 This is a Center for Missionary Outreach call focused on Missionary Response grants. And we're eager to share with you a little bit about the intention behind these grants, how they'll work and provide opportunity for some brainstorming and definitely some Q&A for all of you. So hopefully at the end of this call, you'll feel equipped to apply for these. And I hope that they are a catalyst and an encouragement to you and your ministry and your communities. So before we get too far into it, let me offer a brief word of scripture and a prayer for us. I was thinking a little bit about some of the messaging that I continue to see just in the news media and all across our communities expressing the idea that as we move through this pandemic that we're in it together, that we're in this together. And it reminded me of wise words from the prophet Isaiah that also expressed in a different way how we are all interconnected. And so I wanna share with you these words from Isaiah 58. I'll read a few verses from verses nine, 10 and 11. So here are these words. The prophet says, if you remove the yoke from among you, the finger pointing, the wicked speech, if you open your heart to the hungry and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted, your light will shine in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noon. The Lord will continually, will guide you continually and provide for you even in parched places. He will rescue your bones. You will be like a watered garden, like a spring of water that won't run dry. They will rebuild ancient ruins on your account. The foundations of your generations past, you will restore. You will be called Mender of Broken Walls, Restorer of Livable Streets. Will you pray with me as we begin? Holy and gracious God, we give you thanks for your steady companionship through these days in which the foundations do seem to be shaking. And God we find solace and encouragement in the truth that you are the same yesterday, today and forever. God open our eyes to the needs of the oppressed and the afflicted around us and all of our communities. Help us to recognize the timeless wisdom that we find in your words, that our fortunes are tied up with theirs and that the way in which we reach out to them and our ministry with them in so many ways opens the floodgates to your grace and your mercy and your strength in our own lives. Help us this day to rest in your presence, to rely upon your grace so that we are indeed a spring that never runs dry and a light to all the world. It's in Christ's name we pray, amen. All right. So as we begin this Center for Missional Outreach call, I do wanna just remind all of you of a couple of other calls that our various centers are also sponsoring this week. Tomorrow on Tuesday at one o'clock, Kami, Gaston and I in particular will be leading a book on adaptive leadership and how to thrive and survive leading churches through this time of change. We'll be using Canoing the Mountains as our primary resource and be in touch with that. Do a little teaching, do a little learning from one another in conversation. You can register ahead of time for that. And there's a workbook that we're utilizing to guide us through that work. So that's tomorrow at one o'clock. And then on Thursday at 1.30, the Center for Church Development will be leading a webinar on Tech Talk with North Texas Conference Geeks. Experts will be on the call to answer questions about hardware, software, subscription services and some of the little things that you can do that'll make a big difference in your ministries as we all continue to adapt and learn. So I just wanna put those on your radar. But we're here today to talk about the COVID-19 Mission Alt Response Grants. Let me say just a word about sort of where these grants come from, where this idea for grants comes from. For some time now, all of the centers we've been focused on a strategy that has us playing a role as catalysts for local churches. So that rather than the conference in this time trying to develop our own programming, our own response, our focus is on being a resource and a support and an encouragement to you who are truly on the ground and on the front lines in a unique way to develop your own responses. And so these grants are just offered in that spirit to be a way to catalyze your own work and your own communities. For these grants, the money is coming from a disaster, the North Texas Disaster Relief Fund. If you're not real familiar with that fund, over the years, folks from across the North Texas conference have given to this designated fund and it's used to power the church's response in the wake of disasters. So in October, when the tornadoes hit parts of Dallas, dollars from this fund were used to help our response and to meet some of the needs of families, especially in the Christ Foundry area whose homes were damaged. Before that, a lot of these funds were given for and then used to aid our response to Hurricane Harvey. And so these dollars have been used to subsidize dozens and dozens of mission teams from across the conference to go south and be a part of the rebuilding efforts. They were used to rebuild a house or a roof on a church in Portland, Texas when the insurance didn't cover all of the costs required to replace that. And many other kinds of efforts related to Hurricane Harvey recovery. Well, there are funds that are remaining in this North Texas Disaster Relief Fund. And so our CMO team discerned that it would be timely and that it would be helpful for us to repurpose some of those dollars to bring some aid in this crisis in the midst of this disaster that we're in the midst of. So we're doing that in a variety of ways. We certainly recognize that, as I'm sure many of us have seen reported pretty steadily in the news that persons of color are being affected by COVID-19, both health-wise and economically in a disproportionate way. And so with that lens, we have engaged in conversation with the various leaders of our Latinx churches in and around Dallas and are working on developing some responses with them, specifically around food distribution and mental health and counseling services. That's one example. Hopefully you've heard that tomorrow is North Texas Giving Day now. And now granted, this is an effort focused on the city of Dallas and surrounding communities. But we saw that we could engage in a meaningful way by strengthening the work of those various nonprofits who really are on the front lines and meeting the needs of persons who are most affected, again, in many cases in communities of color. And so we're matching gifts given tomorrow on North Texas Giving Day now. And hopefully you've seen communication about that. If you have questions, I can answer those at another time. And then there are these grants, again, that are being funded from the North Texas Disaster Relief Fund and a way for us to drive resources to our metropolitan areas where we know that many of the churches have ongoing relationships with people and communities that have been most affected and uniquely for these grants, also to rural communities. And we want to have, especially in our focus, churches that are 150 in worship or smaller who we know are integral to your communities and who are very well aware of the different kinds of needs that are emerging and may just benefit from some additional resourcing in order to make your hopes and your dreams about connecting with your neighbors happen. So that's a little bit about where these grants come from and our hope for them. So let's see, that's probably enough for now. Let me, Andrew, let me pitch it to you and you want to give us a little more detail about these two types of grants. You're muted. Yeah, Andrew, you're still muted. Sorry, I've got a toddler over here, so we may need our own disaster response help over here. So we've got two real grant opportunities, oh goodness. Two real grant types. One is called a Racial Equity Response Grant and that is really purpose to try to amplify the efforts of some of our churches that primarily serve in settings that allow them to make positive impacts in black indigenous and person of color communities. And these grants can go toward relief type efforts. So thinking about immediate needs of our surrounding communities, food insecurity is a big one right now of course and several of you have looked at that up in previous conversations. And a number of other things are brewing and y'all have great ideas already. Other more long-term advocacy related ministries are also kind of on the table for that grant. Our Rural Spons Grants is really to try to focus on our rural churches with under 150 and average worst attendance, they're in a position to make impacts in their community. And so we've got two real funding options just to be real practical. We can either have just a direct grant and those are in the range of $250 to $1,000. So they're on the smaller end and then we can do a matching challenge grant which we can offer a little bit more. And those are in the range of $500 to $2,500. So for every dollar that a church can raise for whatever this project and idea is that you have, we will match it dollar for dollar. And again, we're gonna try to limit this to congregations under 150 and attendance so that we can really try to partner with our churches that may be impacted more than others by the recession. Andy, would you like to speak about our priority? Yeah, and so I alluded to this earlier, but let me just say this in another way. For the Center for Missionary Outreach, one of our focus areas has to do with racial justice and equity as a center team. And with all the work we do, we try to spark conversation and awareness around the realities of racism and to help all of us view our work through that lens rather than maybe compartmentalize it to help us see all the work we do through that lens. We are deeply convicted by the idea that if we do that, that that's a small part of the mix of what will help us to become a more just and equitable church and community. And so I just offer that to you related to these grants as well, especially as I'm looking at some of our rural church leaders, you all know your context and your community as well. You all know what relationships and what community partners you already are connected to. And so, you know, you all can see the opportunities that you have to come alongside your neighbors effectively in this moment. What I would encourage you to do and challenge you to do is to again, if you've not already done so, to view all of what I've just said, your community, the needs, relationships, partners through that lens of racial justice and equity. And just know that as we receive these grant requests, we'll have that lens in mind as well and be particularly eager to find and support efforts that clearly have that theme of work in mind. So just to be super clear, if you're in a particular community where the need you see and the opportunity that you have doesn't obviously sort of directly connect with communities of color that doesn't disqualify you. I don't mean to imply that, but we are just again trying to help all of us grow in this way and to have this important lens in mind as we do our work with our neighbors. And a word about deadlines, we have a rolling deadline for this grant application. So we're looking to see kind of how these are taken advantage of and how these grant applications come in. And so we're kind of waiting to see what the response is before we put a hard and fast deadline on those. And hopefully when we are able to receive applications from you and others, we can have a very quick turnaround, especially for those grant applications that are very pressing in terms of timelines for the work that you wanna do. We wanna really be clear, if you've never put a grant application together, if that terminology is just really throwing you off and intimidating, we don't want you to be worried at all. If it takes me helping you just write the application myself, we can do that. I can help you think through the ideas that you have, even if it's just a really basic idea, kind of coach you through that. We wanna be this, help this be as easy as possible for you to be able to do the most good in your communities. So we wanna make it as easy as possible. All right, friends, so I mean, hopefully we've set the table for some further conversation around these grants, either the Racial Equity Grants or the Rural Missional Response Grants. So at this point, are there any particular questions that you have, again, either about the intent of the grants or just the process of application? So Andy, good morning. Yes, good morning. I have two questions. One, so Andrew, you gave the amount between 250 and 1,000 for the rural churches. What is the amount for the racial ethnic churches? What is the amount for the grant? Is it the same? Yes, so they're both the same. You can have two funding options. So one, you can get a direct grant where it's just a check in the mail. It's $250 to $1,000 or you can get a matching challenge grant which is worth more of $500 to $2,500. But for that, you've gotta raise money from other sources as well, but you can potentially have more of an impact. My second question is, is the grant application on the CMO website? Yes, it should be active now. If you go to the Center for Missionary Outreach sub-page on our website, they should be active now and can receive applications. Okay, thank you, that's that one. In fact, I just navigated to the Missionary Outreach page and both grant applications are up and ready to be filled out. Any other questions? Again, just about grant application process or again, the intention behind these grants? So yeah, I'm gonna ask if I could, the difference between the two, they're both seeking the same results of supporting communities through this. One is intentionally partnering where in my community there's not a direct ministry in our community, not a lot of varying ethnicities within my community, but we could expand ours to reach, maybe partner with a church in the next county over or something like that to build a relationship in the midst of that. Or we could work within the community that we've got, that would be the defining difference between the two. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's fair. Again, in your context, I think that our hope is that the nature of these grants would encourage you to even ask those questions that I sort of heard you working through, are there communities of color in your community, your surrounding areas that are being affected that you could potentially reach out to? Even just, again, looking at your situation using that lens and asking that question is a positive thing. Having done that, if it seems as though the way that you and your church can be most effective to be in ministry with your neighbors right now, it doesn't necessarily lead you into ministries with communities of color, then again, that doesn't disqualify you from applying. Does that make sense? Again, we want these efforts that you all developed to be contextual for you. Right, well, just like you said, I think the search for that need will open eyes and have us look closer at the community and hopefully our members to look closer in the community beyond what they just see face to face. So thanks. And the other question. Great. Does this need to be a new ministry? I was thinking about possible collaboration with the school district and food distribution. And so also we have hungry hearts in summers prior to the summers, but I don't know what this summer might look like given the COVID outbreak. So I think my question is just basically, does this need to be like a new ministry or can this fund existing ministries either done by the church already or are done by the church in the community or just community? Yeah, my response to that would be that the dollars do not have to be used to start something brand new. Again, I think the spirit of the grants is to aid your church's response to needs that are emerging because of the COVID-19 pandemic or needs that have become heightened like food insecurity because of the pandemic. So as I hear your question, Sylvia, I mean, you may have been a partnership that had addressed food insecurity in the past, but if your community is like many of those that I've become familiar with, you may be seeing need that's doubled and these in this time. And so a grant could be used to lean even more into that kind of ministry in order to meet the changing needs. So again, I think the clear focus we wanna have for all these grants is that they're helping you be in ministry with your neighbors to meet needs that are emerging because of the pandemic. Thank you. Andrew, do you wanna add anything to that? Thank you, capture it well. Yeah, Jay, is it your hand up? Yeah. Yeah, my wife teaches fourth grade online now and it's crazy if they don't raise their hand. So I'm just... That's good. Can you all just give some examples of some of what these grants might go to in rural churches with less than 150? Yeah, absolutely. And Andrew, I'll take a stab and then if you want to follow up and offer some others as well. So I mean, largely I'm just gonna be reflecting back to you ideas for ministries that I've learned about and seen emerging from some churches across the conference. So for example, if you have any kind of hospital or healthcare clinic or healthcare personnel in your community, a church could develop a special outreach, a ministry of support and encouragement for those frontline persons. Similarly, most every community has some kind of a grocery store. I know not all, but most. And so along the same lines, a ministry of encouragement and support could be developed for those essential workers. And Andrew already lifted it up, but food insecurity is a pressing need that cuts across every demographic and community in these days. Again, some of the nonprofits I'm closest to are reporting having, feeding 250, 300% of the typical numbers of persons that they feed. And so any way that your church can connect to those efforts in your community to be a part of food distribution, I think that would be an opportunity. In your community, you may be aware of a particular industry. Maybe there's a Tyson Foods plant that's in your county or I mean, you name it, but some particular industry that really is a part of the economy in your local community that has had to furlough workers or has been shuttered for the past two months. And so you may be aware of a particular opportunity to partner with the community of workers and know what they're experiencing and how you can be helpful to them. We're aware that mental health needs we're probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now in terms of the mental health needs that will be emerging. And even as people are sort of released from sheltering in place, many of them will emerge maybe not as well off as they were when they entered into that sheltering time. And so, I mean, there may be a way for you to partner with a mental health provider in your community to amplify their efforts to help connect people to them and the work they do, even just to raise awareness that if you're experiencing X, Y or Z, you're not alone and there are resources anyway. So trying to step into that mental health arena, we see as a really legitimate way to respond to needs. And I guess, I mean, one more I'd lift up that's an obvious one for me is partnering with your local schools. In most every case, you know, our school districts have been, well, on the front lines of meeting food insecurity needs for children and families. They've also been adapting themselves and teachers and administrators have been working double time to try to learn new skills just like so many of you. And so I think there's a great opportunity to develop a relationship or if you already have one to connect with school principals or even just teachers in your community that you have a relationship with and simply ask the question, you know, how can our church community be helpful to you right now? What do you need? And begin conversations like that. I think we've seen that those relationships with schools uncovered a lot of opportunities for ministry. And I guess while I rattle those kinds of ideas off, let me just give you a little shameless plug now that our center has plans in the works for the next couple of weeks to have focused calls on two of those topics. One is on mental health and again, bringing experts on to help us step into the waters and see how churches can be a part of addressing needs. Again, that I think are gonna be rising and important for the next six months. You know, this is not gonna end just when business is open. And then the other is on church school partnerships. We'll again bring expert practitioners to the table and have good conversation about what we're learning about the best ways we can partner with our friends and education sector. So, and again, they're gonna be adapting for the rest of this year too. So lots of opportunities to be in ministry with our neighbors in those ways. So those calls are over the next couple of weeks. You'll see more about that. So, Sonya, hold your question for just one second. Andrea, do you wanna follow up or add any other sort of examples as a way to spark some thinking about this? You know, we might just think a little bit more about those pretty comprehensive description with the racial equity grants all of those components are included. But you might also think about kind of the advocacy piece of ways to draw attention of local leaders, of legislative leaders and others to the needs of communities of color and others that have not gotten the attention that they need as this pandemic continues to work itself out. And to draw resources to those communities that are being so hard hit. So it's the only component I would add. Great. All right, yeah, Sonya. Yes, this actually goes back to Sylvia's question. So in our particular context, we already had a partnership with the school where the church every year provided backpacks and school supplies in August. And just to give a little context, the church I am at, we average 50 people on a Sunday morning. So that gives you our size and yet they do amazing things. So last August, 113 backpacks full of supplies were given out to area children in need. So it is anticipated there are going to be more applications this year. There is going to be a greater need because of the pandemic and the parents out of work or the income has been reduced. And so my understanding is the grant could be used for that because it's a preexisting ministry, but there will be a greater need. So if I'm correct about that, but also where conversations have just started last week in our church is that we already have a partnership with the food pantry. I'm gonna brag on the church for a minute. Every other week we have a one hour food drive in our parking lot. We had one yesterday. We have now collected 3,500 items since March to go to the food pantry. So I love that that's been happening. Now we're starting to look at, we have acreage, if we look at our resources and our abundance at the church, we have acreage that's not being used. And part of that was turned years ago into community garden beds for community people to pay a water fee and they could come garden. Well, there's only a handful of families using those now. It's not as popular as it used to be. And we are trying to get that restarted in the community and we do have some more people who are interested in these days with a little bit more time on their hands. And there seems to be an uptick now in looking at again, being able to grow our own food. But we're looking at all the unused beds and thinking, is there a way that we could use those to grow fresh produce to help meet the nutrient needs and the community to somehow keep partnering with the food pantry to grow fresh vegetables that could then be distributed through the local food pantry. But I know that's a putting a system into place and you need refrigeration or whatever else you need. So we're starting to look at going in that direction but we're in the very beginning stages of looking at that. So is that my understanding, either or of those, in theory, the grant could be applied towards but would there be a priority such as the community beds and producing fresh foods over the backpack ministry? So Sonya, thanks so much. I don't know if I would, I mean just off the cuff wanna sort of rank those. I think they both could be legitimate grant requests but I would say one word about each and then Andrew again, if you have comment please add something. So first is related to sort of revisiting the community garden work and thinking about how that could be particularly relevant these days. I think that's a fantastic idea and there's somebody on the call that you definitely should talk to and that's Samantha Parsson. Samantha and her church just recently received a ministry with grant to begin a pretty substantial a community garden effort themselves in their context with a lot of the same kind of goals. And so you all probably wanna talk to each other. So definitely I would encourage you to think about that. And I mean, whether it's in an urban context or rural context, I mean, we're definitely hearing that food pantries are in need of supply and particularly in need of produce. And so if the church could be a part of that broader system in your community, that would be fantastic. Related to the backpacks, I guess definitely if there's an expanded need and a grant could help you rise to meet that expanded need, I think that would be legitimate. The one, just sort of comment I'd offer or that just makes me think about is that, Andrew mentioned that, I mean, we understand that in this COVID-19 pandemic situation that sort of immediate short-term relief efforts are needed and that churches have an opportunity to step into that kind of work. And so we wanna honor that. And at the same time, I think for any grant application, we would encourage you to think through how being a part of those relief efforts could also help you develop new relationships with new people in your community and how those relief efforts could be a part of a larger effort on your part to do that kind of, again, sort of relational deep kind of work. So just a reflection about that idea. Thank you. So I had just a quick question and a thought. So I'm assuming these are like one-time grants, I'm assuming that's a one-time thing. And as I'm thinking about that, because as part of either an initiative or either contributing to something on, maybe once or twice and just in all consideration, looking at the size of a grant, you're not talking about something that's going to sustain something necessarily long-term. So that's one assumption. The other thing, the other question I had actually is that the thing that came to my mind was our day school is right now providing care for Monday to Thursday for children, for essential workers. It's kind of a different program from what they normally do. And they are also helping them with their schoolwork and all of that. So I don't know if this is something that could possibly, we could look at into either an underserved community that where they're still needing that kind of assistance, would it be appropriate for something like that is actually my question. So that's what I was just wondering. Okay. So I guess, thanks Lucretia. With regard to the daycare question, I would encourage you to connect with Andrew for some richer conversation about that. Okay. That's not an idea that just we've already talked about. And so I think we probably just need to have more conversation to understand the opportunity a little more and what that would look like in terms of the grant. But yeah, for these grants, in fact, most of the granting work that our center does, they're meant to be sort of one-time catalytic grants that help you launch something or start something. As you can imagine, as a conference, I mean, we have funds that we like to, I mean, obviously we would like to redirect and put back into the hands of local church leadership, but our funds are limited. And so if we got into the business of sustaining a lot of local church ministries, then we'd only be able to help four or five churches at one time. But if we play a more catalytic role, then I think the idea is that we can come alongside and help spark creative work in, I mean, 20, 40, 50 churches all at one time. And also hopefully then that will encourage investment and ownership from the lady in your church so that the sustainability of that depends then upon your local church leadership, grabbing hold of the vision. And then, I mean, like a lot of our ministries developing such a commitment to it that once it's launched, then they are invested and want to continue to see it. They want to see it continue. So anyway, just that's a little bit of our thought process about the grants. I have a question. Great. So for the matching grant, do we have to have secured all of the funds prior to applying for the matching grant? No, not prior to applying. So, and this is a little nuance that at least Andrew and I haven't talked about. But if you want to apply for a matching grant in your grant, if you can describe either the money that you believe you can get or the process by which you will raise those funds, then we can consider the application with that in mind. But then I do think, and this is the part, this is the nuance we'll have to work out is at what point a check from a conference is released and can that be a rolling process as well? So like if you say, we have a goal of raising $1,000 at whatever point you raise 500, then maybe you let us know that and then we can release a check for 500. When you get to the full amount, we can release the full amount, right? So we wanna, I think we'll work with you. I think the, again, for us, the value is for us to be as responsive as we can and to put these grant dollars to use in your contexts as quickly as we can and do that responsibly, obviously. So yeah, the money doesn't have to be in hand before you apply. Good question. I'll pass, think about little details that we haven't talked about. Well, if there are not other questions at this point, then we thought that a good use of maybe the remainder of our time would be Andrew for you to put us into a couple of smaller groups where we could maybe talk with each other and share ideas that either we've thought about or even just name needs that we're seeing in our communities and we can help one another in the early stage of envisioning these ministries for which a grant could be given. So I think our plan is Andrew will divide us into a couple of breakout groups and we can facilitate that conversation. And then after, what do you say? 20 minutes maybe, 15 minutes. Andrew, you can judge based on how it's going in your group. Then we'll come back together just for a brief wrap up. Okay, sound good?