Bishop of the Global Methodist Church, Dr. Carolyn Moore on Words of Life!

For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, planning your finances is bigger than just money. We help you put your plans into motion and faith into action so you can do more for the ones in your heart.

Because sometimes, all you need to make a difference is someone to help you make it happen. Thrivent, where money means more. Connect with us at Thrivent.com. Life Audio. Hi, from the Salvation Army, you're listening to Words of Life. Welcome back to Words of Life. I'm going to keep this really short because I am so excited for you to meet, if you don't know her, our new guest for the next five weeks, Dr. Carolyn Moore. Hey, welcome back to Words of Life. I'm Bernie Dake, and I'm so glad that you're here. We have an incredible guest with us this week, and her name is Dr. Carolyn Moore.

Welcome to our little studio. What a joy. Anytime I get to be at the Salvation Army Southern Headquarters, I am a happy person.

Well, we're happy too. My wife and I were very fortunate to get to meet you last summer at the Salvation Army's Bible Conference where you preached. We had so much fun there. I fell in love with Salvation Army people when I was at that conference. I mean, I had so much respect and love for you guys already, but we had fun.

Very cool. For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, planning your finances is bigger than just money. We help you put your plans into motion and faith into action so you can do more for the ones in your heart. Because sometimes all you need to make a difference is someone to help you make it happen. Thrivent, where money means more.

Connect with us at Thrivent.com. It's Holy Week in Jerusalem. Crowds welcome Jesus as King.

Rebellion is in the air. Jesus operates outside our jurisdiction. Room will descend on us all. But instead of taking the throne, Jesus turns the tables. My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of thieves. The world will never be the same. Coming soon to theaters, The Chosen Last Supper.

Get your tickets now. Well, the fun part about today is we get to know you and introduce you to a whole new audience of people. So let's start at the top.

Who is Dr. Carolyn Moore? Well, I was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, and that's where I live now, but that sort of just got thrown back into the briar patch kind of thing. I was raised in what I would call a more culturally Christian home. We set a blessing before meals. We went to somebody, at least one of the eight of us would go to church most Sundays.

Eight. Yeah, there were six children and my parents. And, you know, we believed in, as many culturally Christian families do, a generic God. But I found Jesus personally through youth group. I was on a mission trip and I was sitting in a room by myself one night on a mission trip in Blairsville, Georgia, and I saw it. I was looking at a tree and its revelation came to me. That tree did not happen by itself.

It came because of a creator. And because I was raised in a Christian tradition, I just sort of at that moment took the entire Christian worldview on. And about a year, maybe two years later, I was 11 or 12 then.

Yeah, I was 12 then. When I was 13, I was standing in a pulpit at my home church on a Sunday evening during one of their Sunday evening worship services. And I heard the voice of the Lord while I was sharing a devotional.

It's part of a youth service. I heard the Lord say, this is where you belong. And from that moment, I have always sensed myself as called into ministry.

That doesn't mean I did it. I didn't just take the short road home. I actually took about 10 years off from following Jesus seriously and lived some pretty dark days during those 10 years. But when I came back to Christ, I came back to the call. I just found out that faith and the call for me are intricately connected. So how does one equip themselves 10 years after falling in love with the Lord in a genuine way to then become a pastor, a teacher?

That's a great question. So when I was 13, I heard that call. By the time I got to college, I had watered it down because in my tradition, nobody had seen a female pastor couldn't really support it. And so when I stepped away and watered it down to maybe Christian education, I ended up falling away from the faith completely. I got married in my 20s and it wasn't until I was almost 30 years old that I came back to Christ. I came back through Bible study and the words of the Bible began to jump off the page.

It was really kind of remarkable. So a lot of my story is maybe a little different in that I didn't have a lot of other people around me. It was that time in the room by myself when I was 12. It was standing in a pulpit, hearing the voice of God when I was 13.

It was sitting at my kitchen table when I was in my late 20s watching the words of Scripture jump off the page at me and speak a living word to me. So when I came back to Christ and came back to the call, I just immediately sensed I was married by that time. My husband was fully supportive of the idea and I sensed it was time to go to seminary. I didn't want to go to seminary. I thought, God knows my GPA from college.

Sure, He's not going to make me do that again, but that's what we did. We went off to Asbury Theological Seminary and those were some of the best years of our lives together. We got rooted so well in what it means to be an Orthodox follower of Jesus.

It was just a great time of awakening of my call, of the specifics of my call. I fell in love with the idea of the church itself. I just fell in love with what it means to be the church and sensed God's call into pastoral ministry, but even more than that, into studying the church and understanding what the church is.

I ended up planting a congregation in my first appointment, and then I planted a church almost 22 years ago and just have been in love with the body of Christ ever since. For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, planning your finances is bigger than just money. We help you put your plans into motion and faith into action so you can do more for the ones in your heart, because sometimes all you need to make a difference is someone to help you make it happen. Thrivent, where money means more.

Connect with us at Thrivent.com. It's Holy Week in Jerusalem, and the city is restless. The people of Israel welcome Jesus as King, his followers ready for revolution. But instead of taking the throne, Jesus turns the tables.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Experience Holy Week like never before.

What have you done? Coming soon to theaters. The chosen Last Supper.

Get your tickets now. For our listeners, let's back up just a smidge because you mentioned the Asbury Theological Seminary set in this beautiful little town in Wilmore, Kentucky, just south of Lexington. When I was exploring where to go to seminary, I did sort of what you do when you get your car fixed.

You get three estimates. I applied three places, and I drove to Asbury. And I can remember driving into Wilmore thinking, Jesus himself is going to have to open this car door for me to come here. I am not coming to a place where there is one restaurant, and it's a subway.

No, thank you. But within, I would say, two hours of being there, being on a student tour, I called my husband and said, this is it. This is where God's called us. And it wasn't the town. There was nothing about the setting itself that kind of inspired me. Again, it was one of those things that was just deep calling to deep, the Holy Spirit saying, this is where I will shape and form you. And that has been more formative than any other place on the planet for me. I graduated 26 years ago, and for the last 26 years, I've probably been to Asbury at least once a year for something, have spoken on campus, have led some group, have done some work with either Seedbed or Asbury University or Asbury Seminary, and they're my people, my spiritual home. It's a great place.

It's a great place. I never knew anybody to go to Asbury, but when I was looking at seminaries, I just assumed I would go to one of the traditional seminaries for my denomination, the denomination I was in at the time. But when I would ask pastors, if you had it to do over again, where would you go? Person after person after person said I'd go to Asbury Seminary. Out in the middle of nowhere, there is this amazing deep well where the Holy Spirit is likely to show up.

And that's been proven through the outpourings that have happened over the years. There is a deep well in that place. I don't want to call it the town.

I don't want to call it an institution. I just want to say that in that place, there is a deep well where God can trust the stewardship of the Holy Spirit. And many people listening to this podcast might know that Asbury is a place where there was a revival, not two years ago. So many people wanted to be a part of it and they flocked to that little town and wanted to see and feel and hear what was happening. And it was an inspiration to so many of our young people.

Right. So many people got filled with the Holy Spirit during that outpouring. I've heard so many testimonies about healings.

That's what I'm talking about. There's a deep well in that place that God continues to return to. You mentioned your first appointment.

This was the fascinating thing for me meeting you last summer. That church plant, that church that you have been a part of for so long. Tell us about that church. Okay.

Okay. So my first five years in ministry, I served as an associate pastor in Athens, Georgia, and I started a worship service across the street. Go dogs. So it was sort of like, did I just hear you say go dogs?

Go dogs. Amen. So I felt like that five years was kind of like church planting on training wheels because I had a big church to draw from. I was an associate pastor of a place that had a copy machine, that had paperclips, that had resources. I left there and did what they call a parachute drop in Evans, Georgia, and it was just me. It was me and whoever came to join me in starting this new congregation.

And that was 21 years ago. And we had a vision for building something that was a missional community. And I want to tell you that the Salvation Army model is very much part of the inspiration for the model of our church. I wanted to understand how a church that maybe wasn't part of the Salvation Army could still be as much mission as it was worship.

And so we did a couple of things maybe a little differently in that it was all under the same roof. But all these years we have emphasized local, regional, and international missions every bit as much as we have emphasized our worshiping and discipleship community. And so I have the Salvation Army to thank for really helping me understand that model.

And I think it is a beautiful model for building church and it worked for us. So for 21 years, we've developed a missional community in Evans, Georgia that is well respected and goes hand in hand with a number of other ministries in that town to provide services. So about two or three years ago, we had raised someone up in our congregation, a young man who came to be our youth pastor and worship leader and told me he would give me one year. But you could see ministry dripping from every door. I knew he was called and it took a little bit of time for him to believe with me that maybe he was called not just to vocational ministry but to seminary and to ordained ministry.

And he ended up going to Asbury, got his degree. And about two years ago, we began to talk very seriously with the leadership of the church about allowing him to step in as the next lead pastor. I knew that eventually Mosaic, that's the name of our church, Mosaic was going to need a second generation pastor. He or I, one of us was going to leave because he needed to lead a church.

And why would I let him leave when God had raised someone up from among us? So we began to talk about it. The leadership took it very seriously. They vetted him even though he was one of us and they prayed and we had a season of discernment and they came to the conclusion that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and us to let Christopher Goss be our next lead pastor.

And so last August 1st, I stepped out. I thought, you know, I had this deal with God that I was going to do this really great thing and give this young person the next generation of ministry and then God would give me something really awesome so I could say, look, and it's all going to turn out great for me too. But last year, I have to tell you, I had opportunities but none of them felt like the call of God on my mind. They felt like a job, not the call of God. And at some point during last year, I heard the Lord say, I can give you certainty or I can give you faith.

Which would you rather have? And of course, I want certainty, but I know the right answer is faith. So I told the Lord, I'll take faith. And that meant stepping out on August 1st into nothing. I didn't know what my next assignment would be. I just trusted the Lord that it would come.

By that time, I actually had been nominated for the episcopacy in the global Methodist church, but the elections wouldn't happen until late September and only a general conference in our denomination can decide who will be a bishop. So there was a wait there. And I'm so grateful. God is so good.

He is so good. He used all of last year to build my faith. And so when I did get elected as a bishop in the global Methodist church, I walked into it with this renewed passion for Jesus Christ with a renewed level of faith, ready to do the thing God had called me to.

Wow. The Salvation Army's mission, doing the most good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support. You can subscribe to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit salvationarmysoundcast.org. Join us next time for the Salvation Army's Words of Life. Thanks so much for listening to Words of Life. We want to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the show. Visit lifeaudio.com, where you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They have shows about prayer, Bible studying, parenting, and more. Thanks again for listening.

We'll see you next time. For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, planning your finances is bigger than just money. We help you put your plans into motion and faith into action so you can do more for the ones in your heart.

Because sometimes all you need to make a difference is someone to help you make it happen. Thrivent, where money means more. Connect with us at thrivent.com. Want to learn more about God and His will for your life one verse at a time? I'm Kwanice Patway, co-host of the Your Daily Bible Verse Podcast. I'm inviting you to tune in and subscribe at LifeAudio.com.