opens back up. We talked about this at our staff meeting last week. The church opens back up. Do you know how you're going to roll people back into the life of the church. What's your rollout plan. What's your regathering plan. So let's say for example because here's what I believe is going to happen. I can't don't quote me on this I just this is just Kevin, following the trends and following the facts. If in fact we went from being able to worship however many people we could worship down to, what was it 250, then down to no gatherings larger than 50, then no gatherings larger than 25, then no gathering is larger than 10. I almost guarantee you that when we're able to regather, we're not going to be able to have 300 400 500 people in the space at one time. So, I'll just say for a church like us, when we have, you know, twice three times that. How do we provide worship for people when we can come back. How do we provide facilities plan for that right. Can we do we have to go to four services, five services to accommodate, you know, 200 people at each service. How do we space those out. Do we go to a midweek service you go to a Saturday service. How is our facility prepared to handle that. What is it going to mean for the cleaning of a facility. Have you done a deep clean of your church. This is an airborne virus. There was a story that came out that a guy was in a restaurant he sneezed, and the virus spread through the air ducts and other people got contracted the virus. Are your events being cleaned out. Have you done a glee deep clean of your sanctuary. We have our building cleaned every week, even though we're not in it. Because you know like if you go on a long vacation you come back you got stuff everywhere. Just because you're absent doesn't mean you got to be absent from taking care of your grounds. It's the space of worship. So make sure that you do that and make sure you have a plan in place. An incremental worship rollout plan for when people come back. You are already prepared. So, I would offer that just as some things that we've done to put things in order. Because, you know, and it's always changing right you've got to be adaptable to so let me just add that in. So I'm going to light this pass it off but I want to say before I do that the cabinet's been working on things to consider as you go back into your settings and so that's going to be made available to all of our pastors but it'll be on our website and just been reading through I've been reading through all the possible things that people need to be considering and putting together also what the governor has put out that our regulations for our state. So that's going to be likely be made available to everybody. If not this afternoon tomorrow morning and and then also just on that same topic. Oh and put in the chat that the his center is going to be having a Thursday at 130 pro sponding to the club in 19 I'm hoping that the all of that piece can be made available as people are looking through the checklist. Yeah, but thank you so much for answering these questions and I think you wanted to touch a little bit on the Christian education component. And so I'm I'm going to I'm going to ask you I'm going to like pass the ball over to you and ask you to respond to that. I need to jump on this other one but it's been a blessing for me to once again. Like I said you didn't you didn't disappoint me at all and your fresh perspective and your intentionality and your creativity and empowerment of people and thank you for the work you do. Always good to see you my friend. Thanks. Blessings to you. So Dr. Muriel, before you go into Christian education. I want to just kind of think about getting us back we're 30 minutes off of our tentative schedule that was in pencil. So as you talk about it we're going to talk a little bit about that and then bring it up later as we are rounding up I want to get into one more piece on leadership so let me give you time to respond to that and then we're going to move our agenda. Okay, yeah I'll be brief Christian Ed keep doing it. If you have not created classes, keep creating them. Our Christian education on Sunday morning we had nine. We have nine Sunday school classes, Bible study classes, all of them are still meeting our goal again intentionality. Our goal is to make sure that every class still met. Every class leader got set up on either zoom or Google Hangouts. And each person got their own login credentials. They were able to share those login credentials with all their class members. Our classes have grown exponentially since we've been online. People can do them from the comfort of their home in their pajamas or whatever they want to do and not come to the physical space. Same thing for our meetings. All of our meetings are online. We get great results. I am and then as the pastor of the church I would also encourage you to do specialized congregation wide studies. So on Wednesday evening. I do a segment on live called stay in the course and last week I did a panel on the Ministry of Mental Health this coming Wednesday. I'm doing a panel with Dr Jimmy Abington of Emory and Dr Roland Carter on the power of hymns in times of crisis. So that's going to be our Wednesday night and tying in scripture to it. And I'm doing beginning tomorrow actually a seven week congregation study on the book of Revelation and the seven churches of Asia Minor. It's a zoom call. So it's not me just, you know, talking and teaching that way but it's a zoom call. We've got our registration at 200 and we've hit registration. And so we'll have. And so that's just another touch point of connection with your people right just an opportunity to to continue the education, really to expand it. So be creative with that and make sure that all your classes continue that should be a goal that they don't stop meeting because a lot of people find community through their Christian education small groups, Bible studies, etc. So thank you. Thank you. Those are great suggestions. So as we get ready to move into our next section before we leave this, I wanted to honor that. Dr Ron Patterson, Dr Micah Buoy and Derek Jacobs are also on the call. And they did a whole year with Dr mural with leadership and preaching and you know, iron sharpening iron. So as if I'm just going to give the three of you a chance to just make a quick response to some of the things that he has mentioned and some of the things that you have put in place. Already in the churches for the North Texas Conference. So Dr Patterson looks like you're moving forward to you want to go first. Hey my friend. You can't hear you. You're muted. We can't hear you. Good morning, Kevin. How are you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Hello everybody. As soon as I put my earphones on and started listening Kevin you were so wise I broke out paper and pencil and I've been writing ever since. As Diana said, I'm sharpening iron. You are giving me life. I mean, I just am like a sponge. This is fantastic. But at the park we are continuing to do zoom Sunday school is on zoom, a lot of prayer calls. My husband and I started a prayer online Bible study. He named it is called the pastor and her sidekick. I love it. So we are standing in touch. I spent at least an hour every day on the phone calling people and those phone calls make such a big difference. Our online giving is amazingly doing well. Our seniors come back with their check during the day and just hand me check so it is gratifying to feel that love. The most exciting thing we're doing in Hamilton Park is that once we saw all these jobs being lost in Dallas, we said we know there'll be extra amounts of hunger. And so we launched a feeding program to meet the hunger in our community. Everybody's hungry, the adults, the children. And so now we feed about 1000 people every week. We're going to go to the field, grab and go style. Get it and out. So they're in the building, you know, let 60 seconds or less. We love you but go. But it's a hot meal is nutritious. And the people that have come through just show the demographic of hunger right now. We have sheltered and unsheltered. We have black, white Latino. We have entire families, parents and little kids coming in. But the ones that always get me are the teenagers. When a teenage boy, you know, with his basketball comes in for a hot meal, that says you are really hitting something powerful. Now our challenge and I hope you all can help me with this is to how to leverage all those people that came through for that meal. What do we do to minister to them once this is over. That's what we're trying to figure out now but we are, but we are the park is alive and well. And thank God and thank you for this great phone call. Thank you. Okay. Dr. Bowie. Good morning, Kevin. Good seeing you again, man. We are a priest. I 87 anniversary on yesterday at man, folks still tweeting you and talking about you and matter of fact, I may use that if that. Anyway, I digress y'all go check it out. Powerful powerful message yesterday but we really are my discipleship, our pastoral care administration meetings. They're all virtual. Have a couple of folks on a call on the team. Our team is on this call today so I thank God for them. They have really stepped up man they know what it means to be nimble and flexible. I think we had to adjust. I think one thing you said, I think initially at me personally I thought this would last maybe, maybe about a month. And I think now, realizing we ended for the long haul, it's been a major adjustment. And I think this whole process is not me. It's my team so we were doing a great job. This Sunday. Not just because you preached but this was probably I believe one of our best experience worship experiences. Technologically things flow well so we really folks and I'll make sure that we get that tight. I said all time we're not the only game in town. If our stuff is quote unquote ragged they're gonna go to Hamilton Park matter of fact, the village is built a big old building they may go to the village and so like it's not competition but we want to make sure that we're doing new stuff. So I'm even thinking this week as we talk. I'm thinking I may do so and I got my team on the phone I think I want to do something on the couch. Just talk to folks conversation from the couch. Times of crisis so always trying to do something different. But one thing I really, I don't think my past of outreach is on the call but really I think now we have started meeting the needs of our senior sites but I know it's time for us to really really get out into the streets and do stuff so we still we're doing some stuff I think we really have to get an overdrive because I think can be said the best and you said it being intentional and I'm gonna say this I'm a close man this doing ministry like this has probably been more exhausting. I want you all to Google how zoom calls it's been proven how zoom calls can be so exhausting. Yeah, so little tip for some of y'all when y'all see me do this. That's a way to really get your breath, because with when you pitch it out you have to always be on and that's exhausting so so we do zoom calls my executive pastors on the call and on this meeting today. And you know we all do zoom I have we have our. I think I see minister Latasha she's right there she works for our women's ministry she's doing our interns she's doing a major double internship so so it's a lot going on. And I don't know men is it's exciting time I think they say these are the best of times and worst of times so the good thing about this we have a blank canvas, and we can paint it however we want. And you can't mess it up because it's never been done before. So we all start new church. So that's that's what we've been doing I appreciate your leadership and pressing our way through it. So, giving, I would say as nine I think Reverend master I giving I don't know what it's looking like today but we hadn't dropped off majorly but I believe it's going to start back up and what I've been doing. Like, like you said, like Dr Patterson said, I've been starting to call a lot of my members, not realize that how much they appreciate that. And even some of them believe it or not. You have some members I mean I text them I call them so even text sometimes go a long way so when they start talking more in the text I just call them, you know, but other than that. This has been some interesting times but it's exciting. I appreciate your leadership. And it's good being with my former cohorts. Absolutely. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kevin good to see you. Good to see you smiling this afternoon. Good. I'm smiling more these days. You know, we're inside and things are, you know, this pandemic kind of hit us in an interesting season, as Dr Bowie mentioned, we are finishing up a building about 30 days away 3045 days away so there's a high possibility when we finish our building we won't be able to So, but, but we've been able to utilize that to still build and gain momentum because we're constantly using social media to push out what's going on with the building and matter of fact we just put brand new pictures up yesterday it went viral all over social media so we're actually using that as an opportunity for us to to gain some energy and and some momentum and it's working. So, but it'll be interesting to see how this thing plays out five or five months from now we finally get in there according to what you're saying with CDC so. But you know, everything is holding pretty strong. Our giving is sustaining about, you know, it's, it's pretty strong it hasn't really dropped off that much. It's a little bit here and there but this past Sunday yesterday was very strong so you know people seem to building and all that they know that we have to continue to be supportive so that that really has been strong so I resonate with a lot of stuff that you have the insight to have given us and it really is making me think even more about a relaunch pro relaunch plan. And with my team, I like you have a very strong leadership team and so it's not just me but it's a it's a group of us it's a team of us who have really working to keep this thing moving. You know, each and every week, calling members I do call 10 a day that has been very helpful as you said and Dr buoy. And that just goes a long way just to have a brief conversation, you know how is it with your soul. As a matter of fact, we're doing a zoom is called this coming Sunday at five from five to six all members are able to get on the zoom to do what we're calling a how is it with your soul. Our where people just like you said connect people want to connect. And although I'm completely zoomed out like everybody else. It's just the only way that we can really connect and so we're looking forward to doing that. We have a drive through food bank coming up on our parking lot our new parking lot. We're going to 250 prepackaged meals for for families in need and so the city just so it was pretty excited about that so just trying to find ways to continue building momentum and meeting needs and and I'm excited about this. It sounds crazy. I'm not excited about the pandemic. But I'm excited about the opportunity has given me to look at my leadership to spend more time with my kids, which is something I haven't been able to do. And my wife as well and then really just kind of reflect on on the church and where God is leading so I'm using as an opportunity to really look at my own leadership and spend some quality time. I had not been able to do before so it's basically blessing in disguise in some ways. I'll stop there. Okay. All right, thank you. I thank all three of you for your leadership in the North Texas conference and sharing with us what you're doing. So for this part of the the call what we had hoped to do is have Dr. Mary talk about leadership. I think he's done an excellent job of answering came his questions and talking about leadership. But before we transition into the preaching part of it. I wanted to know if there are any colors and I know I'm running a risk by opening it up. But we are really wanting to get your questions answered with him being here. Almost like present. So if there are any questions that you want to ask him about leadership before we transition. This would be your time you can unmute and ask Dr. Mary of your question. Okay. So, you were talking about the pause. And I was wondering, we're going to be exploring this Thursday about using this time to take churches through a visioning process. What, how are you engaging the leaders of your church and to kind of use, use this liminal space to think about the future. Yeah, great question. I don't know how much visioning we can really do right now. Aside from how is this going to impact the things that we weren't doing. How can we do those things better. We're we're in a pandemic. You know what I would net what I would not like to happen is and what I've tried to avoid is thinking to first of all we're not going to we're not going to get away from who we are like we have a vision we know what we're doing. You know, our vision is to be light in the community and around the world through discipleship service social justice. We're still living out that vision. Why is still going to be there. Now what we do is obviously going to change. I will say going forward, we will obviously be working to implement more online Bible study experiences and extending that into our Christian Ed. So, in as much as we're doing visioning, it's really about how can we keep on doing what's working for us right now. How can we keep that going in our churches. Like we're not going to change our entire approach to ministry, because it's working in fact for us as our approach to ministry that's that's helping us maintain. I think what conferences are going to have to think about if you're looking at more of a larger perspective. The conference is going to have to think about how do you help churches heal from this. How do you help pastors heal sometimes and I'm not saying this for any of the conference in particular. But I've discovered sometimes there can be a disconnect from the hierarchy and those who are on the ground doing the work during the in church work the local church work. And sometimes I think the the institution believes that pastors and churches can move to places not ready to go yet. And I think there's going to have to be a significant time for pastors and people to heal. Yeah, doing a lot of what your son's doing right there, a lot of hugging a lot of talking. Look, we understand Oh and look, look, we get it. We get it. There's going to have to be a lot of time. If you know I would urge conferences right now, not to add anything else to to the pastor's plate. But I would urge conferences right now to look at more of how do we care for our clergy. Who we're going to rely on and depend on to lead our churches after through this pandemic and after it. That's if that were if that were me, and it's not me y'all, you know y'all see things I don't see or you. But I, I chair our clergy effectiveness committee here. And one of the things that I see from clergy that we have to review. Is that there's a ton of broken this there. And there's a lot of hurt there that has gone on a dress for a long time. And we can expect our pastors to be effective and vision with our people and leadership. You know, so what does it mean to have more of a pedagogy of care and moving forward in that care so that you can vision you can reimagine. What I would if I were in that space, I'd focus on heavily. How do you how do you remove the financial burden or at least help with it of your churches. And thinking even even beyond that, if you're thinking about six months from now. You know, how do you how do you help churches that don't make it, or pastors who don't make it. And seeing deaths of individuals in COVID-19 this thing continues. How do you deal with deaths of churches. I just think we have to there's a lot to think about. And if I were, if I were in conference leadership anywhere, I would put a hedge of protection and care around my pastors right now. Yes, yes, as much as much as I could. And because every day, every single and I understand that we have to vision and we got to look forward to leadership. But every day we got to think about what it means to live week to week. What it means live. I don't know what's gonna happen next week. And so this is a week to week thing that every week the dynamics may change. I don't know if that was helpful at all. I just, it was thank you for that. I appreciate it both as we think about how to help our local churches and how the and how conference leadership. Giving some insight to what's going on with our churches. I appreciate both those pieces. Dr Muriel. Yeah. Brandy be good. Thanks, Joshua. Dr Muriel connected to some of the things you said in that point. One of the things that's happened in this is I thought I was, I thought I was going to finish out a series on zoom, and it ended up transitioning into another sort of more private support group of the young clergy. And in that so I never finished that series finished and then we started another series that went public, but from that just was led to continue sort of that talk and support. And some folks came in that aren't necessarily local. They're young clergy folks that I know and ended up I'm sort of facilitate not sort of I ended up I'm facilitating sort of a support discussion and network of young clergy that are working in churches. And this past week. They shared that they're basically me as a facilitator. I'm sort of on suicide watch with them. Like they, they verbalize the fact that like this is not they're not okay. They're managing day to day. They can't think about week to week right. Their leadership doesn't really know their leadership thinks things are fine their congregations think things are fine but they don't know. And so can you talk just about care for pastors care for our peers care for our loved ones care as leaders. I don't really have any pastors on, you know, like that I'm managing but other people on the call do and you do so. Could you just lend some of what you are feeling and knowing and possibly doing in this moment connected to that. Yeah. I want to be honest and transparent during this time with you all because I feel like I can be. And I know we always we talk about collegiality and wanting to be collegial with one another. What we have done. And I can only speak for within our denomination based on what I've experienced. I think what we have done is created the illusion of collegiality and not a reality of it. All the focus groups and the, you know, ordination groups and all the small groups and all the, the meeting that we do at district meetings and all that supposed to curate this experience of collegiality trust and support. But one of the issues that we see pervasive among clergy, and I'm going to go deeper brand with your question is a sense of competition. It is unhealthy. Especially if it is, if it is presented as collegiality. And that's just so I want to I want to first set the framework for my answer by saying by asking about the imposing question. How can I be collegial and caring with and for someone with whom I'm in competition. So I think we have to start there. And I'm not saying that all clergy are in competition, but I just think our system has set up that unhealthy perception. And so it's very difficult for each for people to call one another sometimes. And so I'll just say that, first and foremost, that's why I go back to this term intentionality. Sometimes you have to be intentional about having people you can reach out to who may not be in your clergy circle. And who may not be in your district, or in your neighborhood, or maybe on this call, I don't know. I just I just think it's important for us to have all types have those types of outlets. So what does that then mean for the care of the pastor. Well, one of the things that I'm that I've tried to do during this time and I will offer it to you as a different method of care is coaching linking up with someone who has been in the throes of ministry and maybe near retirement, or has led and has gone through almost every scenario situation as a pastor that you can imagine. And then you just link up with that person and person and ask them for a season to coach you. I'm about to do that now because I want to even go through more and understand more about certain points of ministry and this becomes a person for me that has served perhaps a larger church that has understand some of the personal personal dynamics and people dynamics and then it becomes someone with whom I can converse and experience that type of care. So that's what I would say I would say pursue that. The other piece I think is conferences have to give clergy the space to care for themselves. And because we are in a denominational system. I think I read something yesterday. Was it from the Iowa conference. Was it Iowa conference where the bishop is giving her clergy three days of mandatory. Yes. Okay, mandatory rest and and just kind of time to break away I think that's great. I don't know if I would extend that through Sunday but I think that's, I definitely think during the week you give me like a Tuesday through Thursday or Friday. Look, I'm good. If you could take care of all of that, because I just also want to want to be clear that your people still want to see you on Sunday. Look, they don't care that you at the beach. They don't care that you're tired that you know you've you've been with at funerals and with families all week. These folks have been taking care of kids working long job some of them are unemployed. They need their pastor on Sunday morning right now. They need you. I have committed I will try my very best not take a Sunday off during this pandemic. I don't know how people need they need you. But during in the meantime, you know, you do have to care for yourself so those are the three things Brandon I would offer is consider someone outside of your immediate peer group for that care. If you're coaching, you know someone who can really help to help you work on your deficiencies. And, you know, the third one I would say has to be a conference responsibility. The conference has to give the pastor's time and space to do that. So, so, Josh, sorry, Brandon. I want to think you're will you name something right before brandis point which I think feeds into her point. There are a number of churches that probably won't make it after this is over. And more so, I think the reason the North Texas conference has a black church initiative is because the black church vitality is not the same as a North Georgia college. So, so what. What do you do with that spirit of competition, if you will, right the fact that you probably have more black bodies than you have black spaces. And I think one of the things that I find very interesting about this conversation is, and I'm just maybe named at the beginning to call I'm sorry I was late I had three year old I bought with me to church, but she, but here is. And you're like this is your second senior pastor appointment. Right. And cascade is one of the largest black churches in our denomination. And so we are all sitting here. Receiving wisdom from the mouth of a millennial right who has been tasked or truck or entrusted with a significant assignment. And I am, I am struck by the imagery. And also, I would like to, you know, probably hear your perspective on how that's played out in your in your annual conference. Like it's because I think we were we're treating this time as if like we're going to continue to. And this is this is not a shot to anybody or anything but it's like, we continue to entrust the same people. We're not experts when the truth is we're not experts anymore. And this is a season that we're all going through for the first time. And so I'm, I, I'm, I wonder about, about that, how other annual conferences are handling that. And also, like I said, how do you, how do you create collegiality when the truth is, many people may not have appointments after this right well I'm seeing healthy places to be. I'm sorry. You know, and those are questions that I will say to you that I know where my limitations are. And I am not afraid to ever say that I don't know. I do not know, after this season, how the church is going to look. I don't know how conferences are going to deal with pastors who are pastoring churches currently that may not make it. I don't know how our denomination is going to look. And because I have a lot of things to think about right. I have one to three students, three individuals on my team at our church who are in the ordination process. It's going to look like for them to be ordained and then if they're ordained where they're going to be, I mean, yeah, they're cascade we're going to try to make room but you know, the truth is the, the well only run so deep. And so, I don't know. But here's what I do know. I trust God. That's what I do know. And I have, and what I have discovered and experienced from the Lord, because again we're still in a spiritual enterprise. Right. What I have experienced is where I don't know what is going to happen. God knows. Now, I'm talking to a bunch of preachers I thought I would get at least three or four amens right there. But I thought I would at least say, look, if I can't get y'all to say amen I don't know what we go do Dr. Bowie I don't know what we go do if I get the preachers to say. Look, if I can't bust out at Romans 828, we know that all things work together for the good of them who love the Lord and those who are called according to his purpose. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what I will do if I can get it. But you know, that's, that's the truth man. And, and I realized that God puts us in certain situations for, you know, just like Esther for such a time as this, I, I don't think that any of us are where we are. By mistake, I don't think I'm serving this church right now in a season of global pandemic by mistake. And what can I do individually to use my voice and, you know, all that I've learned and all that I've gleaned to share and help help others and then this is a shared burden, right. So how are we as churches extending ourselves to help other people. So that's those are the things we have to look at. I do recognize that that can be brought this up earlier. I think now is a time for prophetic leadership, and we talk about prophetic leadership. And this is what this whole cohort's been about and all the sessions that we've had and we've talked about what does it mean to step out and tell forth what the Lord has said what does it mean to be on the margins of leadership, as people are looking, looking at you and not understanding why you're doing what you're doing, what does it mean to be out there and be that voice for the marginalized and tell your people that we don't know how we're going to come through this, but we know that God is on our side. And as long as God is on our side, we will come through it. Hey, I want to follow up real fast with Joshua's question and I think for everybody listen on this call. When you talk about courageous leadership, I think it's tied in with humility. And one thing I realized when we start the BCI process. I had met Kevin pride to this whole process and I knew he was much younger than me, but I knew I had something I could glean from him. So I think when you get past your ego and your age and realize it's not about you. It's about kingdom work. That's when you can get past it, Joshua. So what I realized, I mean, just going back yesterday, you know, when we brought Kevin in via, you know, technology, I told Congress is going to be a word this brother can preach, you know, and I salad say this. I believe the system has created this, which is totally unhealthy. I think when you realize the bigger picture that is not about us is about seeking to save that which is lost. And I think Kevin Josh, I'm Josh is Josh what I'm I'm just preaching cohort stuff I learned from you that I'm pulling into them now. He says something y'all and Reverend Masters, I think Josh is on or something in this process. If we think about this y'all at the foot of the cross, the ground is level. Yeah, there's no big eyes, no small use, no rich, no poor, no black, no white, and the beautiful thing about this God is raising up new prophetic leaders out of this crisis. And it may be more millennial. So, but baby boomers. I'm a Gen Xer. We have to humble ourselves because there's plenty good room, but everybody has a divine assignment for this next season. So I'm clear about that. And I think we all have to be clear on this call, who we are and who's we are, and who God has gifted and blessed for this next season. And I'm clear about, you know, and I'll be honest with you for a minute, I'm like, I'm, I can coach and lead Kevin, but guess what, it's not about that. It's about humbling yourself and being sensitive and discerning of what God and who God is using. So I think the piece that not only I have, but we all need to have in his phone, it can lessen suicide and lessen hate oration when you know who and who's you are. So I'm just going to chill. I'm going to stop talking on that. Now we're back. So let me kind of help us to regroup as we get ready for the afternoon. We are all in the position of ministry. And one of the primary purposes of our two primary purposes of our cohort has been prophetic leadership and sermon preparation. Our cohort members have turned in sermons that we have read and evaluated and I know that the cohort members from last year are remembering those days. So we're going to shift now and move into a time of sermon preparation to focus on what it's like to preach to empty pews. And if there's anyone that is here that's preaching to full pews, you can just kind of tune us out right now because that means that you're not in this group. But we could not not do this piece because that's what we are about. And I think that that is the preaching prep is something that all of us need to be about even those of us that's not serving churches. We are asked to preach from time to time in the different churches. So sermon prep has been really important. And as Dr. Bowie mentioned, Dr. Muriel preached yesterday for St. Luke's 87th anniversary and I would lift that sermon up. So we can go and look at it on their web page is recorded. But sermon prep and sermon delivery is one of the things that he shines at. He may not be good at everything, but sermon prep is is is and sermon delivery is is one of his really strong suits among many but I just want to just very quickly tell this story. I was in Atlanta for another meeting and went to cascade. I have a sister there that's not a biological sister but a sister in Christ and I heard Dr. Muriel preach. And I was really in awe about that because the preaching that I really tune into is if it's biblically based and I thought, hmm, I was going to another church for the second service I thought let me just see if he can do this again. So second service he preached and it was just as motivating and inspiring and after worship I did talk with him and I said, how do you, how do you do this kind of preaching. He said is it talked about biblical based and as he talked preached at St. Luke yesterday, virtually his sermon, talking about the woman with the issue of blood and her issue was the quarantine so I don't want to go into that sermon that much, but Dr. Bowie and Dr. Muriel you can tell that I listened to that that sermon on yesterday. So how do we do sermon preparation with the focus on preaching to the empty fuse. I want, I want Dr. Muriel to talk about that but I want to also allow time for you to ask him questions about what he's doing and then our last hour where will be spent on doing ministry with the poor. Let's talk about sermon prep so I'm passing it over to you, Kevin. Right. I want to argue that, even though we are not physically in the building. The pews are as full today as they have ever been. The world wide web is your pool pit is your excuse me is your congregation. Your pulpit may be your dinner table your couch I'm doing a series right now called lessons from the living room and literally preaching in our living room. And that's been an adjustment but it's, it's had some very powerful moments. I would say that your voice can go further now and it brings to light what second Timothy four to says, preach the word be prepared in season and out of season. Maybe you can encourage with great patience and careful instruction that our, our work never stops. No matter where we are, we are preachers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And no matter what season we are in, in the sanctuary out of the sanctuary, no matter where we are, we should be preaching and reaching the world with the gospel of Jesus. I will say because right now I've not not seen such a large concentration of preaching on social media and online at one time. I mean, can you just imagine with me how many people are every day being reached with a message of the good news of Jesus, if that is if we're preaching the good news. Some of this other stuff that we hear I don't know what it is, but for those of us who preach the good news of Jesus Christ we are reaching a large number of people with the message of Christ and so I think that's important for us to acknowledge that. So I want to hear from you briefly before I get any deeper how has it been for you preaching. Not those of you who've had to preach consistently. And even those of you who just may have done a sermon or two how's it been. Not being able to do it from the comfort of your pulpit on Sundays. I think somebody's talking right is that Jim. Jim, I think you're on mute. Okay, Jim, we can't hear you. He's going to unmute himself here. Okay, yeah. Yeah, our faith is certainly an incarnational faith. And this is wonderful to be together virtually but oh my gosh I miss my people on this. And you know where they hugging a bunch of people and, you know, it I was a, I was a theater major and undergraduate graduate school and I liken it to we're not actors of course in ministry but on the stage playing to an empty house or our NBA NFL playing to known in the stands it's it's a whole different. It's a whole different game. It's hard I think somebody else. Thanks Jim for your honesty. I would say, Dr. Miro. The first. It was like a shock. I think I talked to my, the cohort last week in this preaching cohort. It hit me. The mind of the word get the world is my. I'm always intentional, not just talking to the members of St. Luke, but literally talking to the world. So I envisioned the second week and I remember in Linda Mayberry is on the call she's my executive pastor and also Pastor George battle. So once huesy when I first I guess pre recorded. You know what I envisioned was that Jesus was actually and knowing that I was preaching and we always say this we're preaching to audience of one we don't preach for a man's to shout. We don't preach for transformation and change. And as long as I'm pleasing Jesus I know that sounds real Christian ease but I'm saying Lord I'm preaching to you so you can take this word and change change the world. Now that it's kind of like I was a journalism minor new stuff is coming out. Now, of course I want to see a head nod or a man every now and then. But when you see like, Pastor Natasha kind of facilitates our live stream stuff so you hear you see responses via, you know, Facebook and live stream so you know you make an impact but I realize now I'm preaching to one person. Jesus, but I know I'm going to connect with the world so I'm good with it was hard but I'm not gonna say I'm a pro at it but I think I've got it down and it can get better. But I'm enjoying it. I want to say that I'm enjoying it. Also, we made a pretty smooth transition to online because my admin has an iPhone 10, and he's able to edit, take my sermon and edit in the music piece and then put it on our website so it was seamless. But I tell you, I'm doing Facebook live preaching is amazing. I love the feedback. That part has gone well. I want to add talking about pastoral care and taking care of yourself as a pastor. After those first five weeks of me preaching, I was burned to a crisp. And so I was happy to step back and let my associate preach. And that's been something some self care for me to just step back and let somebody else carry that for a little while, give me time to regroup and then come back again. Excellent. Excellent. Anybody else just want to provide that space. Yeah, these are these are all great thoughts. I want to suggest that you are now people's internet pastor, you ever considered yourself that if you want to add a new title to your business card at internet pastor. That your people that you got a lot of new members right now your people's internet pastor, and they're going to start referring to you is that the longer we stay in this, the more of a normal and the normally long you say anything it normalizes right. Children of Israel and in exile in Babylon, you know, Jeremiah 29, you know the prophet says, look, you're going to be here for 70 years so you might as well build some houses, have kids, marry them off plant vineyards. Because I'm going to revisit you after 70 years I need you to normalize an exile for a while and I look at this as we are normalizing in an exile, and God did not tell us to stop building. He says keep building, keep building your ministry, keep preaching the word, keep reaching people for Jesus. They may not walk down your aisle but they can fill out a form online and you can call them and they can become an e member. You may not be preaching from a pulpit but you can get on a couch you can go outside next to a tree, you can you know you can you can set up a table with a green screen and you can proclaim that Jesus lives and people will still hear the gospel. The Lord never told us to stop growing. He just told us to go Matthew 28 and so I think now we have a greater opportunity to go. And the preacher is still still the most powerful voice in society, I believe. I think pastor preacher prophet is still the most powerful voice in society when we use our voices. Let me say that again when we use our voices, coupled with the word of God, I still think we have the greatest influence. So yesterday, I preached a sermon that a title mama didn't raise no fool. That was the title of the sermon. And it was a response sermon because again preaching is contextual as well and so it's incarnational but it's also contextual. So I knew that the people tuning in to cascade were going to want to hear what my perspective was on our governor reopening Georgia, and how that was related to, you know, how it is that we continue our ministry as Christians. So I went to the Proverbs, and I went to Proverbs 18 and you read Proverbs 18. It's in that section that what I call the couplets section the nuggets of wisdom section between Proverbs 10 and 29. I mean, in no distinct order, you can just go in and you can just kind of pick some nuggets of wisdom in these Proverbs is not like Proverbs one through nine or Proverbs 33 one. And so I picked out Proverbs to Proverbs 18 to Proverbs 18 1213 and Proverbs 21, where Solomon is juxtaposing the difference between the foolish and the wise. And he talks about and when you get to verse number 21 life or death lies in the power of the top. How it is that when we speak foolishly, our words can be destructive and can cause death. When we speak wisely, our words can bring life. And so I talked about my upbringing as a, you know, as a proud Mississippian I'm from the deep south. Y'all in Texas, y'all Southern, but Mississippi is deep south, right? We, we, we deep south. Is Texas even considered stuff? Yeah, they are. Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry. I had to do it. Mississippi's deep south with deep south. And, you know, in deep south, in deep south, we have a lot of sayings growing up things like, you know, when, when you weren't, when, you know, somebody's trying to talk to you and they weren't getting through. They would say things like, I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. Or when you were moving real slow, you know, grandma won't say you moving slow as molasses. Things like that we just said in the south. And one of the things that we always heard growing up that I continue to say that even this day is mama didn't raise no fool. And so I talked about how, how it is that that deep Southern saying was conventional wisdom for how it is that we should use our intellect when making decisions, particularly when we are in positions of authority. How it is that those who govern from positions of authority must always speak wisely and not foolishly because if we speak foolishly, then it can cause death. We speak wisely can bring life. And so I juxtapose that with, you know, opening up too soon and all that. But for my context, it was appropriate. It's important for us as ministers of the gospel to use the scriptures to convey a prophetic message for the times in which we live. But now there's no need for anybody be preaching about, you know, prosperity and all this other stuff. No, we are in a debt we are in the wilderness right now. Right people we are in a pandemic people are dying every day. And so people want to hear your voice in the midst of the wilderness, crying out saying everything's going to be all right. Right. By faith. If it were me. And you just dining asking my approach, I've approached preaching in this season to connecting with faith and, you know, keeping people on top of their faith. I really tried to connect a lot with the Old Testament and particularly what it means to come through very difficult trying season. This coming week I'm exploring what it means to really trust God when you can't trace God. And looking at Abraham and Isaac on the mountain and how it is that Abraham didn't see the ram in the bush, until God changed his perspective. And in the season of pandemic we don't know where the ram in the bush is, but God is even changing our perspective in the season. So it's important to approach preaching in this season in a way that your people can connect the preach. And then I want to also say that they need to see that. They can also say that they need to see you vulnerable. That's that's something we don't do very well. Preachers don't like to be very vulnerable. But I think in this season your people need to know that you're wrestling with this, just as much as they are. And a part of the wrestle is, I'm getting a man from John, a part of the wrestle is like, we can't see you. We need to be near you. And a part of our faith is, you know, not with not not keeping ourselves apart right you know forsaking the assembling of ourselves together we need to. We don't want to forsake the assembly but now we can assemble. I think people your people need to know that you miss them even though you may not as much. Sometimes pastors need a break from their people a man so I should have got about 27 a man's I know we got 31 people on the call I should have got 27 a man's at least from that. Sometimes I think people. Sometimes I think the people need a break from us. Amen. I don't think it's a bad thing that we're that we're getting this break. I think for pastors and preachers your people need to have an opportunity to appreciate you and appreciate what you bring in this season. This thing's been recorded so I'm not going to say too much about that but your people will appreciate you. They'll appreciate you a lot more right now if you take time to be their pastor and preach sermons people are going to remember your sermons right now for years to come they're not going to. Sometimes they may not remember what we ever preach but in a pandemic. They don't remember what you're talking about. They don't remember that sermon that, you know, in quarantine day 95. And when they were ready to give it up and throw it all the way that their pastor spoke a word, and it meant the world to them and kept them going to another 95 days. So I want to just set the framework, not necessarily telling you how to preach because you all know how to preach. But really the mindset for preaching is what I've tried to focus on I've tried to put myself in the home with the mom, who is working a full time job, and now who has to care for her and teach her three children, in addition to being on conference calls and, you know, having to worry about whether or not she's going to get laid off because the revenue and coming in from from the job, or, you know, for that essential worker who's at the grocery store all day. And, you know, they've never been appreciated up until this point now every time we go to the grocery store y'all is saying thank you thank you and they're putting their lives on the line every single day. You know, so that we can eat and still not getting paid a lot of money or for that teacher who is having to adjust because she's been teaching here he or she has been teaching for 35 years and has never had to do online class online teacher, and now it's an adjustment. So, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the listener of the end user that's what I call and so I would encourage you to do the very same. You're no longer preaching to just you again, you're no longer just preaching to your congregation. I do have a totally new following. I happen to think that when we come out of this Coronavirus pandemic that churches are going to be filled much like they were after 911 at World War two. I think this is going to be another moment for the church. This gets back then I think then this connects with almost asking earlier about the visioning. Let's say we come through this, we get a vaccine, there will be one come through all this. And now you got more people knocking at your door sitting in your pews, because you have connected with them, you know, virtually first. So the question is what you're going to do. Now when you come out of this you've been preaching all these strong sermons online at the house. You come back and your sermons go from a 10 to a six ain't gonna work. That was a man moment right there ain't gonna work. I would suggest that you ought to be doing your best preaching right now. We ought to have a preaching marathon going on right now. You ought to put as much content out as you can. I don't wear people out but you should put as much content out as you can take this opportunity to do some special topics that you probably would not have preached on had you been, you know, inside of your sanctuary. Use this opportunity. Maybe some of you, some of us were too afraid to preach certain things because we don't want to look at some of the faces of our people. But guess what you're just looking at a camera now. So say what you got to say and let the spirit have his way. So this is really an opportunity for each of us to hone in our craft. There's another very important lesson from this to be gleaned and that is because you are having to record your sermons now. We started off doing them live and then we decide you know what we're going to pre record and you know we'll get it to our staff videographer they'll put it together we'll just live streaming on Sunday. But it gives me an opportunity to go back and now watch my sermon because I have to review it. So, whereas I may not have been reviewing my sermons before now I've got to go back. And I have to meticulously watch myself because we were our worst critics right we don't like to watch ourselves preach. I got to go back and watch myself you got to go back and watch yourself to say why did I say that. Why did I do that. Why did that. And the beauty about preaching now is that if you have enough time you can go back and correct it. You can go back and repreach your sermon. Some of you may want to do that but I've had to the other week I didn't intentionally do it, but I had to go back and repreach I was about 25 minutes into somebody make my clothes about to bring it home and low and behold my computer. I don't know if it went in sleep mode. So might then cut off the recording I said dog on it. So it gave me an opportunity to go back, watch the sermon I said, I could say this a little differently, I could redo this. So I went back and re preached the entire sermon and come to find out the second attempt was better than the first attempt. So these are opportunities that you'll congregate I would not say this in front of my people. And if you all tell any of my church I went back and preach the sermon again I will deny it. But I just want you to know that this is your opportunity really to hone in your on your craft and your skill by some self evaluation and examination. So I want to stop there and just really answer any questions about, you know, maybe form or what are some of the some of the questions that you all may have about preaching that I can hone in on so that we can make our time together a little more effective. I have a comment. And that is, when we're starting this back in March, on March 22 to do this, some advice that was given to me by a professional was to think outside the box. And so I did. And like you, I record the sermon, but also I don't court it. I'm not record this the sermon usually in the sanctuary, but other times like the introduction and the benediction, and maybe some parts in the middle I'll record someplace else. For example, on one Sunday, a week ago I preached about the power of the resurrection. And so I went to the local power plant and spoke outside it, and that was recorded, and then that was edited together and so that was a lot of fun. Owen, the, from our tour together, the power plant is right smack next door to Salem Kinzer United Methodist Church. So I started to add the camera, my son's 18 and studying, wants to study film next year in college. So I had him record me in the back of Salem Kinzer and then turn the camera around said this is the power company right here. And that was a lot of fun. And then yesterday I preached about the importance of listening to God. And so I went upstairs for a benediction to our third floor of our building where we have the control panel for our carillon. And so it goes off at noon and it goes off also at 12. And so I went up there and I filmed the benediction while the chimes are going off. So that that was kind of fun. So I would encourage others to do that. It's fun that the members seem to like it. And it's nice change of pace and and so many of you and I've had times in your preaching, like, you know, man, if I if I had the opportunity to do this on location. It will be so much better. Well, this is this opportunity. So I invite you to take advantage of it. Absolutely. Thank you, John for sharing that. I had a question more geared to what you were saying about the possible influx of people coming into our churches because of the quality of preaching that we're doing. I wonder, had you even thought of had you been thinking about prepping our people for the possible influx of people that may be coming into our doors because they connected with you personally as the pastor. I get the time to go back into our churches. You know people miss their pastor. They want to touch. They miss their proximity to their pastor to their church to their friends and new people may not. Well, congregants may not be thinking, Oh, we need to be ready to welcome these new people as well to kind of set the stage for the quality of preaching they're going to receive when they come in. So I wonder, had you been thinking about that. Yeah, then I pushed that back on the pastor. How are you preparing them for that. Everything's about intention now and everything's about preparation. So I think you need to be we need to all be talking about life after this being very intentional. And I think you need to do it over and over and over again how do your system and all these things go back in the systems right. How do your how does your, how do you welcome guests when you come back. I'm gonna tell you a big change for us. And I'm not saying that we're going to totally eradicate it but our moment of sweet what we call sweet sweet spirit, where we pass this the passing of the piece. Right, we take a moment and worship and that's when everybody goes around and greets everybody. But when we come back, there's still going to be a lot of anxiety around social distancing. Don't love me. Don't touch me. Don't, you know, if you don't give me six feet is six feet at least give me for right so I think we were going to have a culture already of disconnection. Even when we come back to our church. So I think we have to prepare for that. I think as the pastor we have to be preparing people to welcome. We have to be welcoming. And, you know, even if we have to say look, we're going, we are going to devote a significant amount of time to welcoming the people who are new among us and not saying that they're going to be a whole lot of new people there. They're main and they may come for a couple weeks and find out the church is mean they may leave. But I think you have about two. I think you've got a good two weeks. When we get back two weeks. That's what that's what I'm putting my mind to two weeks to capture all of those folks who may have connected with you and who may want to physically visit your church. You've got two weeks to really connect and say and get your people to the place where you say look we've been wanting our church to grow. God has given it to us. How are we going to accept it and you know woe into us as pastors if we do not prepare our people for that other questions other other thoughts on that. I want to say a word briefly about somebody. Jim, are you coming on. Yeah, there you go. You. Okay, there you go, Jim. Oh, no, I was going to say. Okay, I thought you were you were saying something. Let me say a word about ministry with children. And how many of y'all are offering children church experiences right now. Okay, good, good, good. There are some tools out there that you can do that quite easily. Right now media has a lot of resources. Also, yeah, right now is great. Also Google Hangouts. You can set up a portal through Google Hangouts to where you can offline have a teacher instructor come online work with the kids. We do four of those on a Sunday, different times and then we do also one with our young adults on Sunday evening. And then there's a devotional time for children and youth and young adults every day of the week that's led by our youth pastor. So intentionally sharing the word with all age groups, all demographics. Again, those things don't need to stop just because we're virtual. In fact, I think we can expand. So I just wanted to offer that and the content to the content is very important. It's important primarily because people still need to be able to connect with theology with our theology. Because they're hearing a lot of stuff out there. I still think we have, we have the best theology there is out there and we need to, it needs to be front and center right now. People need to know about theology of grace and what it means to our theology about evil and how it is that we, how do you reconcile and those are those are deep questions that people are going to ask you is the is corona virus and active God. Is God punishing us because, you know, of our just our wretchedness, right, you know, people are asking these questions, these are things that we're hearing young people are asking these questions, especially, and then some. So our senior members going to ask these questions. So how do we wrestle how do we, how do we inform. How does our theology inform a time of pandemic inform us during a time of pandemic. I think these are very important things we need to consider as we're as we're talking. As we're preaching and teaching and providing spaces for people to connect with us. Can I stop here and ask some questions and get some gain some questions get some questions. Anybody who may have some more. I've had just a plethora of those kind of in time prophecy. Here you could a second. It's God is not the instigator God is always at ground zero but that they're only to to make all things new, always present with us but certainly not the instigator. So you're right. I mean, I channel surf to see what's out there. And there's there's a lot of a lot of God blaming going on and, you know, better get right, you know, use the last days. So it does give us a nice opportunity to preach grace. Yeah, and I think that's a great point. You know, these in time prophecies and all that I get that, but you know, the writers of the Bible always thought we were in the last days. Absolutely. So they didn't know that we were going to be reading their their writings today. I mean, I think this is important for us to share with our people that, you know, these times are not unique to the world to world history. And so, in the midst of all the chaos that you know we're still the people of faith, and we need to be preaching, you know what a sound. I just think that's very important just wanted to lift that other comments other thoughts. Question on first time visitors you were talking about the number of people who were coming and visiting your site. So how do you capture their information connect with them to follow up and then try to connect them with a greater congregation and and discipleship. Yeah, great question. Is it okay if I, if I share my screen for a second. I want to I want to just want to take you just to show you a couple things that we're doing. I'll just go here. Let me create a new tab and and let me pull that over here. Just one moment. Take some of this stuff down. Okay. Give me one second. I'm going to share this. Let me see if you guys can see this one moment. Let me turn my share on. Can you all see my screen yet. Let me try to do it again. Okay, here it is. While you are doing that may I ask just send a message I'm not seeing everyone's name in the never mind never mind answered my own question. Okay, I just wanted to share this with you all can if you all can see this. Let me know. So when you go to our website. And this came out of a. We ultimately kind of revamped our website during this season of pandemic. And this is the revelation Bible study I was telling you all about what people could register right here online. And then I did an introduction to the book of revelation that everybody needs has to watch before they come into the class on Tuesday. One of the things that we did in terms of our virtual church we actually created our director technology actually created a virtual church. Or so people on Sunday morning when they log on there on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube we stream to all those platforms, but our virtual church is a very unique unique experience. So when you log on, we have, we put online the same thing people would get if they came into our physical sanctuary. So we put hospitality we put check in, we put all their all the Christian education opportunities. So when guests log on to our site and they enter our virtual church the very first thing they see if your guest is our first time guest check in. That's just a form. I want to this may be a Google doc I need to. Yeah, this is from Google forms. Very quick all they have to do is you know input their information. Here it captures some very important information that we use when they click submit. This goes to our hospitality ministry. And they get contacted immediately when they connect with our church. We probably have more people connecting through this method now that we did connected when people came into the physical sanctuary. But this is building our database it's a great tool, and it keeps people connected and people are logging on, you know, constantly throughout the week. Let me go down here. We also want it so there are a couple things that are important to our church. One of the things that was very important and we, we didn't want to lose this piece was our bulletin. So every Sunday morning, our church members get a bulletin, and we wanted to keep that, albeit virtually so they can get the bulletin online. It's, it's a abbreviated bulletin but they can still get it. The other very important piece to our church to our members was the prayer list. On the back of our bulletin, we have a list of, you know, dozens of names of people who our members pray for they call they contact they send cards. So it was very important for us to keep this active. This is just a Google Doc, it's kept up by our pastor of pastoral care. Anytime someone gets sick in the hospital. They die. These names go into this list. There's just a link that's embedded in the form. It's always live right so it's always kept current. So we have those who are, you know, being healed in the nursing homes rehab facilities. Those are being healed at home. And then this was a very important piece of the bereavements anyone who's died in our church, so that people can send them condolences. Again, this is a living document. So if I types. So if I go in and type something on this document right now because I have access to it. It'll populate onto the website. Which is, you know, which which helps us tremendously. So we don't have to keep seeps in an email and documents back and forth. Just a Google Doc. And so I think Google Docs are free. This wasn't this was something that we added so that people could connect. Let's call our virtual Grand Hall Grand Hall is our lobby, our Narthex, if you would. And so what people can do people can record videos of themselves and they can upload them. This was a video of my daughter. So we can record that through the virtual Grand Hall Post it and people can respond to it. So like here's a family that responded. I got a download app. But yeah, here's a here's a family that responded when you can see this little bubble here, and then they sent us a message back it's just a way for people to connect. Virtually then, when you go in. So you can join, you know you can go in live. And this is our live stream, which is and you notice where the live stream is placed. So it's placed right next to our giving options. So that one of the things that we've been trying to do is to track our clicks on our live stream with those clicks on giving, which over the last several weeks is correlated and has, and has increased. And so when you get down to, and again, each thing has a flow so people come into the worship service hospitality. They interworship in the sanctuary. They have a time of giving. And then we have the invitation to Christian discipleship. So if you want to join the church, you want to become a member of cascade. If you want, you know to receive Christ, or if you want to join our church family. So this is our new member intake form in our intake form. I recorded just a new member welcome video. So much for visiting our website for visiting our membership page for signing up for membership and to come to know Jesus Christ closer in your wall. It's just a touch point, right? And all they have to do is indicate which service they're joining from get their name, email address within 24 hours and fill out this form within 24 hours someone contacts him from our team. And we guide them through the same process that we would for membership, if they were physically with us. So I want people to tell us about the experience, you know, and worship, and, you know, this is kind of how we curate our experience on Sunday. Then after worship, we have our young people. And here's their hangouts. So the gathering hangouts each Sunday for students, young adults and parents, after virtual worship service all they do is click here to join. It goes to Google Hangout. It goes to, you know, a time where, you know, they can, they can just have their time of fellowship, but it's proven to be very helpful for us. And, you know, all of that came as a result of very intentional conversation and review and looking at everything week to week so that we could make sure that we were, we were getting those touch points for visitors. For, for first time worshipers and for people who wanted to join the church. I hope that was helpful. Thank you. You just add to that Kevin started off by saying, just go to the website. So if you want a copy of those copies of those forms or, or want to know the look at those forms, they're on the cascade website. Yeah, everything's there. Are there any questions about the forms or things he's covered so far. Any questions. How your church might be able to do any of this. So we're going to move. But before we do, I'm going to ask Owen, because I know he's always ready to talk about this. He's just, you know, is ready. So, going by what we've covered so far so far, this would be a good time to announce what's happening on Thursday, how you next, what is about the time and everything and then following him will go into our ministry with the poor because we all have them in our community. So we all have even more now of the pandemic. So our centering is made of a word and on will tell you that that word. So, Owen, let's get having an announcement about Thursday. Thank you. This Thursday 1 30pm is going to be the center for church development weekly zoom meeting. It's entitled pro spawning. And we were, we've been debating about what we were talking about doing and we've been in the throws of responding and boldly adapting to the reality of the COVID crisis in our country. We're going to see both political leaders as well as the chat that's going on among pastors about starting to look forward. So as we're this Thursday is going to be all about looking forward. John Thornburg shared a, an article about first level courage is that immediate response and stepping up to the plate amid the crisis. And he talked about stepping into second level courage means taking the time to just step back and reflect who do we want to be on the other side of this. What is God calling us to as we move through this season and into seasons to come. And so John Thornburg is going to be with us from Texas Methodist Foundation and also one of our peer clergy in the North Texas conference, as well as Mark Meyer Mark Meyer is a consultant nationwide with the unstuck group and go to the unstuck group calm and check out the all the resources that they have. The mark Myers who's their leader in vitalization efforts in the church is going to be with us also about moving from responding to postponing, which is the word we made up because there wasn't a word that was capturing what we were trying to and trying to communicate. So we hope y'all can join us this Thursday at 1.30pm. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And you want to tell me how they can find the link. Yeah, I mean if you're on Facebook, there's an event page. Just look up postponing a positive since we made up the word is going to be the only one there about postponing. And also I'll copy the link on the on the chat here. Okay. I know that that's important for them to know how to join on the link because as this call has gone on people have text me to say I was the link I can't get on so we know where link is that's also helpful. So one of the things as we all know that we are involved in is we're having people that are in line for food bank. Become the food bank recipient that had never, never lost their job never been without food. It's it's really a hard time. And so Sharon talked about feeding over a thousand each week. And so she's doing that on a regular basis. She saw that down the street, the kids were getting food from the school, but parents weren't getting food. And so that was what have to spark this. So we all have people that are in need. And so how do we as the church, particularly the United Methodist Church, which is a part of our theology, how how are we reaching out how do we do that. And Dr. Mario has a new magazine helps many of us may have newsletters, but they have a magazine that is about all the kinds of things that they have done and one of the things that I just happened to be a church and it cascade one Sunday. They bought new tennis shoes for children. And they will appreciate that. As a child, growing up, I never had a pair of new shoes on the first day of school, never had a new outfit on the first day of school. And I'm so glad that I was able to make sure that my children did whether they needed it or not kids need that. And so they have a program called souls for souls. And they do that and do that well. But that's not the only thing just back to school that we are concerned about right now. We're concerned about, you know, all of the things as impact and families and they have so many things that they do. So I'm not asking Dr. Mario to just give us a long list of what they do because we can do all the things that they do, but there's not a church that's represented on this line on this call that can't buy 10 pairs of brand new tennis shoes for children that may be in your neighborhood. And you don't even have to worry about what size, what color, what kind, there would be a child at that school that will be that size. So I just want to give that as a call that we can't say we can't do it because there's something that we all can do. I know you can't say amen, but in the African American tradition, we thrive on amen. So just kind of thumbs up or something that we can, you're hearing me. So I want to lift that. Amen. Thank you. So I just want to lift that up that when we talk about doing ministry with the poor. I want to really push this idea that we don't do ministry to them. We don't just tell them what they need we do ministry with them we walk alongside of them we, we are there with them. So I know that cascade is doing a lot of things. So I'm going to ask. And I've already, you know, I've already asked Dr. Merrill about this. I want him to talk about some of the significant things the way they're doing ministry with the poor at cascade, and then he's going to pause. I'm going to have questions on things that you may want to have more idea more knowledge about or you might want to talk a little bit about how can I implement this or just ask a question about a kind of ministry that you may have been considering. I want to spend some significant time on how to do ministry with the poor is the logically sound they've always Jesus said will always have the poor with us. So it's, it's vividly sound and as I'm Continuing to call Kevin friend. The things I've noticed about what he's doing. I just think that other churches need to know about that and be a part of that. I want to welcome Reverend Andy Lewis to our call today. Our director that is in charge of that that very important ministry for our annual conference so welcome Andy to the call. So, Dr. Merrill. Tell us, I know that Atlanta has no poor right y'all have yet on having any poor folks. So, but on that note, what would you just jump in here and talk a little bit about how you're doing the ministry with the poor. First of all, you, you all probably could could really school me on a lot of things that you're doing. You know, we don't have the fix to everything I think in ministry is contextual. So the work that you're doing is should be lifted up is very important. I think our care for the poor and ministry with the poor should emanate out of a care for people period. And if you don't care for people then chances are you're not going to minister to them or with them. You know, Jesus had the Bible says Jesus had compassion upon them. You got to have a heart of compassion and to think outside of your own personal sphere of comfort, if you would, we put into our vision service. Discipleship service social justice. Those are the three things in our vision statement that we take seriously there we call them the three pillars of our church that our church is almost kind of this Trinitarian idea that our church stands on this Trinitarian pillar these service discipleship social justice, we take service very seriously. I think we have to in particularly during the season of pandemic. We have to think about think differently about who the poor are think differently about that pre pandemic the poor could have been those people, those people that we always say we those people. They're our people, our people who would beg for money or would be homeless or would be, you know unemployed etc, who could not provide the physical means of survival for themselves or their families. I think at any given time now. It could be one of our closest members to be someone in our ministry in our church, it could be someone on our executive team. We are all at this point is acceptable to becoming poor. I just want to be honest about that be real about it. The poor. You know Diana said, you know the poor always be among you. For us, it's about taking starting first with our members who among our membership needs help. And how can we help our members who are in need. We've done that through what's called a community fund for a number of years this predates me. We collect an offering each first Sunday for our community fund for our outreach efforts. We think it's a, it's an important enough, and it comes out to be about 10% of our budget every year. In addition to our portion, this is, this is money over and above the apportionment. So we're, we're going out the door. If it's about 10% apportionments is about another 10% 10 to 12% and just service dollars so we well over you know so it's important for us to do it. And so I want to it's it's good if you have set aside funding so that you can do ongoing mission and ministry with the poor. I mean, I think, you know, Jesus said where your treasure is there your heart will be also well if you don't put any treasure aside to do any ministry with the poor, then, or those, you know, who need assistance or need help how we want to help those people, then that's your heart isn't there. I think you have to put dollars where your heart is. So, without getting into kind of too many things that we were doing listing them. We've honestly tried to in this season to protect our members and to continue social distancing we tried to provide more support and funding to organizations that are doing the work and volunteers there to help and assist. We've had to even rethink how it is that we are we're doing outreach. The other last was it last week, we gave away 500 boxes of food this week we'll do it again. And this is what I hear is where our strong point has been in terms of giving. It hadn't been talking about, hey, we need y'all to keep giving, because we got to support the church or we got to pay bills we pay staff. People are getting laid off. They don't really care about that. Okay, I just will be on people don't care what people care about is when I give to my church, are you going to take the money and you're going to help somebody. I know you got to support staff I know you have to support overhead and operations, but when I give you this tie. Are you going to take this money and you're going to help somebody with it. So, when we started broadcasting to our church that hey look this week, we gave groceries, a full week of groceries to 500 senior citizens in our community. We'll do it again next week. We had not only enough money to do that ministry, but we had more than enough to give to operations right because people give to projects, people give to ministry. They don't give to budgets, they don't get, and we can say all we want and we can, you know, we can try to fear, we can try to use theory towards it all we want, theorize it all we want but people give to ministry. You know, that's why they give to the boys and girls club. That's why they give to the social organizations, because they know that they're doing something with the money. People don't give to salaries. Well, at least our people don't. I don't know some of you guys may, but they want to know they want to know about you know what you pay in such and stuff this week they want to know. I think my money isn't gonna help somebody. Now yeah, there it takes to have to do that and you have to tie that in to what it is that you are trying to do in the community. But so when you're asking for resources, particularly during this season, how are you tying it back in your offering appeal to something that you as a church are doing in the community with people who need help. You'll get more from your people, not just monetarily, but you'll get more of their time of their creativity of their ideas of their service, when they know that what you're connecting they're giving to is going to go help somebody. I just gave somebody a good nugget for they offering on Sunday, that when you're getting ready to ask, I dare you to put out an initiative within your congregation that you want. You're able to do what Hamilton meal does and feel it feeds 1000 people every week right that's huge. I wish we could do that I wish we could feed 1000 people with a hot meal every week. That's not what we can do right now. Right. But what we can do is we can provide assistance and support, you know, based on our context. So I want to I want to encourage you and challenge everybody can I challenge on my right. Can I challenge out from Georgia. I want to challenge you find somebody to help and ask your congregation to help you help them. And when you do that it could be 10 people, it could be find 10 children 10 families in your community and you want to provide food for them for a week. I promise you you can find 10 families who need some food and say look as a congregation, we're going to commit to providing food for a week for these 10 families. And in order to do that, we need you to give because this is what it's going to take to do so. I almost guarantee you that that steak dinner that some of your members wanted to have, even though they can't go out and eat it but they went to Publix and they bought that state. Again, they may, you know, they may get some chicken instead of the state and they may give you the rest of the money. I'm being facetious but the truth is people will make the sacrifice to give you the means to do the ministry, if you ask them for it, and if you connect it to something that you're trying to do. So, going forward, yeah, we're right, Diane is right, there are going to be a lot of people who are hurting in this crisis and coming out of it. And so, I think annual conferences have to be prepared for crisis management and what it looks like to be a resource to people. No churches have to be prepared. And how do we take the burden off of, we're going to get, we're going to talk about apportionments and I want to go that far. But, you know, we have bills that we've got to pay and how can our portion dollars go even more towards identifying things in communities that truly need help. And being creative about helping, helping those communities. I don't know if I even said that right, but I think conferences are going to have to step in and do some major work to, and helping churches find ways to help people. I hope, and I'm, I know I'm talking to some conference leadership on this call, and I will say the same thing to my conference leadership. I hope that conference leadership across the country are spending time and conversation with local churches and pastors and asking the question. How do you need us, how can we help. And I think at this point, we're going to need more grassroots. We're going to be more organic ways of doing ministry. And it's going to have to be local. Let's pause there. I think I want to check in with Reverend Lewis, Andy to see if he has any questions or anything in specific that you want us to ask now on while Dr. Mario is on the call. Thank you, thank you, thank you for inviting me and you may have noticed, Dorita Williams Louie and Andrew Pfizer also who are part of our Center for Missionary Outreach team have joined the call. We're excited to be a part of it. So River Merial, thank you for speaking to some of the ways that you're seeing Missionary Outreach emerge and shift and change in this pandemic reality. You know, toward the end, I guess I have one question. Toward the end, you were commenting that you feel like it's really critical for local churches to identify, you know, someone to help. And if I heard you right, you know, to identify partners who can help them do that. There may, I think you alluded to it early in your comments that, you know, Cascade has been directing volunteers and people to work with community partners who are on the ground, doing the work. So I just, I wonder if, if just in your context there in Atlanta, if you've seen any really compelling models for how that's working meaning ministries that are on the ground doing the work that are meeting the emerging needs and the churches can partner with hearing about maybe an idea or two that's working there might help open our eyes to things that are happening here. Yeah, I would, for us it was the Atlanta Community Food Bank. That is where we get we have a food pantry that we open every week. Food pantry, cold and closet every Thursday. And so it was because we had already had that relationship and they provide all of our food for us. And it was when they told us hey look, we're looking to give away 500 food boxes in this area to this community. Can you help us, we said, absolutely, we can't do five communities, but we can do this community, and we can take ownership for this one. So they assemble all the boxes they put everything together, they have their own plan for distancing and safety and food safety, things that logistically we didn't have to worry about thank God because it would have been a logistical challenge for us to just get people in that space, but that's what they do. And so we were able to provide, you know, volunteers and shifts to go and help to distribute, because they had already put together so I would say some best practices, look for organizations that have the manpower that pay people already on their to assemble things and they just need some additional help right they just need maybe the distribution channel or you know they they need the funding for it. And because still I still believe that if we provide some funding, I mean that's almost as good as us handing the food out I mean I would love to hand it out and make that personal connection. But if they don't have the funding, then it's not going anywhere you're not going to feed anybody. So that's one model. I think another thing to consider is, how can you do something. If you just like Reverend Patterson on your campus where it can continue to shine the light on you as a church in your community doing something on your campus that's safe for people safety safety has to be first. So if it's as a as a conference, you know, we're going to have a goal of galvanizing 30 churches that are going to that we're going to ask and we're going to request that you offer your campus as a site for food distribution, one Saturday a month. And as the conference your partner, and we just asked that the church will provide enough volunteers to distribute the food. That's something that's doable, but you also have to, you know, procure masks and gloves and things like that so they're challenges, but again, it can be done. So a couple of examples of things that I've seen work, things that I've seen done food and security is a big issue right now it's a major issue right now food and security. Also, rental assistance major issue right now. In addition to that if you want to if you want to talk on the domestic violence side of things providing resources for people who may be in situations. And they need an outlet. They need someone to talk to so providing counseling services or some kind of resource so I think we have to redefine what service is even in this season. Maybe food, or maybe mental health service, or it may be, you know, some kind of other assistance. But I would just encourage you all to think outside the box and and use your resources that are that are at your disposal. I hope that helped. Yes. Thank you very much. I want this point I want to lift up that I heard you say, except when you were describing that initial example of the way you partner with the food bank. It sounded like you already had an existing and strong relationship with that community partner, so that they had a vision and then they reached out to you to ask for your help. And it scores. How important it is for all of us in all of our contexts to develop those kinds of relationships with ministry partners in our communities. So often it's through those relationships that you know the opportunity for service emerges. We can step into that. So thank you for sharing that example and reminding us of that. You know, people, and maybe you all have heard of this, you know, providing meals for essential workers. I think these things are important. We did. I can't think of how many flood buckets we did. And obviously flood buckets from through uncor and inside of the flood buckets, you know we often put these in 95 masks. And so we were encouraging churches before they sent the buckets to the warehouse. And we go through them because there's, you know, a need for in 95 masks right now for emergency care workers. And, you know, I know there are some churches who went through and found hundreds of masks, and we're able to donate them and give them to essential care workers so it's things like that that are right underneath our nose and I didn't even think about that. I got a call from Action Ministry, someone who did the outreach work and they said, Hey, Kevin, have y'all, you know, thought about this, this project. So I just think there's a lot of things that we can do to your point, Andy, when we have the major point here is relationship relationship, and if you haven't built relationships with people in your community and organizations you need to do so. Because in times like these, you know they need us and it provides a great opportunity for us. Absolutely. I think that's one of the questions of questions. And then are there perhaps other questions from anyone else on the call and I'll turn it back to you. Yeah, are there any other questions from anyone else that's on the call related to ways that we can do ministry with the poor. I think that we can, you know, maybe talk to Kevin about or talk to other people that may be on the line that that are already doing something that you can, you can share it. Dr. Paterson, will you wait? Yeah, I'm doing multiple things in the house at the same time so forgive me for being out. Dr. Muriel and everybody else. Here's the burning question that we have in Hamilton Park. We are feeding all these people, we are seeing parents come in with small children, teenagers, a lot of men, homeless, everything. In a perfect world we could leverage all this good will that we're doing and then bring them to church. But the reality is we have to do church differently. So how do we create, when this is over, a church response to them that connects them and keeps them with us somehow, but not being so arrogant to say, Oh, you must come in our building. You know, should we have a parking lot church or how do we, how do we hold on to all these good people that we have met during this feeding time? I think you hold on to them just like you're doing now. You know, you feed them, you talk to them. You build, so often we want to convert our serve those who we serve into those with whom we worship. And that may never happen. I've had to come to the conclusion that there will be some people that we feed that will never come and worship with us. And I have to be okay with that. Now, on the other hand, there will be some people that we feed and we serve and we help who will want to come to worship with us. And we have been the very thing that keeps them away. We have, we have been the very people that keeps them away. We've been the detractor. After we've helped them after we've done something good. And then they come to our church, or they say, you know what I want to because not everybody's homeless. That's not everybody's help. Let me say that some people are homeless, not everybody's helpless, right? Right. So I think we've got to get out of this mindset that just because we feed somebody, they feel helpless. That's not necessarily the case. So can we treat that person with the same dignity and humanity that we do our biggest either or our choir director or our senior pastor. Yeah, we have a people problem. That's our issue. We don't have a desire problem. People desire to be in community people desire to be loved. People desire to be, I think people desire to be connected to the church. Our problem is people. We don't know as Christians often how to treat people. Hey, Dr. Muriel. Well, you just said something there. And I think you started early, they said Romans 12 and two. Yeah. And I think far too often, I'm going to speak about your nomination. We're about numbers and dashboard butts in the seat. It's a different day. And I think from a conference level from a local church level, we have to understand that everybody who we feed is not called to be a member of St. Luke. And I think we have to set our why our why is not to it's to make disciples when I was hungry. You didn't put me in a leadership position you fed. Everybody on this call we have to understand why we do we do. And I think God is waking us up now through this pandemic to understand the institution must be more relational. That's right. And what I realized, Reverend Masters, when we go to home do homeless ministries with our people. I'm members don't even know how to communicate with them. It's like they don't bite. So I think now we have to understand as the body of Christ, that everybody we free may not be a member of Hamilton Park, but they are part of the beloved community. And I think that the system the institution must rethink how we engage people. It's not about numbers anymore it's about impact and meeting the needs of people. And we want to get people in our pews but I think we need to shift that. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. And, and also, Dr. Boyd when we think about that, and we think about ministry with as opposed to ministry for when we are high society, so did he if you will, we we're going to put some food out there but you can't don't touch me. You know, this is not a time. I'm not talking about the time of pandemic. I'm talking just regular ordinary time. But when you talk about ministry with you, you hold their hand, and you, you walk with them, you talk to them, you find out what can we do together. It's a it's a different world. And so this way we used to do it. I think Kevin made a point and he may want to say more about that. We have a relation relational problem and I want you to know, God is not happy with that. There are people that I came to know in love and I mean dearly love that were homeless when I was at war. I want you to know they protected me like nobody else when I would leave my house in Richardson and go for him because there's papers that I needed to turn in the report to the conference or the district whatever it was it needed. You know, I'm not going to tell them I was coming. I know they were they're going to be on the street. They saw my car drive up and they came right over what you doing here. They were right there. I went in the church got what I needed and was never scared. What we have to understand is they have so many gifts to give. Yes. They are valuable. They are made in God's image and if we can understand how to walk with them and and receive their gifts and honor their gifts. I mean, there was there was a couple of them when we didn't have a vision and they told me on Wednesday that they knew how to play. Somebody told them they knew how to play and we invited them to the sanctuary. They did not feel honored. They thought you're they're not going to really let me come in here. Yes, we are. And so it was it was a learning not new for me because I serve the people in South Central LA. I'm going to understand that people are people and they're made in God's image. It doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter if your hair straight or curly. It doesn't matter how much money you have. We may not all have the gifts. Dr. Kevin Muriel or Dr. Bowie, but we have gifts and we have to understand and use those gifts so Go ahead. Go ahead, Miranda. Thank you, Reverend Patterson. Dr. Muriel, can you talk a little bit about so everyone's looking forward to after this because it's going to be better right it's going to be different it's not going to be this we're ready for this to be over. But as a pastor, can you talk a little bit about how we're going to have to be agile and what we can be engaging because to Reverend Masters point and to one of your points earlier. Um, us having messages that emphasize that right now makes us valuable right now. As churches and as faith communities, but gets that lesson about we're all valuable because I am seeing I'm thinking that's what's going to happen talking to a lot. You know, my previous life as a as a as a researcher and demographer and sociologist, there's going to be some quick shifts. So we're going to be excited to get out. But then all of the people that have been able to fill out the paperwork to not have their mortgage or their, their house for closed or their rent or be evicted. There's going to be rapidly changing things we're going to be happy and then we're going to be down and then up and then down and many of our folks who were happy to serve are now going to find themselves in a position where they're questioning their value because now now they need to ask. They need to ask to be served. Right. And so how do we care for their spirits and their souls so that they understand that they're they they transfer that lesson about who we've been doing ministry with being valuable to even though my life has changed and now I'm going to take home the extras after I help serve that I am still as valuable so that they don't back out of engaging with us our numbers don't go down became right there's some things that happen to church life when our members change positions right that has to do with their soul and our agility to go from here's a message of hope to value to sit down somewhere to chat right there's there's some agility there. That is not a six week sermon right series that is not a year long series so can you talk a little bit about that agility. I think you just said it I mean I think you you answered your question with saying you have to be agile you gotta be agile during the season. You know it's and you have to be deeply intentional and deeply intentional caring for people and agile I will I want to say that when we come out of this. Everything all the for me. It is I'm gonna have to spend a lot of time with my people. You gonna have to spend a lot of time with your people. And you gonna have to be okay with that. There's no way around that right. And you're gonna have to spend a lot of time with your people reassuring them but also sitting with them in the midst of the brokenness that is inevitable think about it this way. People who have died have had to have funerals. Now you have to go back and have a memorial service so now they've got to relive that entire experience of even if they've you know somewhat. Come to the come to the realization that it happened, but now I've got to sit in front of I've got to send the sanctuary with more people morning crying remembering their life now I've got to relive that so even and people aren't thinking about. They really aren't thinking about that, but because they just want to have a service, but that in and of itself can be traumatic to have to relive I mean, two funerals for one person, like, that's that's a lot. It's a lot on you and it's a lot on the people. I think you can have to spend time with folks, but I want to go back to what we were just talking about to because I think all these things connect. Some of y'all know what it's like. And since we're all pastors and preachers, we can be honest. Some of y'all know what it's like not to want to go to your church and be around some of your people. I mean, we all got them. And some of you know that there are some weeks that you just walk in you're like okay. I don't even know about this. I had to hear them you to say amen. Amen. Jim was with me. Ain't nobody else with me. I got Jim with me. So what in the world do we think other people are going to feel if sometimes we don't even want to be there with the people of God and the saints. So, and so I'll be doggone if you're going to ask me to come and sit in your church and soak up all the looks and the judgment and all of this from folk. Number one, I don't have no, but the second thing, you know, why would I do that I would rather you feed me or help me and I go on about my business. And I'll come back next week. In order to, because Brandon brings up a good point in order for us to reach the masses and care for the masses of people. We're going to have to care for people. We're going to have just love people, no matter who they are what they bring. Because if the truth be told, and we don't we are. I think we tell the truth from the word but we're not good at telling the whole truth. If the truth be told, we all are a mess in some way. So messiness that we are working through having to deal with. I think that's what made the humanity of Jesus so powerful. He wasn't just fully God but he was also human. And the humanity says that I can cry. I can wrestle the humanity says, you know, I know what it, know what it means to suffer and have pain. We're going to have to be human for a while. I just that that's what I really wanted to say brand I would brand I went all around the mountain to say that we're going to have to be human with people for a while. And let people know that, you know, we feel what they feel and we sit there intentionally with folks. So, Kate, you had a comment. You didn't have a comment. I thought I saw Kate talk. Okay. Yeah, I had a comment in a question. Dr muriel such a pleasure. I met you briefly. And just a pleasure to meet my, my aunt and uncle were a part of cascade when Reverend Lowry was there so it's just a pleasure to see the work going on with the young people now. I did want to ask and speak to doing ministry with that we're talking about earlier Dr buoy brought up and, and how we are, or how you are entering to the vision of racial inequities that we're seeing with co bid 19 impacting black people. People of color communities of color, and how it's killing us in a way that is demographically different from any other group. And so, when I had a conversation without my co worker and my director this morning Andy Lewis and Andrew Pfizer and Andy brought up an article that's talking about moving through blizzard or winter are we entering into a mini ice age, and my, my reaction or my response to that. That suggestion in that article is that we're, I'm hoping that we're moving into an ice age and mini ice age that will be different after this but that will take the time to lament and take the time to breathe and like you said be human, so that we can see people and so that we can honor and love and, and walk in dignity with people, but I'm hoping that we can dismantle. I am, we're working toward dismantling racial inequities and injustices in health care with some of the things that we are working on with the journey toward racial healing and so healing means that there's a lot of wounding. There are some things that we actually need to name, and we need to make sure that as a system. We are building structures that will take down supremacy of whiteness, and that will actually name that and then we can move forward, because some people aren't entering the church because we don't name and we don't say and we exclude because of skin color because of class, of course, but it for me, the way that I enter into life is from a perspective in the framework of racial injustice. And so we're still working through what that means for our country historically, and I'm asking and wondering how are you seeing that played out in Atlanta in Cascade and the work that you're doing. And if you have any suggestions as to what your hope is or what your, your vision is as we walk through the healing for, for these communities for these, for those of us who are seeing the, the impact of coded for me always talk about black people, we've been doing this, you know, this pandemic, it exacerbates for those of us who are in the black community the things that are already twisting our arms and, and killing us. And so I'm hoping that as a denomination and as a conference will be able to build a different kind of beloved community. And once we, or as we're moving through, we don't have to wait. And once we kind of have some restrictions lifted as to how we're going to do that. Yeah, yeah, you know, I have a, I have a problem with pursuing racial healing, if at the same time, we aren't pursuing the dismantling of the systems that cause the hurt in the first place. We're talking about racial healing and reconciliation. We also need to be talking about how do we dismantle institutional racism and racism that has been pervasive in our land for centuries. And as part of the fabric of our nation. I think we all need to heal. I think that. But, but I can heal, but I also need to be treated as a human too. That's, that's another thing. And the, the truth is, you know, these are uncomfortable conversations for a lot of people, right. I, but I love having these conversations, because if you don't live in the discomfort of talking about racism and institutional racism, much of which, you know, was around far earlier than you and I, all of us. Things have been happening for years. I just thank God that now we can talk about them. But when you talk about the inequities in health care and and in the food disparities and so much the environmental injustice so much black and brown people dying at a higher rate is a direct result of all of these systemic injustices and issues that we've seen for over the last six centuries is not just because more black people getting sick. It's because of the underlying issues that are direct result of, you know, systemic racism. We know the CDC just reported that 30% of COVID-19 patients are African American, even though we make up 13% of the population. I'm trying to start asking yourself why, why in Chicago 70% of the COVID-19 deaths black folks Michigan, Georgia, all have reported higher percentages of black and brown people contracting the virus and dying from it. And so I would simply say that the church has to be on the front lines of having these conversations and so while we're talking about serving people and helping people. We're talking about what it means with even within our denomination for social for injustice to be pervasive. And for us not to really have those hard conversations about racism racial inequality that we see, even in our own church. If the church can get it right. Then how can we expect society to get it right. So what does that take right. It takes those who are in the majority who, you know, are who have built the power structure who have the power within the structure to say you know what this ain't right. And that takes a relinquishing of power. And people don't like to relinquish power. Right. Here we don't people don't like to believe this world is nations built on power, but it takes those who are in the majority group to say, this is not right and there are some inequities that only we can work to solve. So, you start doing that right you do it through a multiplicity of ways. Particularly during this season we're talking about church life. Do you all have a church development office there. One of the things that we're looking at is, is okay, well, we've been paying apportionments all these years. And for us, we haven't benefited from many church development funds that the majority of church development funds coming through our conference, go into predominantly white churches. I get it. Hey, the majority of you know, our denominations over 90% white, I get it I understand. We're asked to pay apportionments, just like everybody else. Most of the time we pay 100%. So how does that how do those funds then flow back out of the structure of the institution into places where we can see equitably those funds are being dispersed. And by the way, who makes the decisions for the dispersing of the funds. You got to go back and just start asking questions. This may be a lot further than you wanted me to go. But I'm just kind of tracing some things. All of this matters when we start talking about even a conferences response to COVID-19 reopening, etc. So, what churches are you going to get, give most of, give the most attention to what pastors, are you going to give the most assistance to. If you don't think that that's going that this is going to play a part in that decision making, we're all fooling ourselves, because it's been a part of the conversation. For, for, since the founding of this denomination and our church. And so I just want to be clear that those who sit at the table, have to always operate with the mindset of, are we doing what's best for the whole. And not just a segment. And sometimes when you ask those questions or sometimes all the time when you have to ask those questions, you have to lean a little bit more towards saying, how is this going to affect those who have historically been marginalized as a part of the structure. That's called thinking equitably. We're not going to be equal. Y'all can, we can continue to talk about this whole equality thing at equality, I think is in the great by and by I want us to be Diana I promise one of these days we're going to be equal. In the eyes of Jesus and the great by and by we're going to all be there. But while we on earth. Generationally, we know that we don't start at the same place. We just don't. And we've got to acknowledge that reality. And so once we acknowledge that we are not equal, then we can say, Okay, if we're not equal, how can everybody be equitable. How can we build the platform that was not in place for us. How can we build it so that for generations that to come that are to come for new clergy that come into the conference for new churches that are developed and built. Equitable for everybody. We need to have an equity conversation. And conferences have to be honest about the inequities that exist, because our denomination and other institutions are simply microcosms of the larger macro that we see in society every day. And, you know, that's that's our reality. I know that was probably a lot further. It's a little bit more greater that you are farther than you wanted me to go. But I just think it's an important conversation we have to have so don't talk to me about racial healing. If we aren't going to talk about destroying the systems that brought the hurt in the first place. And don't be the person that continues to say, Well, I love everybody. And I preach Jesus when in essence, you're the one progressing the empire. Ariel to that point. Um, can you talk a little bit to make some things playing about. So the other thing that we have in this moment in front of us is the ability to create disruption to what I call the charity industrial complex, which is what we contribute to, which is the unequal. It's not helping because we all love everyone, but it's the unequal distribution of those resources in a way that don't get to the people who are the most vulnerable and don't get to the communities right that the system is also simultaneously impacting in the most negative ways. And so right now I feel like we are present in a moment where not only have we not only are we sitting in a moment where we're creating invited disruptions and innovations, but we have the ability to expose and change that entire complex right, whether it's to completely dismantle it or make it more equitable. And so what are some ways we can talk about the things that we're doing and trying so that they don't get dismissed as what we just did that during covert times know our ministries were able to get to the most vulnerable to the brown to the folks who were on the front lines as essential workers, which happened to be because of the industry's mostly black brown women right. We were able to do that. And it wasn't just a special case, we should do that moving forward so how do we talk about what we're doing is not just what we did in the meantime, but as legitimate things to fund as disruptions. Yeah, and then name those disruptions. Yeah, I mean, so you have a few different things working right you've got your, your larger structure. You know you've got your conference, and then you've got your local church your conference your district your local church. I think on every level. There needs to be a consistent conversation. And the things the same things need to be raised on each level so if you're talking from a conference perspective number one I'm the first thing I'm always asked conference leaders when they talk about racial justice and serving all you know all this. I always ask who is at your table. Who's at the table, who's talking. If anybody who ever raises the issue at the table, then you won't know about it and it's not that there's any ill will going on at the table. It's just, you know, there's no, there's no conscience there for, you know, the thing that would matter to, to me or to you. So what comes out is the things that matter to the people at the table. That's exactly what happens in all these cases on the district level as well as you know the local church level. I think you have to have people at the table who can have those conversations. But here's what I, here's what I really think. Here's my, my, you know, if I if I had a vision for the church. Man, it will be people of every race of every social economic background and demographic coming together to say you know what, we're going to look intentionally at every community at every single community from, you know, your, your low income minority community to your upper echelon minorities to your low income white communities your upper echelon white communities and everything in between. We're going to look at diversity and we are going to be intentional every time we look at doing something. We're going to have every group represented at that table to talk about how we're going to do this. I think if you do that, not saying you're going to solve every problem but you'll be a little closer to working some things out. But if you don't have the people at the table, you're never going to get there. You can throw money at it, you can do it, but you're never going to get there. If you don't have the right people at the table. That's why I thank God for people like sdiana masters and others who are at the table. And you all conference, who can raise some of those issues and who have equity in the conference. But I, but I think it has to be a broader conversation. And the last thing I'll say, I'll be quiet after this is, we can't think that everyone is working against us. There's some people who consciously who unconsciously don't know what to do and seriously just want to want to learn. And we have to give people space to be human and people space to be vulnerable. And we have to give people space, quite frankly, to be ignorant. And I had to learn that, because I can come to a conversation. I'm like, well, how do you, what do you mean you didn't know about 400 years of, you know, of injustice toward black. What do you mean you didn't know about the inequities and you know the injustices, what do you mean you didn't know we're not equal. And some people just have never connected the dots. And so my job as a prophet is to help people pastor is in the midst of it to help people to try to connect the dots, and to be patient with people, but also to push people, because this is not comfortable work. And don't think that you're going to come to this table and have a kumbaya moment with me, and just leave and we're going to be doing anything. I'm going to be the agitator that you never thought would be in your life. I'm going to agitate you and every time we're going to say, Well, what are you doing, what are you doing, and you need an agitator at the table. I don't know if bishops or whoever will put an agitator, but you need somebody at the table who's going to press the button. When the button needs to be pressed, you need somebody who's going to press it to say are we thinking about this. Why aren't we doing this. Well, it's not, it's not comfortable. It's, it's hard. We can't do it. Who says we can't do it. You know, I can do all things. That's what I thought word says. Anyway, I'm done. I'm sorry. We're, we're glad to read it opened up this door. So we did, she opened it up and you know, opening up the door to go there. So it wasn't on the agenda, but I think it was still important because it is the section with doing ministry with I just want to add one thing, or even maybe question you on one thing. Kevin, just to take it just one step forward before we start to kind of wrap up for the day. You're talking about having people at the table, you know, and what's implied is having people of color at the table. The thing that that I have found in my years of being just alive and in all the leadership roles. And I think that is that it's, it's important to have a person at the table, but this idea of having somebody at the table because they are black, does not mustered doesn't just because you black, don't mean that you like me as a black woman be a multi race woman don't even know that you know brand is multi race what does that look like, you know, you have to have people really understand know the issues, well read, well connected and can really speak for the issue so so it's it's important to have people at the table I agree, but not just anybody, you know, sometimes we have conferences and districts that put people on committees. Just because they're black, and they want to speak to black talk about the black issue that's that that has not worked and it will never work so would you just speak a little bit about that and wrap our day up. Yes, yes, yes, thank you for saying that and let me clarify Lord, you need to be down with the calls. Okay, what color you as long as you are down with the calls right speak. Absolutely, I have been in meetings before where a, and this guy who's actually very close to me, white male has been more whoa, then you know some of my black colleagues, just like, listen to him, right, you know he gets it this is, this is really about what is what's best for humanity and whoever can speak that true. And sometimes that truth has more power coming from someone in the majority group. I mean, because you can, you can speak from from one who has historically been the position in the position of the oppressor, when the oppressor can speak for the oppressed, that's powerful. Not saying that you yourself have been the oppressor but out of the group. But no, yes, thank you for saying that you need to be down with the calls and and be able to speak in tech and intellectually and intelligently about the calls important. Not not bad grammar, not not ghetto, not, you know, all of this other speak to the people of power, the same language that they speak that that's one thing but the other thing is that we can't forget in this is when we think about that. Not only does the person have to have the right color, they have to be knowledgeable about the issues that are at hand, because sometimes you might have somebody at the table that is so worried about their job. I'm talking about the church now so worried about their job that they may have the, all of the pieces, but they don't have the curses to speak up because they don't want to be reappointed they don't want to be appointed to something that where they may not be able to make a living so there are a lot of moving parts in this. And so all of that is you have to be really careful as to who you bring to the table. And conferences have to provide space and leaders and this is why I say denominations and particularly in our in our in our denomination. And I would even impress this upon upon the leadership of the North Texas conference have have leadership in place that will allow space for disruption, because it makes you better we all need to be disrupted, all of us. It makes us better. Have have space for people to say hold on. Let's think about this without fear of being reprimanded. It was it was told to me by very wise pastor, who has been a hallmark in this in this denomination. Bishop White who was a mentor of mine would always say about leadership, don't want to surround yourself with too many people that will tell you yes. Right. Don't surround yourself with a bunch of yes folk surround yourself with people who respect your leadership, but will push you to think more broadly. That's just a leadership lesson so I would say that in these days of COVID-19 my encouragement to this amazing conference because y'all really are a great conference while traveling across the United States and see other conferences. I mean you guys are in fairly and pretty good shape compared to a lot of folks even in this time of COVID-19 we all have our issues right. North Georgia included y'all are in good shape and you guys have good forward thinking leadership. Diana and you know husband Henry and you know so many others who I've come to know and to respect in the North Texas conference and so you all continue to pray for you during this season. But lead courageously. You know if I if I could challenge your leadership lead courageously but lead equitably and you know there are a lot of different faces in this conference that need help and that need assistance and pay attention to them all. Thank you. It's been a long day we had a short lunch just a short break we never did really take a bathroom break we've worked really hard today and I'm going to ask you to give help me and giving Dr. He's given us today and I thank him for that. I called him on a short notice to say we're completely changing the agenda. We're not just having the black folks gonna have the white folks come to. And he said whatever you need my friend whatever you need. And so I thank him for being willing to be flexible in what he had already planned we planned this day in August of 2019. Had no idea that this virus was coming around but you know you have to be prepared in season now the season. So thank you Dr. Mario for your flexibility thank you for all that you've given us today thank you for your challenges. Matt you're you're on the line and you didn't have any ideas on call on you but that's okay because we're on the team. So I'm going to ask you if you will announce again what's happening on Thursday and then you know see if anybody has any question be sure and tell them where they can get the link. And pray pray pray. Absolutely. Yeah. So Thursday we're we're just looking at how can we be proactive as we begin to consider you know we've we responded to sort of having to pivot and the changes that we've had to make and now how can we sort of get in front of it and begin to think as visionary leaders about what God's doing that none of this has taken God off guard and they got a still actively moving in our world and how can we partner with that and be proactive or pro sponding to the to the events in our world and sort of the changing context of ministry that we live in so I think Owen actually in the chat room there shared some of the details that's Thursday at 130 for the CCB webinar and yeah I would love to to see all on that. Okay, thank you. We're going to post this. The recording of our zoom call on our conference page. So if you miss something that you were taking notes on it'll be there. So be sure if you need to reach me just feel free to call me you have my cell number 213-880-709 our conference emails are the same. Dr. Muriel and Gerita. Let me just speak to both of you just for a second. Both of you have exciting things happening and you don't know it's the same thing. Both of you are getting ready to have baby boys around the same time. So I know Kevin is excited about his son and I know Gerita is excited about her son so I wanted both y'all to know that and on that note I know both you've been praying and Kevin's been speaking all day so Gerita I'm going to ask you to just close us in prayer because you know we've been praying for you and I know you've been praying so on that note we're going to ask you to close us in prayer. Congratulations Dr. Muriel. Thank you. You too. You too. I tell people not to call my baby no Corona baby. Let's go to our God our creator in prayer. God look at us gathering through technology that we probably didn't think about before a pandemic or a crisis that took us by surprise but never took you by surprise God we say thank you we bow in your presence we just lift you up in the listening and honor because you are God and God alone and you're still on the throne. So we say thank you for going before us making every cricket play straight and every rough place playing. We bless you for helping us to be innovative and creative and the things that you called us to do. We bless you God for allowing us to do the work that you've already called us to. Lord I pray blessings over Dr. Muriel his wife and his children the one to come in the one that's already here I think and I pray God that you would just continue to bless cascade as they do the work that you've called them to. Thank you for the north Texas conference for the Methodist Church and for the church globally. We pray God that you would just be with us and for us and help us to see and to be a word that causes this world to see your son high and lifted up. Lord we bless you and we thank you for today and the days to come and we ask that you give us energy that we don't have. We ask that you help us to grieve and lament and rest and do what it takes to continue in this work to reach out when we need it and to settle down when we need that as well. So Lord bless all of the things that you called us to do and calls us to walk up rightly in your word and truth. It's in the name of the Trinity that I pray these things. Amen. Amen. Thank you my brothers and sisters for your tenacity to hang in there for all day this long call it's been exciting but I know it's been really hard for us. We're just zoomed out but today was a good day. So thank you Dr. Muriel and we will probably talk next week as we get ready for September. Absolutely. God bless you all. Thank you. Blessings to everybody.