Shueyville Pastor Leaves After 22-year Run

SHUEYVILLE - After 22 years in Shueyville, it's time for The Rev. Tom Carver to make like a Methodist circuit rider of old and disappear into the sunset. For, Tom has been assigned a new job, to become spiritual director for more than 80 Iowa Conference United Methodist churches in a 16-county area in northwest Iowa.

"It'll be hard to say goodbye," says Tom, who turned 53 last Saturday. "But life is about transformation and change."

Yes, as he has married couples, baptized their children, confirmed them and spoken eulogies for longtime members of the Shueyville United Methodist Church, Tom knew this day would come.

In the Methodist tradition, pastors typically serve a church for seven years and move on.

"In the early development of the country, that's how the Methodist denomination was able to spread out," Tom says.

Even 10 years in one place, Tom says, would be a long time.

"Twenty-two years is a great run," he says. "It's more than we expected."

He and his wife, Linda, raised five children - Dan, Jessi, Laura, Beth and Katelyn - in the parsonage overlooking the church. He knows that church officials were generous, allowing them to stay as the children finished high school.

Tom's last Sunday is June 17, but the church is hosting a reception for him and his family on June 10. He and Linda will live in a church-owned house in Storm Lake.

As a young man, Tom had no inclination to take the pulpit. He graduated from high school in Urbandale where he regularly attended and participated in youth activities at Aldersgate United Methodist Church.

"An old retired pastor told me, ‘We're always looking for a few good men.' I said, (to himself), ‘No way, old man.'"

But, at the University of Northern Iowa, where he earned a business degree, Tom and Linda, his girlfriend at the time, became regulars at a Lutheran church in Cedar Falls. One Sunday the sermon seemed particularly inspiring.

"Wouldn't that be neat," Tom thought, "to inspire people like I was inspired that morning."

Then, a voice in his head said, "Tom, if that's what you want to do, that's what you should do."

He told his girlfriend that they needed to talk; that he'd made a decision that would change their lives. Of course, she thought he was about to propose. Instead, Tom said, "I'm ready to become a pastor."

Since they'd never talked about that, she didn't know what it meant. Tom wasn't sure, either.

But he proposed a year later, they married in 1981, and after seminary and internships, he served the Otterbein United Methodist Church in rural Toledo for five years. He came to Shueyville in 1990.

"I never really thought about the ministry before that," Tom recalls about his own transformation, "but I've never doubted it since."

He has seen plenty of change at the Shueyville church, too, where community growth has translated into a swelling congregation, from 250 members to more than 750, putting this rural church in the top ten percent of Iowa's Methodist churches, he says.

"There is such great potential for this church to keep growing," Tom says. He doesn't doubt that, either.