Left Hanging

For all of those who continue to hang in here with me, I acknowledge that this little saga of mine is, at best, laborious. I’m getting dangerously close, however, to providing the answer for all those who have asked, “How the hell did you end up in Las Vegas?” I ask for your patience, because we still need to spend a little more time in Nebraska. It cannot be documented, of course, but I think that district superintendents in The United Methodist Church sometimes wonder how they can get the troublesome pastors for whom they are charged “out of their hair.” Lowen Kruse and Dick Carter managed this by shipping me and the family off to Burwell, and now Jim Brewer was giving serious thought to how to get me out of his district. While Nebraska had conference-sponsored new churches under development, the new church start that Jim had in mind for me did not fall into that “official” category. Two of Omaha’s suburban congregations had somehow figured out that they could go in together on what was tantamount to a “satellite” in the Bellevue area. There was no housing, no building, no concrete plans at all other than putting a feather in the caps of the pastors who concocted this scheme—if it worked. My prospective district superintendent, The Reverend Susan P. Davies, was completely focused upon finding a replacement for Denny Silk (Denny voluntarily left his post as senior pastor of Omaha First after admitting to some sort of indiscretion with a congregant) and never gave me so much as a phone call. Annual Conference was drawing nearer by the day, and the only thing I knew for certain was that nothing definite with regard to my future in Nebraska was taking shape. The Zeitgeist was encouraging a call to my old friend, Nate Holt.

P.S. Some of you might be interested in learning more about who Davies arranged to serve as the new senior pastor of Omaha First. I sometimes wonder if she ever wished that she would have paid more attention to some of the little things—like me—that were going on in her district at the same time: http://www.umaffirm.org/cornews/uptomin.html