Battle of the Titans

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to take longer telling the story of my time at Rockbrook UMC than I was actually there—which was two years. The following cast of characters was involved one way or another in the end of my appointment to Rockbrook in 1990. Donald Bredthauer was the Omaha district superintendent who arranged for my transfer from the Desert Southwest Annual Conference, and he had since become one of the associate pastors at First UMC. Lowen Kruse followed Bredthauer as D.S., and as I’ve already mentioned, Dick Carter had been a district superintendent prior to being appointed to Rockbrook. Vernon Goff was the senior pastor of St. Luke’s UMC, one of the fastest growing churches in the conference. Denny Silk was senior pastor at First UMC which was arguably one of the more prestigious churches in the conference.

Having observed my ability to get things done at Rockbrook, both Goff and Silk expressed interest in me becoming an associate on their respective staffs. Bredthauer, having just been succeeded by Kruse, was the most pragmatic in his understanding that being appointed to another church in the same district was a long shot, but he nonetheless was supportive of such a move. The alliance between Carter and Kruse, however, was not to be underestimated, and those two expressed to Bishop Woodrow Hearn that my remaining in the proximity of Rockbrook would not look good, particularly for Carter, and that whatever threat I was posing could be reduced significantly by moving me far away from Omaha. It was hard for Kruse to disguise his satisfaction the day he called me to his office to inform me that it was time for me to learn what it meant to be the pastor-in-charge. His spin was that I was to be appointed to the churches in not one but two county seats (what he neglected to tell me was that each town was the only one in each county).

The strangest irony to come out of my time at Rockbrook was the confession (this is not sacramental in The United Methodist Church) from a parishioner that she had had an affair with the pastor of a United Methodist church in Las Vegas while she and her husband were living there. What a small world! Six years before my appointment there, I was learning about the dark side of Trinity United Methodist.