Prairie Grove United Methodist Church issued the following announcement on Nov.22.
When she agreed in 2019 to take on a three-point charge in rural Maryland, Nan Duerling worried that she might have overreached. Her only experiences were in large, urban congregations.
“When (husband) Craig and I moved here from (Anne) Arundel County on the western shore of Maryland, we left a 1,000-member church,” said Duerling, who retired in 2017 as a freelance editor and writer for The United Methodist Publishing House after 33 years. She grew up in an even larger church, about 3,000 members.
A colleague from the Baltimore-Washington Conference, now retired Bishop Peggy Johnson, asked Duerling to temporarily take on three churches in the rural Neck District in Dorchester County, Maryland. Each has between 50 and 100 members.
“I was asked if I would do this on a short-term basis,” Duerling said with a chortle. “But I'm still there.”
Duerling turned for help to BeADisciple, an online learning program of The Richard and Julia Wilke Institute for Discipleship at Southwestern College, a United Methodist institution in Winfield, Kansas.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Prairie Grove United Methodist Church
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