 Hello, I'm Mike McKee, the Bishop of the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. At the end of February, there'll be a special call session at the General Conference making decisions about our ministry with gay and lesbian brothers and sisters that we have in our church, even beyond the church. While much attention has been focused on the General Conference, more attention has been focused on the ministry that laity and clergy in the churches in the North Texas Conference have been doing for a long, long time. What I invite you to do over the next several weeks is, of course, pray about the delegates and for the delegates of the General Conference. But more importantly, I'd like to invite you to reconsider your own ministry in your local church. What is it that you sense that God is calling you to do? How is it that God is inviting you to meet people whom you do not know so that you may introduce them to the God who knows them and loves them? The most important thing that we can be focused on at this time is our ministry and our mission to the mission field that we know as the North Texas Conference. So following the General Conference on February the 26th at its conclusion, the delegates will go home. Clergy and lady the next day, they will be involved in ministry in their local communities. There will be someone in the hospital who needs a visit from her pastor, someone who has heard a diagnosis that is life-threatening. There will be a family who will walk in the doors of the church for the first time the following Sunday after General Conference. There will be students who are looking for a path forward about their life of discipleship. Much ministry will still be taking place and will be needed. Let us focus not on an outcome, but how it is that we can all best live in to being the disciples of Jesus Christ that God is calling us to be. I'm going to invite you to join me in prayer for the delegates at the General Conference. I also want to invite you to be in prayer for the church. And by the church, I mean not the United Methodist Church, but your own local congregation about the ministry that you and your pastor share together, about the ministry to the community where you are and about how your church can continue to meet people where they are and introduce them to the God who knows them and loves them. Friends, following General Conference, there will be work to do. And we will continue to be the church that God has called us to be. God bless you.