 We need to connect the rural community with communities near a city so they can learn from each other. We need to get people out of their church buildings and into the community with our neighbors. Hello, I'm Mike McKee, the Bishop of the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. You have come together as one of the charge conferences representing particular church in the metro district of the North Texas Conference. As you gather in a charge conference, you not only take stock of what you have done in ministry this past year, you will also begin to lay the groundwork for the coming year as well. Guiding you today will be the Reverend Cammie Gaston, your district superintendent. But there are some things I'd like to share with you as challenges and opportunities and our work together in the North Texas Conference for the coming year. Over 300 United Methodist Churches in the North Texas Conference are making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. During the coming year, I hope that our churches will become even more vibrant, more vital, and sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. And I'm inviting you and your congregation to join with the other 300 United Methodist congregations in North Texas on some common initiatives that will impact the communities in which our churches are located, but more importantly, will impact the lives of men and women, children, and students with the good news of Jesus Christ. The Christian faith began as a missionary movement. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, His disciples, His early followers, they began to share how it is that Jesus' life, His death, and His resurrection had transformed Him. But they didn't keep that a secret. They began to tell others of the good news of Jesus Christ, not only in the communities in which they lived, but many were so bold that they would travel to distant places with people whom they did not know and cultures that they perhaps didn't understand, but were still able to tell the good news of Jesus and how His life and death and resurrection and knowing His love could transform their own lives and the communities in which they were located. Likewise, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, shared the gospel in unlikely places, in prisons, in coal mines, wherever people gathered who may not have heard the good news of Jesus Christ. But I'm not asking you to travel long distance to share the good news or to go to unlikely places. I'm inviting you to go to familiar places to tell the story of Jesus and to share the good news. First, I would like to invite you to join me and others in the United Methodist Church in North Texas to read the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles during the coming year. There are 24 chapters in the Gospel of Luke, 28 in the Acts of the Apostles, and if we read one chapter a week, we can bookend the story of the life and ministry of Jesus with the story of the early church. During that year, each week, you can receive either through email or social media or on our website, brief devotions and some questions about your own devotional life pertaining to that scripture passage that week. And I think that if we can engage together in a study of scripture that we use in our own private devotional time, in addition to your Sunday school class or your small group or any mission project you're engaged in, it will create a foundation about our understanding of the life and ministry of Jesus and about the story of the early church. And it can serve to form our own understanding of our ministry together, lay and clergy to the communities in North Texas. Secondly, I would encourage us to develop a culture of invitation. In other words, what I'd like for each of us to be able to do is to tell our own story of Jesus so that his story can become the story of another who does not yet know him. Maybe it's the way in which you recommend your church and its ministry to a person who is hurting. Maybe it's the way in which you invite someone to be with you in a small group or small Bible study or simply to worship in your congregation. Whatever it is, we must learn how to tell the story of Jesus in simple and clear ways. Rabbi Hillel, the noted Jewish theologian of several centuries ago, shared that a good Jew should be able to tell the essence of the Torah, the law, while standing on one foot. I would challenge us to be able to tell why the Gospel is important to us in that kind of clear fashion. To tell why the Gospel is important to us while standing on one foot. What I encourage each of our congregations and pastors to do is to develop a plan about how it is that you will share the good news in the communities in which you're located. How it is that the people called Methodists can be emboldened again to tell the story not in unlikely places or in distant places, but in familiar places to people they know because each and every person can only be whole if they know the story of Jesus. The third initiative upon which we need to focus is how we impact communities, the communities in which our churches are located. For me, we need to understand how it is that a local church makes a community healthier because not only of its presence, but of its ministry with people in that community. What would it be like, for example, if thousands of United Methodists all across the North Texas Conference gave one hour a week to a public school, a public school that has unique challenges, and that we engage with students in those schools so that over a period of time we know that those students will be able to be academically successful. But what's important is that we do it not just so that we can do a project just so that we can help a student, but we do it out of our deep love for Jesus the Christ and out of our deep love and God's deep love for all of God's children. I can think of no better way in which we can help people come into living the abundant life that our God wants them to live. There are other places in which we may be able to make an impact in a community. I think of domestic violence and how it is a woman and her children should not have to live in fear because of the violence that may happen in that home. Whatever it is, I trust that your church will engage in a new ministry within the community that seeks to meet the deeply felt hurts of people in your community. Because that is the way in which we can make a difference. That is the way in which we impact communities. And that is a way in which we impact the world in which we live. Many persons ask me sometimes, especially clergy. So what do you measure? How does the cabinet evaluate a church? What makes for vibrant congregation? There are a number of metrics, the numbers of people in worship, the numbers of people in Sunday school or small groups, the numbers of people doing mission. What it all means is how are we engaged on telling the story of Jesus? How are we engaged in living the story of Jesus? How are we engaged in people's lives? Not just our own, but most importantly, and the ones whom God wants us to meet. I hope and pray that the year 2015 is a year of impactful ministry's admission in the 300 churches of the North Texas Conference. And you, you, all of you are important in making that impact on behalf of Jesus the Christ. God bless you for who you are and for what you do.