“We just felt that the direction the United Methodists were headed was not the direction we wanted to go,” she said. “We are more conservative than their opinions and we thought it was a good time for us to disaffiliate ourselves. “

Wallace said the church had considered this over the past year before making this decision. The church won’t be affiliated with any other denomination at this time.

“We’ve been uncomfortable with a lot of the decisions they’ve made over the years,” she said. “We are a small country church and we don’t think they really did much for us. “

Along with the name change, Fairland Grace Community Church hired a new pastor. The church has hired the Reverend James Moore, who resides in Greenfield.

Wallace said it was a new experience to hire a pastor for the Church in Fairland. In the past, The United Methodist Church simply sent a new pastor when needed.

“We had to call people up and say, ‘Hey, are you interested? “” said Wallace. “He was one of those people we knew who was looking for a church. It was a kind of word of mouth. We were lucky to have it fairly quickly.

Moore has been a pastor for about 20 years, since he was in high school in Mitchell, Indiana.

“I had some really good mentors in high school,” he said. “They were actually brothers, Steve and Wes Jones. They were pastors at Mitchell Wesleyan Church, and they just took me under their wing. When I was in high school, pastors took me to clergy conferences and ministerial retreats, and he sometimes let me preach.

These pastors, along with his mother, influenced Moore to pursue his career in preaching.

“I think my mom mostly, she took me to church when I was little and always called me her little preacher, since I was five, so it was something I knew I had to do, “he said.

He retired in 2017 to take care of his wife, who suffers from epilepsy.

“My wife was sick for many years, she had epilepsy and she had brain surgery in 2010, so I took care of her for years,” he said. “Have you ever seen the movie ’50 First Dates’ with Drew Barrymore? This is how she ended up after the operation, where she forgot a lot of things, and I had to explain to her every day and reset her memory.

“Six years ago her whole family moved to Hawaii and she wanted to move to Hawaii,” he continued. “I did my best to move her to Hawaii, but there is no work there.”

“At the end of 2017, I knew she wanted to go to Hawaii, so I left my church in California to come back to Indiana, because I knew I could find a job here, and she moved to Hawaii,” a- he declared. “My kids and I live in Greenfield, just us. … Most pastors who divorce do not remain pastors. So I retired to take care of her, find a new life, you know, because I had always been a teacher, and I did corporate stuff before I went to California, but the past four years have been mainly secular corporate jobs. “

How Does a Retired Pastor Get to Fairland Grace Community Church? God led him there.

“My pastor, Steve Ellis, whom I used to go to his church in Greenfield, he knows the people of that church,” Moore said. “They met somewhere and was talking about this church, about the pastor’s leaving and the independence of the church, and he said, ‘You should call my friend James. He might help you.

A few months passed before the church called Moore, he said.

“Two months passed and I never heard anything, then a Wednesday, [Steve and I] went out to lunch and said, “Have you ever heard of that little church in Fairland?” and I said, ‘Steve, I didn’t hear a word.’ And I said, ‘If the Lord wants me to go there, they’ll call me.’ “

The church called him the next day. He got the keys to the office on Wednesday, bringing him out of retirement after four years. Moore plans to continue working for a company in addition to being a pastor.

“Often times when God works, he works out of the blue,” Moore said. “Sometimes you don’t look for things, they just find you. “

But what really sealed the deal for Moore was that his kids loved this church too.

“I brought them here on Father’s Day and they were like, ‘Daddy, I love this church!’ “, did he declare. “The people of Fairland in this church asked me what I could do for them, and I said, ‘Well, I’d love to build a church where my kids would go.’ Because for the past four years I’ve had a hard time getting them to come to church with me. They just don’t want to go. They say to me ‘Dad, can’t we just watch it online? This church is boring. This church sucks, you know? And they didn’t give me the slightest problem to come here. They are delighted to come here.

“It is an answered prayer,” he added. “I wouldn’t have – If I had brought them here in that first trial on Sunday and they’d said ‘No way, dad, we’re not going over there’, I should have said to these nice people i can’t [be their pastor]. But after church they said, ‘Daddy, it was actually pretty good. We like it.

Moore will deliver his first sermon during the Sunday service. He plans to tell the story of Samson, emphasizing the theme of the anointing of God. Samson was an Israelite who followed the proscriptions of Nazirite life, which is characterized by a commitment to the Lord and includes many rules, such as not cutting one’s hair. Samson had a God-given strength that was taken from him after his lover cut his hair.

“A lot of people think of Samson as the Incredible Hulk, but he wasn’t that special, and he probably wasn’t that muscular,” Moore said. “Every time he has done something great, he says the Spirit of the Lord has come on him.”

Moore said he prays for the anointing of God in his own life, and his greatest fear is that he might try to do God’s will and not have His Spirit.

“It has always been my greatest fear, that I stand up to preach or do something that I thought God called me to do, but when I start to do it I realize that the Spirit of the Lord left me, ”he said. . “But I don’t feel like that here.”

Moore believes the anointing of God is the key to making everything work.

“If you don’t have it, it won’t work,” he said. “But when you have it, it’s like the wind in the sails. One quote I’m going to use on Sunday is when you have the anointing of the Lord, like Michael Jordan, you can jump and decide in the air. The wind just carries you. This is what I did here, I just jumped and I’m going to decide in the air what to do next. I just let the wind carry me and let God do His thing, and it’s Sunday sermon.

So he does not yet have a vision to lead his new church.

“I just met these people a month ago,” he said. “I have to get to know these people, I have to get to know this community and God will give us a vision.”

In the meantime, Moore will worship his religious community.

“I’m going to love them, preach to them, pray for them and make new friends, and then we’ll see from there,” he said. “This is probably my vision by Christmas. At that time, we will all know if it is right and if the Lord’s anointing is there.

In addition to being a pastor at Fairland Grace Community Church, Moore is also working on a book that will be released from the publisher on July 23.

“It’s called War stories: pastors cannot be sacrificed,Moore said. “I was a Wesleyan Methodist, I was ordained a Wesleyan pastor but grew up in the Methodist tradition. I have been a pastor of Wesleyan churches and Methodist churches. Now with that denominational split, it displaced thousands of pastors. ”

Moore has been working on this book for 10 years, trying to capture how pastors lost their jobs, benefits, pensions, and even their homes because of displacement.

“All of these pastors have become useless because of this denominational split,” Moore said. “This book is about post-traumatic stress that pastors experience. You think you can just quit your church job and get a job with a company, but it’s not that easy.

The corporate world doesn’t recognize pastor as a legitimate career, Moore said, making it difficult for pastors to find employment. The book compares displacement to themes of war, such as PTSD, prisoners of war and the missing in action.

“Some of them turn to drug and alcohol addiction, their marriage breaks down, they can’t get a job and people think they’re just bad,” Moore said. “The church just says, ‘Well, they’re no good, so let’s sweep them under a rug.’… Rather than take responsibility, they just let them go. The church has done that to a lot of pastors.

Moore’s final chapter gives hope to its readers by letting them know he did. He quit the post of pastor, got a job with a company, and eventually became a pastor again.

“You can go through it, you will go through it and you can be a pastor again,” he said. “This whole chapter that comes to me now is the book that comes to life. … I believed in my heart that I could come back.