Don't Get Too Comfortable!

“Success” aptly describes nearly every aspect of our time in Burwell and Taylor. Mary’s Master Teacher status was much appreciated by the Loup County School District, Rachel and Rebecca were at the perfect ages to make friends both at church and in the community, and I graduated the Course of Study to be ordained Deacon. Both churches’ apportionments (that UMC tax) were being paid-in-full, worship attendance was growing (to my mind a more valid measurement than membership rolls in communities with relatively static populations), and both congregations were exuding a kind of positive enthusiasm that I was told had been missing in the past. But change was in the air. Carol Roettmer-Brewer was succeeded as district superintendent by Gil Karges (both names will be ironically linked to our family’s future), and Bishop Woodrow Hearn was succeeded by Bishop Joel Martinez. One way that bishops and district superintendents can exert their absolute power is through making appointments. What every United Methodist pastor knows, however, is that such power is not absolute when it comes to “successful” pastors who have no intention of changing charges (Dad’s thirty-five years at Arvada UMC is the most extraordinary example I know of), and so the second-class tier of pastors (local pastors, deacons, and submissive elders) are the victims of arbitrary shuffling that callously ignores the good of pastors, their families, and the congregations they serve. The family and I were about to once again be subjected to the dark side of The United Methodist Church that, as the child of an influential and powerful pastor, I had no inkling existed.