 MGA is, well, different things for different people with the conference minister. So we wanted to make sure to have it again this year and keep it in general format and things. So without further ado, I would like to introduce your conference minister, Ken Salati. He's going to talk for as long as he wants. As long as he keeps it short. As long as he keeps it short. And then we can all talk about that. Thank you. Let's do something simple. God be with Jesus and Spirit and probably in order to sing well those who are able to do that. So I love the setup of this being an impactful moment. And I want to thank the General Association Committee for allowing me more than 15 minutes of time. I live with someone who says that I can do a half an hour on tying your shoelaces. So I do want to say a couple of things about what's happening in the life of our conference and our common life together. I do want to thank the General Association Committee for taking a risk and experimenting. So we are in the season of encouraging experimentation and trying some new things. And I personally am grateful to the committee for simply branching out and saying that indeed something we already know that the wisdom is in the room. And I'm really grateful that GA has taken on this shape and form and God only knows what the next GA will look like. But I want to thank the team for their work. I also want to thank my colleagues with whom I work daily. The staff of the conference. Many of them are sitting here. Not all of them are sitting here. But if they would rise for a moment. Ever aware of the privilege and the responsibility that comes in this position including that's a surprise. Including working with an amazing group of people who day in and day out are committed to making our conference a vital conference. And so I'm grateful to them. I'm also grateful to you the clergy who day in and day out serve in our churches and in other settings of the United Church of Christ. And for your willingness to serve. It is an interesting time to be in ministry. It is the time that God has chosen for us to be in ministry and it is a time fraught with possibilities. It's a time of great challenge and a time of great opportunity. And it is the time that God has entrusted to us. So I want to thank each of you for your ministries. For the ways in which you faithfully live out the gospel call to be a minister in the cycle of Christ. So Silver Lake is a place. But it's also more than a place. It is a place where people lives are changed. Where people lot people's lives are nurtured and where people are called into ministries of commitment and service throughout the world. And so you know that we're in the midst of a transition. Tim is leaving as our executive director. We give thanks for Tim's ministry. We've applauded him before but I think it's appropriate to thank Tim. I wanted to just say one brief word about sort of what the next steps are in this time of transition. We will have an opportunity to give thanks for Tim a little more formally at the Gala Fancy Camp event on November 14th at the Wallingford Country Club. It's a great venue. We had our golf tournament hosted there and we said well why don't we just do Fancy Camp there. They're really gracious hospitable people that run that place. So we decided that we would invite folks to come for the second annual Fancy Camp. And part of that will be a chance to honor Tim and his ministry as our executive director. And if you don't have that on your calendar I would encourage you to come. It's a lot of fun and it's also a way to support the ministries that happen here at Silver Lake Conference Center. As Tim leaves the end of November there will be a bridge person. Someone that will work for about six to eight weeks. We're not positive about the time period. That announcement will be made public tomorrow. Wait is tomorrow Thursday? No. On Thursday that announcement will be made public. It's someone who's part of our conference and knows Silver Lake very well. And this is a person that said yes to the invitation to serve as the bridge between Tim and the next executive director at Silver Lake. We are in the midst of working with Kaleidoscope Incorporated which is a consulting firm that works around church camps and conference centers. And they are helping us conduct the search. And they are doing a great job of doing that. We've got a physician description in place. There is an application process. There are people who are applying. And people have asked me sort of like well can anyone apply for the physician? And the answer of course is yes. It's an open application process. And some people have said are we limiting the search to people that know and love Silver Lake? And the answer is no. We are opening the search nationwide to people that have some conference camping experiences. If they have an executive director experience that would certainly be desired. But we've made it really clear that if it's someone outside of the United Church of Christ tribal family that we would want them to know about our core values. That those are non-negotiable. And that they need to be aware of what those are. We're pretty out there on the Silver Lake conference center site about our mission and ministry. And we're trying to make sure our candidates know in advance. And Jody Oates who we're working with with Kaleidoscope is really aware of that desire of ours to have someone so that we don't have someone arrive on site and start reversing all the things that we work so hard for. So our hope is that by January of 2016 I will be introducing to all of you the new executive director to Silver Lake conference center. We realize that's a bold move. But we think that can be accomplished. We do have people who are on the interviewing team. And they've assembled a couple once and will assemble before the actual interviews which we're hoping will take place in November, beginning of November as our goal. So I'm going to roll on and then there will be all kinds of conversation but I didn't want to say a couple things. On Monday, this coming Monday I'll turn 60. So when I was 20, close to these 40 years ago, you may, those of you who are in my age cohort group and not all of you are, you may remember the phrase, don't trust anyone 30 or 40, fill in the blank, 50 was like ancient. And so I've been doing a lot of thinking, you know, birthdays people say are just numbers and birthdays are, you know, you're only as old as you feel. You know all the platitudes and that too. But I've been thinking about this a lot. I turned 50 when I was serving in another incarnation on the conference staff and did this whole reflection and riff on turning 50. But I've been reading a lot of Richard Roar. Some of you may know Richard's writings. He's written what I think is a really, a book I would recommend to you, no matter what your age. This isn't just for people who are having anxiety about turning 60. It's called Falling Upward, a spirituality for the two halves of life. The two halves, H-A-L-V-E-S of life. He talks about the first half of life is dedicated to learning how to make a living. And then he says the second half of life is learning how to make a life. And so I really resonate with that notion that, you know, I sort of have kind of figured out what I'm going to do for a living. And it's been an amazing journey to figure that out and to be blessed with meaningful work and ministry. But making a life is really an important part of what I do now. And I'm just going to read one quote from him. He's a quote machine. He actually has a daily feed that you can get if you really like the stuff that he does. He can become a Richard Roar disciple. And he says this, The human ego prefers anything just about anything to failing or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future. The human ego prefers anything just about anything to failing or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future. I love that quote so much I read it twice. Because I live that quote quite frankly. I am paid by the Connecticut conference to maintain an institution. As some of you may remember a couple of years ago when I stood at First Church of Christ in Britain for the meeting to consider my candidacy as your conference minister. I talked about my lack of interest in maintaining the institution. And I still operate out of that particular place. My board of director members are shaking in their boots at this moment. Because in some ways we do all of us, don't we, get paid to maintain an institution. We are pleased when people say to us things are going really well and things are clicking along really well. And everything that you're doing is really wonderful. And we use the tired metrics in our congregations of vitality. We use the metrics of, you heard Jocelyn already comment on it earlier yesterday, the metrics of church attendance and church dollars. We need new metrics. We need to measure some things differently. There's some new work that's being done on what it is we should be measuring. And I bet there's wisdom in this room about what we ought to be measuring. And I'd like us to have some conversation about that. So I love I-words. Not E-Y-E, but words that begin with I. And there is a word that captures, I think, the vision of our conference that has emerged over some time since I've arrived. And so that I-word is... Interdependence. So you know it's made its way into the culture when people can say that and you ask about it. And the idea that we are actually connected to each other, that it is a pre-existing condition that none of us makes it on our own that we actually need each other, not in a codependent way, but in a way that builds up the body of Christ with mutual affection. And we try to outflag one another with zeal. And I have been making the rounds and I love preaching in churches about this as many of you know or some of you know because I've been to your congregations and I'm still looking for opportunities. Cecil would shudder if I'd said that aloud, but I did. And I asked the question in the morning message, what would it look like? If 78,000 people in Connecticut actually believe that they could make a difference. I mean that's how many people we have folks in our tribe together. If you look at the yearbook and you do the math, and we have people in my office that will do the math and tell me if I've got 78 or 77, if I've got it wrong I'll get told, but we have 78,000 United Church of Christ members. Now we used to be something else, but we're not now, so let's celebrate that we are 78,000. And that what would it look like for us to believe that the power of the gospel to change lives and to change Connecticut were within our grasp? It was something we could actually work together on. What would it look like for 78,000 people to work with one purpose? To make the state of Connecticut a more just, loving, compassionate, peaceful state? Can you imagine? Can you just imagine what we might do together if we didn't believe that we were just 240 individual congregations working on our own by ourselves to accomplish the mission and ministry to which we were called as a local church, which is an incredibly powerful blessing of what we have in our midst. But what would it look like for us to work together? So I've been dreaming and thinking about another I-word. I'm not going to come up with an I-word every year, I promise. There's, you know, Apple does. I need a headset in blue jeans. But, you know, I've spent a lot of time talking, thinking, praying, discerning about this word, interdependence. By the way, which is not like an original concept, right? It's scriptural, it's part of our tradition. It's part of our congregational forebear tradition that Seybrook was in agreement that churches actually needed each other. I'mronic that Seybrook's not yet a United Church of Christ Church, but we'll let's leave that for another conversation. But, you know, interdependence, if it is a pre-existing condition, is a process vision. What's the goal, right, of interdependence? It's nice to talk about how we're connected. And I've had that kind of feedback from folks. And of course we can't argue that we all need each other, although we might live to the contrary at times. What is the impact that we will create? Is the I-word I've become enamored by? The word impact. So, sometimes I make the mistake after preaching to call my 27-year-old daughter. And I sometimes forget that I'm going to get a whole earful of information from her that may or may not be a sweet sound to my ears. So, you may know, or you certainly may have preached on the election of I am the Vine. You are the branches from John 15. It was somewhere back in the election era, I think, this year. You're all trying to think, was it an election? So, thank you for confirming that. So, I preach this sermon at one of our churches about the Vine and the branches. And you know that I worked in this notion that we're all part of the Vine. And we are all branches on the Vine. The Vine comes together nicely, right, to believe that we're connected to each other via the Vine, the Christ, the one who calls us to be part of that body. That was pretty good. Yep, thought it was really good. Thought it was really good. And so, a reminder of that passage, just a little snippet from it. I am the real Vine and God is the farmer. Live in me, make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can't bear grapes by itself, but only by being joined to the Vine, you can't bear fruit unless you are joined with me. I am the Vine, you are the branches. You're joined with me and I with you, the relation, intimate and organic. The harvest is sure to be abundant. I've told you these things for a purpose that my joy might be your joy and your joy wholly mature. This is my command, love one another the way I loved you. This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. You are my friends when you do the things I command you, but remember the root command, love one another. So, I'm telling Katrina this story about this great sermon that I preached and how wonderful it was. And she said, well, what did you tell them? And I said, well, you know, it's the Vine and the branches and we're all connected to each other. And she said, dad, you missed the point. You're going, okay, like, take a deep breath. I have no idea what she's going to say. And she says, dad, it's all about the soil. And I'm like, what are you talking about? So what you don't know, well, some of you know, but many of you don't know, is Katrina is a farmer, a proud farmer who believes that she will save the planet by farming. She's currently at the University of California in Santa Cruz in a six-month apprenticeship in agroecology. She worked for four years with the Edible School Yard Program, a program started by Alice Waters of Shea Penise to teach kids where their food comes from that it doesn't come from a bag or can. And so she started working in urban gardens first in Greensboro, North Carolina and then in East Harlem at a school in Brooklyn. She lived in Brooklyn and worked in East Harlem. And then she entered this program. And so last night while I was thinking about what I'd say to you and whether I would tell this story, I got up about 4 a.m. because that happens sometimes. And so I did what some of you may do at 4 a.m. I turned on my computer or my iPad. Sometimes a good idea, sometimes not. So I went to Facebook and I saw a picture posted there. Katrina could care less about Facebook. She never posts anything on Facebook. 2 a.m. last night she posted this picture. You can't make this up. You cannot make this up. So what the picture doesn't frame out is the moon behind her, the gorgeous display of God's creation on Sunday night that some of us experienced together. It was the red moon, the solar eclipse, the lunar eclipse. And there she is in the fields. And I thought, okay, maybe I should talk about the soil a little bit. Thanks, Eric. I want to thank Eric for making that happen 10 minutes before I walked in and the magic that he does. So I asked her about soil. I don't know a lot about soil. Those are your gardeners, know a lot about soil. But what I discovered from her was that healthy soil is the foundation for the world. And I also discovered that 2015, the year in which we are living, is the international year of the soil. How many of you knew that? I mean, really it's the international, the United Nations food and agricultural organization has declared 2015 the year of the soil. So now I want you to hear just a little snippet from the UN. But what I want you to do is multitask with me. So what I want you to do is hear sort of the technical description of soil that's going to come from this source. But I want you to double think. Anybody have, you know what I mean? I want you to hear God as the soil, okay? Because that's what Kat was trying to tell me. But dad, it's all about the soil. Healthy soil is the foundation. For food, for fuel, for fiber and even medicine. Soil is essential to our ecosystem. Playing a role in that carbon cycle, storing and filtering water and improving resilience to floods and droughts and yet we are not paying enough attention to this important ally, this silent ally the UN agency explained. Echoing that call UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that without healthy soils life on earth would be unsustainable. Indeed soils are the foundation of agriculture. They provide vital ecosystem services and the basis for food feed, fuel, fiber and medical products important for human well-being. 95% of our food comes from soil. It's all about the soil. It's all about the gospel that we have been given that says that we need to plant our roots deep in the one who created us. Senator Cory Booker, remember Cory, Mayor of Newark? Now Senator Booker says this about impact. Don't speak to me about your religion. First show it to me in how you treat other people. Don't tell me how much you love your God. Show me in how much you love all of God's children. Don't preach to me your passion for your faith. Teach me through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell. As I am in how you choose to love or give. It's about impact. So as your conference staff, we've been talking together, dreaming together, praying together, discerning together, having many conversations together, even using magic markers and drawing pictures together. The picture in my group was defined in the branches. But we've been talking about really having focus and priorities. And so we've developed two of those. The first is leadership. So after all, it comes down often to that question. What does it mean to be a leader today? What does it mean to be a person of faith called to lead? Faith communities called to lead in ways that are life-giving. And we focused in on the other priority of vitality. What is vitality? What does it mean to be life-giving? The word vitas is life. So what is it that we're doing together that is life-giving? How are we giving life in our communities? How is our conference encouraging and developing and finding ways to point to where vitality is already existing in our congregations? Because we're doing some incredible things together, but we don't even know about it. So those two priorities are providing a somewhat narrow focus. And when you think about it, a lot comes down to those things anyway from my perspective. And last year, I stood in front of you and made the bold assertion. Wow, time is demonic, isn't it? It made the bold assertion that we would start clergy groups, clergy excellence groups, clergy leadership groups. And we have been in conversation about that. We already have some existing conversations and groups that are happening at this moment. But we want to develop that capacity. And I made the bold statement that by this time next year we would have 20 groups up and running. So I stand before you saying we're not there yet. So I ask for your forgiveness. But we also in that conversation have been working on a way for those groups to be seen as leadership development groups. So that there will be clergy excellence groups, but there will also be, and we've thought long and hard about this, lay excellence groups. Because we can spend a lot of time, quite frankly, the stakeholders of the conference are you, folks. The clergy are often the stakeholders of whatever happens and pay the most attention to what happens within conference-wider church life. But we also know that for vital congregations to take place, we've got to have equipped lay leadership. So we are going to ramp that up. We're going to begin that. And I've asked the Associate Conference Minister for Leadership and Vitality, Day McAllister, to give voice to that program. Day. Thank you very much, Kent. So leadership and vitality. Our new general minister and president says this. One of my mantras is simply, it's about mission. Identifying that core mission and giving your heart and soul to it with passion. Commitment and excellence. This is a critical component to maintaining health and vitality. So we talk about leadership development and congregational vitality. Both of them are rooted in the soil of mission. What are we here to do? What impact are we called to have in God's good world? So as a conference, we have spent this time in conversation and we've been asking a lot of folks about our communities of practice. Those communities were born out of a pastoral excellence program. A commitment to not just examine ourselves and the best practices that are engaged by those we call colleagues, but to push ourselves toward excellence. To seeing our role as having a much greater impact. To gauging our influence in the world in which we live. What difference does it make that we're here? The text says that we do not have a light and put it under a bolt. We put it on its stand so that it can be light for the entire community. So our goal is a simple one in leadership development to identify, affirm, nurture, network and build the capacity of lay and clergy leaders of the Connecticut conference and the United Church of Christ. Because if we're really committed to interdependence, it can't just be about Connecticut. It has to be about developing the kind of leaders that will have the greatest impact in transforming the world and allowing it to be more like the kingdom of God for the church with a big C. The identifying part, we've made some changes. We have an associate conference minister for transitions and she is some kind of preacher, don't you think? If you enjoyed that sermon last night like I did, I want to invite you for the very first time to our first annual all-conference revival, which will be November 6th and 7th of Friday and Saturday in Bloomfield. Now, many of you know we've been having a youth revival for five years and we've finally decided, why do they get to have all the fun? So we're going to do this for all of us and it will be November 6th and 7th and Reverend Hughes is going to preach for us on Friday nights. He'll get to hear some more of that great preaching and we've also invited the Reverend Dr. Kenneth Samuel, who is the pastor of the Victory Church and one of our most prolific writers and our God is still speaking devotional. He will be with us on Saturday. So y'all come. I'm done with that commercial. The affirming and nurturing work happens most often through our regional ministries team. These men and women serve every day as support to each of you, standing in the gap, not only in prayer but also in providing resources in the midst of conflict and challenge and difficulty and celebrating when things actually go right. But the networking and the building capacity piece is work that we have done previously through our communities of practice and those communities have made a vital difference in our churches but they could be better. So we spent the last year trying to figure out how to make them better and how to add lay excellence groups. So this is the official launch of our rebranding. So instead of communities of practice, they are now called clergy excellence groups. Clergy excellence groups. To move that word excellence right into the center of the work that we do. We're sharing our best practices so we can be better. Iron sharpens iron to build and expand our capacities. So we have these excellence groups and we've learned some things from being in conversation. Number one, it can be difficult when a group, no matter how vital it is, goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and some more. It can be difficult for the facilitators of those groups. No matter how excited and energized they are, it's difficult when they just keep going and the energizer bunny is not providing additional batteries. So our new clergy and lay excellence groups do have a time frame to them. For our clergy excellence groups, we are suggesting that you work together in a three-year cycle with 10 sessions, one per month, and the summers off to give us an opportunity to meet with the facilitators, to share best practices, to talk about what we're learning and how we can continue to improve so that we can increase our impact not only in those circles, in our churches, in our communities, in our counties, in our state, in our country and the world. No small feat. We have recognized that in some of our groups there's really engaging and significant conversation. Folks are bringing the very best of their experimentation to the work. But in other spaces, it becomes so easy to slip into the pattern of what we've always done. In those communities, it can be difficult to introduce a new way, whether that's changing the way that we govern ourselves or changing the way we understand faith formation. And so we've put together a scope and sequence for those three years. It begins with intentional beginnings and closure so you can end the one group you're a part of and joyfully join another should you decide. It has spiritual formation as one of those segments so we can talk and share honestly about how we understand God and ourselves in this work. It has UCC identity because figuring out who we are together is work that requires colleagues and dialogue. It has personal and professional formation for service because sometimes we need to be in dialogue with each other about how to do this work and how to do it better. And it has plain old knowledge and skills development. Sometimes there are technical fixes for what's going on. Now, each of these segments, we make some suggestions about how many conversations you might want to dedicate to that, whether it be two or three or four or five or six or seven of that 30 session cycle in three years. We have provided some recommendations about things you can talk about. We're going to train a whole new cohort of facilitators on how to implement this curricula and then we're going to talk to them quarterly to figure out how it's going. Is this working? Is this style appropriate? Now, this is the United Church of Christ. So, there's a lot of room for flexibility. We're aware that if we provide an option A and B, it is our collective goal to come up with C. And so even though we say, hey, six sessions would be good, we give you enough topics for maybe three so that the other three around spiritual formation, you can bring your own conversation, your own questions, your own work, your own engagement, we want these to be vital communities of practice where we are nurturing each other and affirming the work that we're doing, celebrating the risk and creating a little bit of a cushion for the fails that will come because we're risking together. The lay excellence groups will be a shorter time frame because we recognize that 30 sessions is a lot of commitment for our lay leaders who are often stretched in any number of ways and positions. We've contracted with some folks who have been doing this work and doing it well, and we're going to have a pilot group for that lay excellence community that will begin in the next 30 to 45 days. We want to try out their system, see how it works, and then figure out how we can duplicate it throughout the conference. Throughout this process, I will be available for questions, for input, for dialogue, for criticism because it's the only way I get better and the only way these programs will reach excellence. Now the very best part of what I get to do is walking away and allowing my boss to answer any of your questions. Thank you, Dave. So I will answer questions in a minute, just a couple more things, and then I'll open it up for your questions. You've heard a little bit about leadership development among our young people, and the GiveSquared program is, and thinking about working for God, our examples of interdependence that have been working for a very long time within our conference setting. I am really excited that the leadership studio, we did an experiment in crowdfunding, and we set a goal. We just pulled it out literally out of the air and said, why don't we raise 15K to buy equipment, to change what was formerly the Dudley Resource Center in our building, and let's find a way to build a studio, a way to broadcast, and also have meetings, interactive meetings, and for local churches to learn how to use the equipment, make it take advantage of that. And I'm very pleased to say that the leadership studio, thanks to Eric and Karen Zeal of our staff, is really, I would say, completed. We haven't had, like, the dedication of the ribbon-cutting ceremony. I know some people really want to cut the ribbon, but we've been using the leadership studio. It's really a sort of an experiment in how technology might bring us together. So we'll be doing some more work out of the leadership studio. And Jay's already mentioned vitality. I want to talk about resources. Every year, we sit down together, and the board sits down together and says, so how are the resources of the conference being generated? And every year, in some ways, it seems like Groundhog Day to me. We have this conversation, and the conversation is we have less money coming through the traditional route of OCWM per capita giving. We built this pretty much a three-legged stool on which we gather the resources. We have those two resources coming from local congregations, and then we have our endowments, which throw off money from interest for the work of the conference. And so the board has begun talking about that. The model that we have has been a model that is 50 years old of obligational giving. It's based on the idea that you're part of the franchise, so why wouldn't you support the franchise? I've asked myself the question, how's that working for us? And it's working, and we are grateful for the gifts and dedication of our churches that do support us through that traditional way of giving, but we cannot just have a three-legged stool moving forward. So this past year, due to the insistence of Charlie Cougenbrode, I have been working on writing a case statement. I know nothing about writing a case statement. So I did what anyone does in this day and age. I worked with case statements. Charlie provided me with rings of materials on case statement. I learned that the president of Stanford University spent one year writing a case statement to raise a billion dollars. And I thought to myself, I've got to learn how to make the case for the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, even within our own family. And so we've endeavored. I'm on version number six, I believe, the case statement and we've done an experiment. We've gone out to 10 churches. Some of you know that because I visited with Charlie and some staff and board members to your churches to talk about what would it look like for us to make the case for what we do and ask for increased support from churches. Now, we're not going to do away with OCWM for capital giving. I'm not suggesting that, but what we've got to do and I think local churches have to do is begin to develop case statements for your own church and your own members. How are we cultivating giving and generosity within our own churches? What impact are we making in our community? We don't get training on this, folks. And as I sit and I meet with leaders after church every Sunday and every single time a conversation comes up about stewardship and money and resources. So it's in our drinking water and yet we live in the richest state in the union. It's not like the resources aren't available in many of our churches, but what we have not done is adapt to the times in which we live. If you don't have a swipe machine at the back of your narthex for giving, think about it. If you don't do online giving and give people an opportunity who pay every single day for everything else in their life through online giving and debit or credit card giving, think about it. If you have an approach to generations and learned about generational giving where generational giving says that the younger generation, some of whom are in the room will tell you, I'm not just going to give to pay the pastor's salary, I'm going to give to make an impact. So how are we learning how to make the case for that? So I've been on this journey, this experiment and a lot of cajoling from Charlie to write this case statement and it's been a really interesting endeavor and I haven't gotten there yet. We haven't reached the promised land. Maybe I'll always have draft on the top of it, but it's about how do we make an impact? What is it we do? And it's a bit intangible, right? And it's about the markers. It's about the metrics. How do we measure a changed life? How do we measure the impact that working with a local congregation to find a new leader? How does that get measured? So we're working hard. We've got some help from a member of Asylum Hill. Charlie and I have been meeting with her to help develop some new materials and resource materials around this. But it ultimately comes down to relationships and impact. So how can we do that work together? Finally, I'd like to talk about the three-legged stool of justice. Tamariffian in the back sitting on the couch drew a picture for me of the work that we're doing for justice in the Connecticut Conference. It's three-legged. It is economic justice work and that's the work that we do for legislative advocacy. We have Michelle Moudric, who has learned how to connect churches to issues within the legislature. We have a very robust and people certainly look to us to provide leadership in racial justice. And we have an emerging ministry here at Silver Lake and Pam is our Executive Director of the Northeast Center for Environmental Justice. And we are... The Board of Directors took a bold move a couple weeks ago. And the bold move was to establish within the Consolidated Trust Fund a carbon-free neutral fund where people could invest monies. Those who are in the Consolidated Trust Fund could invest monies. And so the Board took the bold move and moved $8 million of our assets into that fund. You'll hear more about that. You'll hear more about that. And if your church is in the Consolidated Trust Fund and wants to know more, Charlie is working on some educational materials for that. If you're not in the Consolidated Trust Fund, if you're not in the Consolidated Trust Fund and you have investments and you'd like them to be in a carbon-free neutral fund, we are making that available and I'm excited about that being rolled out. The last thing, and then let's talk, we're going to go a little later, is about this news that came out yesterday the resolution that the three boards of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island unanimously approved to launch a season of discernment among all of the stakeholders of our three conferences to discern together whether God would be pleased if we were to become either a single conference in southeastern New England or whether we would federate in some way. And so we are going to launch a process of conversation about that. This has been going on behind the scenes. You can read about it in the resolution about some of the work that has, the pre-work that has been done to lead to this moment. I am very excited about it. I do not know what the outcome will be because that would not really be very discerning of me. But I do believe that the moment has come for us to ask the question, what does interdependence look like not only in our local churches, what does interdependence look like across the United Church of Christ? What would it mean? We have not had any changes in conference structures since 1957. And so other structures have changed. We talked a little bit about church structures have changed. The national setting has changed its structure, but the conferences have remained the same. So we think this is a moment for us to discern together. What questions do you have? How much time can I go ten minutes of questions? Are we going to be okay with that? Okay, good. Don't tell me that. I have more to say. Okay. I know I'll be held to that. So things that emerged, things that I didn't say that you were sure I was going to talk about. Phrases. Hallelujah. I'm the clergy excellent schools. Do you have any guidelines for, I'm assuming they're regional to kick it off, but what time frame within not only a month pattern, but also within the particular day? What are you talking about? So we believe that once we have trainers and people that are ready to go to begin those groups, we are not locking it into one particular model of geography. We've talked about cohort groups rather than geography groups. What would it look like for all faith formation people to be joined together? What would it look like for all people serving churches of 100 or part-time clergy? What would it look like for chaplains? It could be that some will be geography based. That's a normal, natural, almost traditional model that we have used in the past. So we're not locking it into that. And as far as the frequency, that group will be a self-determining group about when they'll meet, how they'll meet when they'll gather. And I would say that the potential for groups to include within their meeting chances to do that online. What would mean, why couldn't we use WebEx as a platform or Google Hangout as a platform to gather? Especially if geography became an issue, and for some reason in Connecticut, having served in Florida, it's always amazing to me that 20 minutes is like crossing the international date line. I think we can be adaptive about meeting together and the group will be self-determining around it. I just want to say, I think it's exciting for the three Southern New England conferences to be having this conversation because at least in two of the three cases we're doing so from a position of strength. Unlike some of our colleagues out in the western part of the country where they're also beginning to think about these questions, but that's because they can't even afford a full-time single-stack person. So to be doing so from a position of strength, I think it's great. And to be honest, to be thinking about what happens down the road if a national infrastructure is not sustainable, is a regional infrastructure and doing so from a position of strength. So yeah, thank you, Matt. That certainly has been introduced into the conversation and the impact question that I asked earlier about what would it look like for 78,000 people, what would it look like for 150,000 people, which would be roughly the census if we were to join with the two other conferences. What would that look like? Rhode Island brings gifts and strengths to the table as well, but they also are a small membership conference. I think they have 28 to 30 congregations. So the sustainability of staff there is really a question that their board has been dealing with. Jocelyn was at their board meeting when they took the vote representing our conference as a board member. So I do think you're right. I think it's a model that is a little different, not from diminishment, but perhaps from strength to develop something new. Of course, the anxiety that there is already is anxiety that is driven by those of us who work for these settings. And what would this mean? And not sure. We don't have an answer to that. What would the structure look like? Not sure. We don't have an answer to that. But that kind of conversation is also going on in our conference now, the New Haven churches. Some of them are talking together about what would it look like? Would it be a faithful witness for the United Church of Christ in New Haven to have some of our congregations come together in Mission and Ministry? That conversation I know is going on in Woodbury. I know there's initial conversations going on within Waterbury. And I've gone around to our urban centers and the pastors together and said, I'm not here to explain what you should do, but I want to leave you with a question, which is how could the United Church of Christ witness be strengthened in your community if you were to do things cooperatively? Rather than seeing ourselves as competitors in the same town or towns, what would it look like for us to join together for Mission and Ministry? And I realize that's for some of us, that's a leap. I have a question about something you didn't talk about and that is the whole thing that happened this summer with proposed changes structurally to the national side and that a lot of folks were opposed to that because, not because we're opposed to change, God knows, but because of the way it came upon us without a chance for conversation. So my question is is this going to be revisited in two years and is there a plan for us to be able to talk about it? That's a great question. Thank you. Those of you who are sort of synod groupies and follow everything about everything that comes out of the national setting may know that there were some bylaw changes recommended and constitutional changes recommended this past July at in Cleveland at the Synod and those changes, some did pass, but some did not and one of the changes that did not pass was the recommendation that the collegium model of leadership no longer be in place the one that was adopted in 2000 and so there was lots of conversation there was lots of expressions of concern about how that conversation was initiated it came out of the United Church of Christ Board and the Governance Committee Board members expressed reservation about how it came to them and so I think moving forward I don't know whether there is a plan quite frankly about bringing that back to Synod in Baltimore in a couple years but if there is going to be that movement I think one of the learnings would be how would this be discussed churchwide or at least among the delegations of Synod, the question is how do you do that and who's going to respond and who's going to respond but not just the delegations please I think that's part of the problem I think again the question of how do you survey a million people or 900,000 people about opinion and how to do that effectively I think there's going to be a way if I think the learning is is that yes the vote on that fell short by 20 votes of the whole delegation so I do think there will be some impetus and I don't think there's a surprise I think it will be announced well in advance and I think the board which is developing its own culture it's a new board it's a new way to do things is still learning how to be both relational and transparent you know when you have to have a committee on transparency formed you got problems so the board is trying I think the board you know there's new board chair there's new leadership I think we'll see some things about that we'd want to say our new general minister and president John Dorhauer Beat our annual meeting it'll be much better to go to the clergy thing first because that will be more engaging than the keynote address which will be good I think but I would invite you to make sure you take advantage of that because he's got a vision for the church that some of you are already seeing what he's making as public statements other question something I didn't talk about that you were sure I would so I'm grateful again for the chance to address you today and for your leadership in the conference I wish God's blessings upon you thank you okay