“And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. And immediately, they left their nets and followed him.”
Mark 1:17-18. NRSV
We find ourselves at the start of a new appointment year. We are a peculiar people, United Methodists. We appoint pastors and people to serve for one year at a time. It seems antithetical to sustainable leadership paradigms and secular business thinking to guarantee a key leader for a year at a time. Yet, a yearly appointment tenure is inherently faithful and refreshing. As weekly, each Sunday is a new opportunity, a new call for re-creation, and so is the start of a new appointment year. Each year around this time gives way to congregations and pastors to renew a vision for ministry and ideas using holy imagination, whether the leadership is returning or newly installed. It is also a reminder that our vision is not solely predicated on one person called pastor but together, lay and clergy, we are united in our wanting to hear God’s call for our communities of faith. What would happen if we stopped marking time from a Chronos perspective and instead lived into Kairos season, where we embraced the appointed time for God’s purposes as revealed by the Holy Spirit and times of discernment, bible study, prayer, fasting, and commitment to authentic beloved community?
Jesus’ invitation to these disciples in the Gospel of Mark and to all those who claim him as Savior and Lord is a journey beyond what was done in the past and even what we anticipate doing in the future. It is an invitation to trust God, who has been faithful in the past, shows up unexpectedly in the now, and calls us to rest in a certain future grounded in hope and the promise of what the Holy Spirit will do in us and through us in the journey ahead of us. Jesus is eventually leading the disciples he called to resurrection through the Cross of Christ and a new reality of the risen Lord. The Cross is a reminder that nothing is impossible with God, and all things can be made fresh. In some ways, the new appointment year reminds us that grace is the bedrock of our Wesleyan theology. God’s prevenient grace and awakening as the light of Christ woos us to a journey of new beginnings, justified because of the work of Christ and grounded in the blessed assurance of the call for ever-changing lives and ways of being in relationship with each other on the road to sanctification that we might love the Lord our God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves.
Today, I take time to welcome new and returning pastors to the calling of serving God’s people. I also extend gratitude to all the laity who have said yes to serving in leadership, especially to Mrs. Freda Davis (Fremont UMC, Wilson) and Mr. Clement Quintyne (Wilson Temple UMC, Raleigh) as co-laborers with me in the vineyard known as the Capital District. Finally, I am grateful to Mrs. Nancy Martinez, the Administrative Assistant to the DS, for her overwhelming devotion to the people of the Capital District.
It is truly a day of new beginnings.