 Hello, I'm Mike McKee, the Bishop of the North Texas Conference in the United Methodist Church. Last week, United Methodist clergy and lay members of the conference gathered at First United Methodist Church in Richardson for our annual conference, and during that time we explored the theme, Imagine, through a variety of ways. We're going to imagine what it's like to be in ministry with each other and imagine what it really means to be in ministry with our God. During the annual conference, I lifted up four imaginings of what we could do together now and in the coming months, and I want to share them with you today. Imagine. Imagine if you as a United Methodist lay person, or clergy person, even in our annual conference, visited and worshipped with one of our new church starts during the coming year. As you arrive, you can see people begin to set up the worship space and how it is they get ready for receiving and welcoming new people who have moved into a community. It's a way to see the vibrancy of what it means to start a new church in the North Texas Conference. But call and email ahead and tell the pastor you're going to be coming as a representative from your local church and that you've been in prayer for them and their outreach ministry to the community in which they are gathered. The second imagining I want to share with you today is this one. Imagine what it would be like for each local church to have a conversation, bringing together parents and their teenagers so that the parents could begin to share their own faith stories. It's not something that necessarily is shared in a Sunday school class, but a real, dynamic, authentic conversation where a parent tells his or her child how it is I came to believe that the story of Jesus could be my story. I think if we could have those kinds of conversations in our local church, then we could make the faith even more authentic, more real, and more alive for our teenagers and even their parents. The third imagining I want to share with you is one that I actually did during the season of Lent this past year. Imagine what it would be like for 10,000 United Methodists across the North Texas Conference to give up one meal each week during Lent and then at the conclusion of Lent donate the money that they would have spent on those meals. Imagine what it would be like if in that beginning act together we would come together to seize the opportunity and the God-given challenge to us to eradicate poverty in one of our zip codes during the next 15 years. The last imagining I want to share with you is one that I think is very important in terms of what it means to be in ministry with people throughout the North Texas Conference. Imagine what it would be like if each of our local congregations adopted a local public school, a public school that may be having difficulty finding enough parents or enough other volunteers in reading and tutoring students within that public school. Imagine what it would be like if each one of our congregations were to adopt one of those schools and thereby help that school but most importantly help those children realize their God-given potential. Imagine what it would be like for a child to grow up and know those United Methodist Christians care about me. I want to invite you to remember those four imaginings and as you think about how it is that you can be involved, how you can be in ministry, how you can be a voice and an actor for the grace of our God and Jesus the Christ through those four imaginings, write me, email me, tell me how it is that your church is actually beating to expand its ministry by imagining the things that God is calling them to do. I trust and believe that the United Methodist Church in the North Texas Conference has significant people resources to do things greater than we can even begin to imagine but God is imagining for us. I wish you well and God's peace.