June Pastors

The month of June has been “transition” time for Methodist for decades; I do not know the precise time this practice began, but for most Methodists, following the 1938 merger—the Methodist Protestant denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church South became “The Methodist Church,” the practice was in place. Annual Conferences throughout the denomination announced appointments of pastors—and later gravitated to the month of June. Pastors receive their annual assignments at Annual Conference; Some remain the same as last year, some go to a new assignment.

As I write this the North Georgia United Methodist pastors have arrived at—or returned to—their Appointments for the 2024-2025 Conference year. Although a pastoral appointment is for only one year, most pastors are reassigned; United Methodists call this the itinerant system. In the early days of Methodism pastors “rode the circuit” traveling from one church to another—-mostly on horseback. Times, transportation, technology, and—temperaments (one way to say it) have changed. But pastors and their families moving from one place to another—-in different patterns—remain. And in Georgia, June is the month of moves.

As July finds all United Methodist pastors in place, there is a sense of settling into something like—normal. Normal is not an accurate description; having moved to nine (9) different assignments over fifty years of service, I can say with a certain degree of authority, every day is new. They flesh out Yin-yang, Encyclopedia Britannica explains-–in Eastern thought, the two complementary forces that make up all aspects and phenomena of life. Or in a less elegant turn of phrase, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly—it is my contention that we tend to make it what we want it to be.

The toughest assignment I had was early on and projected to me to be “A great opportunity.” It took a couple of decades of maturity and experience for me to discover it was just that, a great opportunity—and would have been even better if I had “put on my big boy britches,” and viewed it differently. As Norman Vincent Peale said, look for fine sunsets instead of puddles (the basis of a sermon he preached—and I came to lean upon heavily).

©Copyright Willis H. Moore 2024