Alumni Spotlight: Carolyn Moore
By: Kari Lutes, Alumni Office Intern
Carolyn Moore, M.Div. 1998, came to Christ at the age of eleven, and received her call to ministry shortly after at the age of thirteen at a church in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia.
“The youth pastor had a sense of humor,” Carolyn recalled of the church. “I had no idea that Christians could have a sense of humor.”
Carolyn’s call came in the middle of a youth-led worship service while she was on stage, giving a sermon to the congregation. “I just sensed a voice,” Carolyn said. “The voice said, ‘This is where you belong.’ I took that as a call.”
The church where Carolyn attended and the tradition in which her parents were raised did not encourage women to be preachers, however.
“So, we watered [the call] down to Christian education,” Carolyn explained. “Which was a terrible idea. It was not a good fit [for me].”
Carolyn attended a Christian school for education, but quickly dropped out before attending University of Georgia and doing undergraduate and graduate work in religion.
“That’s where I stopped walking with the Lord,” Carolyn said. “I could argue the existence of God, and would, but I just wasn’t walking with Him.”
For ten years Carolyn had stepped away from her faith.
“What I discovered was, when you step away from your call, you step away from your faith,” Carolyn said. “I was at a loss, so I just left it completely.”
It took returning home to Augusta for Carolyn to return to her call. Her husband, Steve, received a job offer in Augusta, and Carolyn knew that moving back would mean going back to church.
“I had to show up at church,” Carolyn said with a laugh. “Otherwise my mother would find out I wasn’t following Jesus.”
While she was attending church to appease her mother, someone found out that Carolyn had majored in religion. They assumed Carolyn was a believer and asked her to lead the young adult Bible study. Carolyn turned to a book she’d read as a teenager, C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
“I felt like that was the one book I could manage,” Carolyn said. “I brought that book in, and I said, ‘If you let me teach this, I’ll teach it [the class].’”
Teaching the Bible study eventually led Carolyn back to Christ.
“Going back through that book, I came back to Christ,” Carolyn said.
Her faith changed for her, the words in the Bible seemed to come alive as she read them.
“I was a religion major, I had read the Bible, but boy, it was just a whole different thing this time around,” Carolyn said.
Soon after returning to the faith, Carolyn returned to her call. She was praying one night, wondering what was next for her.
“God said, ‘I’m waiting for you to say yes to your call,’” Carolyn said.
After some prayer, “I said, ‘yes,’” Carolyn said. “My husband walked in the room, and asked me, ‘what are you doing?’ and I said, ‘I think I just said yes to the call.’ And he just fell on the bed laughing, and said, ‘When do we go?’”
Carolyn’s question of when quickly became one of where. Carolyn asked church leaders she trusted where they would go for their divinity degree if they could do it over again, and every single one answered, “Asbury.”
Carolyn described her road to Asbury as, “a sense of being lead theologically first of all, then by the faith community, and then just being led by the Holy Spirit.”
Since graduating from Asbury in 1998, Carolyn has been a pastor in the United Methodist church. For the first five years she served at a large church in Athens Georgia where she started a contemporary worship service associated with the church.
“It was sort of like church planting on training wheels,” Carolyn said.
Carolyn left the church in Athens to return once again to Augusta, where she planted a church in a “parachute drop,” with no attachment to any local churches. For the past thirteen years, Carolyn has served as the pastor of Mosaic United Methodist Church.
“We have this intention of being a lot of broken people, who make something beautiful together,” Carolyn said.
While Carolyn is not sure what is next for her and her ministry, she is currently content with all God is doing in her life. Carolyn enjoys writing for Seedbed and doing traveling ministry, and is working on getting her doctorate in church planting at Asbury Theological Seminary.
“I feel unfairly blessed,” Carolyn said.
Carolyn Moore graduated with her Masters of Divinity in 1998 and is currently working on her Doctor of Ministry. She serves as the president of the Alumni Council here at Asbury Theological Seminary.
Hey Carolyn, My story is similar to yours, with the exception that I went into social work for 40 years. I am now a student at ATS and am old enough to be the grandmother of many of my students. I am enjoying it and am working toward ordination as a Deacon in the MS conf. Glad we both came home. Jill