Thanks to your faithfulness and generosity we are going to finish the year in good shape.  We are close to breaking even as of December 30th depending on how much we spend in December.  It has been an eventful year with many ups and downs, but the Lord has seen us through, and you have responded to his grace.  Many of you have lost jobs, and most of you have gotten new ones.  Keep praying for those who have yet to find employment.  Many of us have lost loved ones during the year, and this has been a time of reflecting on how we have been blessed with their lives.  Many new faces have started attending our church and have become active.  It has been a great joy seeing an ethnically diverse children's choir program in which I saw Texans of all shades singing their hearts out.  We have begun to reach our community which is very diverse, and church is beginning to look like the people who we see in our stores and parking lots.

I am so impressed with the growth of our staff in its abilities, gifts, and graces.  Our church is as strong as any United Methodist church I know in similar circumstances.  We are an inner city church that serves a vast area of the metroplex.  Our new year is before us with many opportunities to seek out the unchurched.  I hope that we will begin to see more and more professions of faith this year, and my goal is that there are more professions of faith when people join our church than transfers from other churches.  God calls us to seek out the least, the last, and the lost.  I believe what we do on Wednesday nights is a portal for the unchurched in our community.  

Once again thank you for your faithfulness and generosity.  It is good to finish a year in so much better shape than we began it.

Grace, peace, and love,

Gifford