News and Views

The Rev. Dr. Tom Pasmore was installed as a conference superintendent at a special installation service Oct. 6 at Avenue UMC in Milford, Del. He will lead the Delaware District and its 111 churches. His appointment marks a new understanding of the superintendency in the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Area.

Pasmore was appointed to this ministry by Bishop LaTrelle Easterling, the Area’s episcopal leader, who praised him for his record of transformative leadership. “Rev. Pasmore’s training in engineering and physics instilled in him Albert Einstein’s ethos that ‘nothing happens until something moves,’” the bishop said. “God’s alchemy is amazing, and God expects that we will participate in God’s salvific work in the world. Rev. Pasmore knows well that we pray and we act. We worship and we witness. We gather and we go.”

This understanding, along with Pasmore’s strong commitment to relational ministry, will serve him well, Bishop Easterling said, as the Area “navigates the changes necessary to move from passivity to purpose, inactive to incarnational discipleship, and resistance to revolution in pursuit of the beloved community.”

While it has always been the case that superintendents serve the entire conference, this intentional and strategic expansion of their ministry will allow leaders to move beyond the traditional boundaries of church, district and conference to “leverage everything God has given us to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” said Bishop Easterling.

During the service, she ceremonially shared her crozier, a symbol of episcopal leadership with Pasmore, and invited his wife, Sarah, and their children to the altar for prayer and to bless the work ahead. His family, including his grandchildren, shared in the service and Pasmore’s ministry by serving Communion to everyone present.

Before being appointed to serve as superintendent, Pasmore was the lead pastor at Asbury UMC in Salisbury, Md. He also served at Avenue UMC in Milford, Richardson Park UMC in Wilmington and Hope UMC in Dover. Central to all his efforts has been a commitment to community-based ministries.

As part of the installation service, Pasmore preached on the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. In addition to stressing the passage’s lesson that each of us is created as a beloved child of God who never stands beyond grace and redemption, he lifted up insights that the passage offers the church today.

He cautioned United Methodists against falling into the same type of righteous thinking as the elder brother, confusing “good boundaries with impermeable ones.”

“We tend to fall into this trap of thinking coloring inside the lines is the way we stay safe from sin,” Pasmore said. “We have mistaken rules for righteousness, clarity for certainty, adaptation for adoption. Our desire to go deeper in the Gospel has resulted in us digging trenches and building fortifications instead of digging wells and sowing seeds.

Becoming mature disciples, Pasmore preached, means embracing hard things, living with sometimes contradictory outlooks and being “willing to live deeply into the gray uncertain world that we find ourselves in.”

To survive and thrive in the season ahead, the church must be willing to go deep together as it tries new things, Pasmore said.

“I can’t even begin to predict what is going to happen in the world around us in the next year,” he concluded. “But I do know that God is with us and God’s grace is sufficient. We need to be focused on doing what we have always done best: building communities of faith that are willing to live and practice their faith together.”