 In the spring of 2020, as the numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were on the rise and the economy was being disrupted, communities all across the North Texas Conference were suffering from higher levels of food insecurity, unemployment or underemployment and grief, stress and a host of other mental health challenges. Communities of color were especially affected by these negative impacts. In response, the CMO hosted a variety of webinars to spark ideas for ministry and to help church leaders support one another. The CMO also developed two COVID-19 disaster response grant opportunities. The first, the Racial Equity Response Grant sought to amplify the efforts of churches serving in contexts that allow them to be in ministry with BIPOC communities. Qualifying applications included relief work as well as advocacy work aimed at building more racially just communities in the wake of COVID-19. The second, the Rural Response Grant sought to come alongside rural churches with under 150 people in average worship attendance and strengthen their ministry with neighbors who were suffering from the pandemic. Reverend Tim Marks and Calvary United Methodist Church in Paris received a Rural Response Grant to support their vision for a ministry of encouragement for essential workers in the Paris community. When we began to have the dream of being able to show appreciation to our essential workers, we kind of felt like a thank you card while it was nice, wasn't really enough. And when we saw the opportunity for the grant from the Missionary Outreach Center, we applied for the grant and received $1,000, which we used to buy $110 gift cards from local businesses to include in the thank you notes that were written by members of our congregation to go to those essential workers. Members of our church from age 7 to 94 were writing thank you cards to include with those gift cards, and so it gave them a real sense of hands-on ministry and outreach to our community. So one of the things the Center for Missionary Outreach really provided for us was some guidance on how to craft notes of appreciation to the essential workers who would receive the gift cards and even so much as helping us make the request to local businesses so that they would understand what we were trying to do when we contacted them to purchase like $100 worth of $10 gift cards from local businesses. It was incredible help to guide us to make connections with the local businesses and the essential workers that we were seeking to help. Before it really even got off the ground, other people began to pick up the ideas of the ministry of thanking essential workers and supporting our local businesses. An insurance agency in town adopted one of the grocery stores and provided gift cards for all the employees at that grocery store. Other churches began to offer the same kind of gift cards to essential employees and other businesses. Our church, Parish Calvary, adopted our medical center and focused on essential workers who were kind of out of the limelight – custodians, office workers, technical support people, technicians. It was really exciting because 100 people at the hospital received gift cards from Calvary, but essential workers at all the businesses in our community received gifts from somebody. So it really grew from just Calvary trying to do something to the whole community expressing their appreciation to essential workers. As the pandemic wore on, blood donations, particularly from those of African ancestry used to most effectively treat sickle cell anemia, were in critically short supply. Blood donations had plummeted due to safety concerns. Reverend Jeffrey Moore and St. Stephen United Methodist Church in Mesquite responded. At the onset of COVID, we had about 90% of our blood drives get canceled by our sponsors who where we used to go to the schools, universities, colleges, corporations who closed because of COVID. And we weren't able to hold blood drives. My first phone call was to Jeffrey at St. Stephen United Methodist Church and said, hey, can you host a blood drive? It felt like a very tangible way that we could respond to the pandemic and support frontline health workers and the healthcare sector, something that otherwise felt really overwhelming. When they started to get word that we were holding a blood drive, it filled up almost immediately. So Jeffrey said, hey, let's have some more. I said, absolutely, let's do this. I reached out to Andrew and I said, do you think this is something that the CMO might be interested in and could coordinate at a conference level so that we could bring the resources of the conference to meet this real and imminent and critical need in healthcare? And of course, Andrew said, sure. The American Red Cross has had wanted to work on increasing their partnership with the African-American community, increasing their African-American donor pool and increasing their outreach to combat sickle cell. And we wanted, we had already launched the JTRJ, the Journey Towards Racial Justice, and so we knew that we wanted to strengthen marginalized communities. So the conversation with Andrew and the center and Jeffrey, we were able to come up with a program that supported the Zahn Home Center and the Dallas Bethlehem by setting a unit goal of 2,000 units. And if we were able to achieve that goal, the program that was developed and that American Red Cross could support was to have a $10 per unit towards those two centers and their missional outreach that they were trying to achieve. We have a refrigerator in our lab that usually sits empty. This refrigerator is for those patients with sickle cell and that refrigerator went from being two to three units to now 20, 30 units being in there. And the United Methodist Church has been an integral part of being able to support that. And it's really a partnership between us and the community and the American Red Cross. It's the best example of in this context of ministry with. In February of this year, winter storm Uri, the snowpocalypse, descended on North Texas, leaving behind over 60 United Methodist churches with damage due to flooding from burst pipes and additional needs in communities already strained from almost 11 months of the pandemic. The CMO responded quickly, providing timely information about disaster relief and recovery resources and preparing for a possible case management effort in targeted communities. The CMO also created a winter storm grant opportunity. This grant had two goals. First, to support churches needing financial assistance to repair their facilities and resume the life-changing ministries that happened there. And second, to catalyze church efforts to be in ministry with their neighbors who were suffering as a result of the winter storm. Reverend Brian Phelps and Church of the Disciple United Methodist Church in DeSoto received a winter storm grant and used the funds to achieve both goals. As soon as we heard that there would be rolling blackouts, I want to say maybe Sunday before the as the storm was kind of brewing, if you will. When it started snowing, we already knew that the church was going to be impacted in some kind of way. We had a couple of members who came by, but they didn't have keys. So what they saw was it just seemed normal. Everything seemed to be in its place. That was Tuesday. So by Thursday, when things kind of cleared up, I trekked my way over here and just saw water coming out the windows. I mean, it was everywhere, icicles coming out of places that I never expected them to. All of the water was just kind of spewing in these rooms. So there were three burst pipes. Pipe one and two of them in the wall back this way. And it just rained, if you will, just was pouring in these offices right here. So all of the flooding took place right here and it just spewed all over the church. So the places with the most impact were the offices, the kitchen and the sanctuary. The water actually just traveled all throughout the church. So that's our north wing and it traveled all the way down to the south wing and really impacted, especially here where the stage or the pool pit was. The winter storm grant kind of has two parts to it of which we're excited about. One, it helps us to defray some of the costs with the deductible. So this is a smaller congregation with some unique needs and higher bills. And so we're just excited for a little bit of help. So we're grateful to CMO for even helping us get that far. But the second leg of that helps us get a little further, like I said with the winter storm in itself, gets us further to reaching our goals for whether that be digital ministry or equipping some spaces with some needs for our neighbors. We believe that it's going to help us get a little further down the road and get out of this experience just a little bit so that we can get back on our feet. The experience of attempting to provide a robust response to the winter storm and the likelihood that the North Texas area will experience extreme weather events more often in the years to come, reveal the importance of renewing our investment in our conference disaster response ministry. An opening on the CMO staff allowed the conference to bring on board someone with expertise and experience in disaster response, who will oversee the task of strengthening the conference's disaster response ministry. We welcome to the CMO staff Reverend Jeremy Bassett, a recently retired elder from the Oklahoma conference, where he served for the last 15 years as the director of the Office of Mission and had responsibility for developing a strong disaster response ministry. The vision is to see this ministry as beyond just engaging crises, but supporting the church in every level and facet of disaster, which is preparedness, then the relief and recovery effort, and then the mitigation of future disasters. And so we'd be looking to equip leadership in each district with people who can go to local churches and say, now how do you want to get engaged in this ministry at what level? And by the way, how is your church looking in terms of its own preparedness and its witness to the community about preparedness? And so we'll be engaging county officials, we'll be engaging state officials, we'll be looking at the various entities that are involved in this ministry to equip us, including, for example, our own conference insurance program. How do we help churches understand what best to do to prepare for a disaster, to ensure for a disaster, and to recover from one once it hits? For the past several years, one of the five areas of focus for the Center for Missionary Outreach has been to provide leadership for making disciples who are courageously anti-racist. Since the launch of the Journey toward Racial Justice in January 2020, the CMO has provided significant staff support for this initiative's efforts. In addition, in 2021, the CMO's ministry with grant process prioritized efforts with leadership by, or a mutual partnership with, persons of color, and with a clear goal of building racial justice and equity. Many months, or in some cases years, of carefully cultivating these ministry ideas has borne much fruit. This spring, the CMO received 14 applications and granted $50,000 to nine different churches and ministries. Reverend Flor Granillo, associate pastor at First UMC in Sherman, was the recipient of one of these grants to help start a ministry called the Vicinos Community Center. Immigrants are mostly humble people, hardworking, and modest. And many of them have no legal documentation. And so they live in the shadows of society because they are just marginalized. And so we want to help them to learn how to transition into the new country. We decided to create this community center is because we want to help the immigrants not only to learn English, not only to teach them parenting skills, but mostly how to be more involved into their children's education because we firmly believe that getting into their children's education, they are going to develop the vision of sending the kids to college. So we are convinced that education will break cycles of poverty and marginalizations for the next generation. Thanks to the generosity of some people in the community, we have the space where we have already launched the first phase of the center. We now are teaching parenting classes and we are teaching a course for mental health for the community. And we believe that this is a great opportunity and the grant, the money of the grant is going to help us to equip and to furnish and to make that space welcoming and inviting for people to come. And the next steps is the connections, making, continue making connections with different institutions and professionals in the center. We want to help them to be just embraced and empowered and to be able to embrace that culture and always reminding them for them to remember that they have the same human rights of all people. The Center for Missional Outreach is investing in the churches of the North Texas Conference by telling the stories of creative, cutting-edge ministry with neighbors, by connecting church leaders with one another for mutual learning and encouragement, by equipping church leaders through consultation, coaching and relevant training and by directing conference staff, energy and financial resources to churches that are living out their core purpose of loving God and loving neighbor. Go to the CMO website or contact us to explore how the CMO might support and invest in your ministry.