You have to bloom where you’re planted
For clergy members in the United Methodist Church and their families, there is no day on the calendar like July 1
By Kimmi Baston
Doug Burns’ least favorite day of the year is his birthday. Most boys and girls excitedly look forward all year long to celebrating their birthday, a day that brings close friends, cake and ice cream and presents. But from a young age, Burns came to dread his birthday, a day that often brought boxes, moving trucks, leaving friends behind and starting all over again in an unfamiliar place.
His birthday is June 30. Of all his birthdays, he remembers his eighth year more clearly than any other.
“Everyone was in the car and was crying, and I thought, ‘Why is everyone crying? It’s my birthday!” he said, more than 40 years later.
The U-Haul trailer, the moving truck, the tears — they were all connected. Burns was just too young to understand the implications — a new house, two hours away, a new school, a new town with new friends and no extended family.
For most people, a birthday on June 30 is like a birthday on any other date. But for children of clergy members in the United Methodist Church, it’s nearly the worst possible day of the year to celebrate a birthday. It’s a date that, all too often, represents moving day.
United Methodist pastors are assigned or reassigned to churches on a yearly basis. Every July 1, they officially take over responsibilities for the church they’re given. That means every year, at the end of June, there’s a possibility they and their family will be uprooted and moved to a different church.
Burns is the child of a former United Methodist pastor (a ‘PK,’ or pastor’s kid, as he calls himself), and as an adult, he became a pastor himself. As a result, he has spent nearly every spring of his life waiting to find out if his birthday will bring celebration, or if it will be a day of sadness and travel.
Frequent moves have never been easy. As a child, every new church meant starting a completely new life over again in an unfamiliar town, a new house and a strange school. Now that he is a pastor with his own family, a new set of challenges is presented. Telling his son and daughter they’re switching schools, leaving his congregation and his friends, moving progressively further away from family — Burns acknowledges it’s not the ideal lifestyle. But he also knew what he was getting into.
“That’s one of the sacrifices of itinerant ministry — it’s just like the circuit riders,” he said.
Like his eighth birthday, this June 30 is moving day for Burns, along with his wife, Judy. His tenure at Christ United Methodist Church of North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, is drawing to a close, and on July 1, he’ll begin work as pastor of Christ United Methodist church of Rockwood and Milford United Methodist Church, both in Connellsville, Pennsylvania.
A lifelong Methodist, Burns leans on the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church to guide him. In its infancy, the Methodist Church consisted of ministers called circuit riders who continually travelled on horseback to minister to various congregations within a given geographic area.
Today, Burns participates in circuit rider reenactments and believes movement between churches every few years helps preserve tradition.
The United Methodist Church is divided geographically into conferences. Burns is part of the Western Pennsylvania Conference, which is headed by Bishop Thomas Bickerton. It is the Bishop, along with his cabinet, who assign pastors to churches.
A variety of situations can bring about a change in pastoral leadership at a church. A pastor may retire or ask to be moved to a different church, or a church may write to the bishop and request a change in pastor. Most often, however, the Bishop’s cabinet simply assesses churches in the conference and decides a church’s pastor is no longer an ideal match, and they assign a new one.
“We [Burns and his wife] hadn’t requested a move, but if a church comes up that seems to fit a pastor well, then the cabinet is aware of that, and they spend some time in prayer and talking about it,” said Burns.
Each Methodist conference is further divided into regional districts. The superintendent of each district, always a former pastor, is also part of deciding pastors’ appointments in his or her district. They are responsible for informing pastors about their yearly appointments. Both a pastor’s current superintendent and his or her future one participate in the call that brings news of a move.
“We got the call in April,” said Burns. “Your District Superintendent calls you first, and then they say ‘I’ve got so-and-so on the line,’ and you have a conference call about the new appointment.”
From there, the process moves fairly quickly.
“You’re allowed a few days to pray with your family,” said Burns, “and then [the District Superintendents] expect to hear back from you about whether you can go to meet the pastor parish at the other church. You go to that meeting, and after that committee feels comfortable and the pastor feels comfortable, it’s considered that the move is going to take place.”
Burns said the hardest part is moving his family from place to place. The Bishop tries to take into account the ages and grades of pastors’ kids, but Burns said it was inevitable that his son and daughter’s schooling would be interrupted at some point. Burns’ move to North Huntingdon in 2007 particularly affected his daughter, Julie.
“This last time, Julie was in her last year of school,” said Burns. “It’s hard to move if your kids are in a rough time in school to move. This time is going to be different, because we’re moving without the kids with us at all.”
Both of Burns’ children have graduated from college, so they won’t be much affected by the move to Connellsville. As a result, Burns is most concerned with the impact on his current church and congregation.
“Everyone’s a little shocked, but every pastor is appointed a year at a time, so everyone in the United Methodist Church knows that’s a possibility,” he said. “It’s kind of hard for them to realize that [the pastor] made a commitment when we started that we would be itinerating pastors. We receive the call from God, the Bishop and the cabinet to go where we’re going.”
That’s how many Methodist pastors deal with leaving friends and family behind — realizing they’re following the call and the will of God.
“I love to think of the possibilities [at the new churches] that God has for us,” said Burns. “John Wesley said, ‘you have nothing to do but save souls.’ There are souls there just like there are souls here.”
While Burns appreciates the tradition the United Methodist pastor appointment system and his responsibility to God and the Bishop, he’s unhappy to leave his congregation, full of individuals he’s grown to love. In Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Pastor Gary Grau at the First United Methodist Church has given his future entirely to God, considering little else when his church appointment is changed.
“I know it’s part of the process,” Grau said. “We’re officially only appointed year by year, and I knew that going in.”
Grau has met the challenges that many Methodist pastors do when they are asked to switch towns, but they’ve never discouraged him. He said he knows his moves are part of God’s plan, and he’s always been able to adjust to new churches with relative ease.
“The last move took us further away from our oldest daughter, and getting used to a different parsonage can sometimes be a challenge, but my wife and I usually manage to overcome that,” he said. “All of our congregations have made us feel at home.”
One of the most difficult assignments handed down from the Bishop is the direction to move to a church in crisis. Grau experienced this two appointments ago, and he said he felt no fear, just the need to rely on God’s guidance.
“If the cabinet knows that the church is hurting they’re going to attempt to send someone in that is going to heal the hurt,” Grau said. “I just had to, under the Lord’s guidance, figure out what was going on and help them to move on. I figured I was making progress when I was accused of preaching forgiveness for the fourth time.”
Grau focuses on doing the best he can for each church he’s appointed to, and he knows that wherever he’s led by the United Methodist system is the right place to be.
Both Burns and Grau feel prayer is an essential part of pastoral appointments. Because assignments are decided above their heads, they have little control over the situation other than to pray for guidance and support.
In other protestant denominations, appointing pastors involves a contrastingly hands-on approach from both individual churches and from pastors.
The Rev. Jim Tinnemeyer, Waynesburg University chaplain, can attest to the stark differences between the Methodist and Presbyterian systems. As a Presbyterian minister himself and with close friends who are Methodist pastors, Tinnemeyer understands the merits and pitfalls of both methods of selecting pastors.
In the Presbyterian Church, pastoral appointments are overseen by geographically divided Presbyteries, the equivalent of Methodist conferences. When there’s an opening at a church, the church’s Presbytery compiles a Committee on Ministry to work with the church and find a replacement pastor.
The congregation forms a Pastor Nominating Committee, comprised of dedicated church members, to be the driving force behind searching for a pastor. The Presbyterian Church’s national website is the hub for the system; it’s where churches post job descriptions for openings and where pastors post resumes and personal statements.
Pastors apply to a particular church, and when the church body has decided on a likely candidate, the Presbytery approves the appointment.
Comparing Methodists and Presbyterians reveals two main differences: the committee system versus the Bishop system, and the fact that Presbyterian appointments take about a year and a half, while Methodists’ transitions occur in a total of three months.
“The [Methodist] system from my perspective tends to move a little faster because you’ve really got one person,” said Tinnemeyer. “[Methodists] don’t have the committee layer, so ours can be kind of slow. However, when one individual has a role they can make mistakes. In theory, if you get more folks in the room, maybe that will lead to a better outcome.”
Tinnemeyer said both systems have strengths and weaknesses — as in any comparison. But he does acknowledge that several of his colleagues rue their inability to build strong connections with their churches when they’re moved around after only brief periods.
“I have heard from some colleagues who are United Methodist that the ‘three years and have to move on’ feels kind of arbitrary to them,” said Tinnemeyer. “They say, ’things were going really well and I just felt like I was getting things going and then I had to move on.’ It really takes time in ministry to make connections; you really have to be in a place for a while.”
Burns’ is in his ninth year at his current church, where he’s helping plan the 50th anniversary celebration. Given his choice, he’d much rather stay to see the remainder of the celebration this year.
“Sometimes the hard thing is that you don’t have control at all,” he said. “But maybe it’s a good time for a new pastor to come in, because we’re celebrating.”
But where Methodist pastors lack control in church appointments, they have increased control over what they preach during worship.
“We have a very free pulpit where we can preach how we feel, because the congregation doesn’t make the decisions about whether you’re there,” said Burns.
So, Burns said, Methodist pastors have to look for the good in the system and find reasons to believe they’re on the right path.
“A lot of times, you’re praying, ‘God, tell us this is what you have for us,” said Burns.
During the last month, Burns has been given a number of heavenly signs directing him toward the Rockwood and Milford churches.
On a recent canoeing trip, Burns’ companion suggested canoeing on the Castleman River — which runs straight through the town of Rockwood. He didn’t yet know Burns was moving churches; he simply found the river in a canoe guidebook.
A few days after the District Superintendent contacted Burns about the move, Burns’ sister-in-law called to mention that she was thinking of moving to Somerset County — the location of both Burns’ future churches.
And just last week, Burns was reading one of his favorite books on ministry, in which there was a historical anecdote about a man experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit for the first time. It occurred in a town called Milford.
Needless to say, despite the pain of leaving his congregation behind, Burns now knows without a doubt that he belongs in Connellsville, and he’s looking forward to putting down roots at two new churches.
“You have to look for signs that God’s going to work in the midst of it,” he said. “No matter what, you have to bloom where you’re planted.”
Kimmi Baston is a junior journalism major at Waynesburg University. You can follow her at @kimmibaston
