Rev. Richard Moeller

Richard Moeller steps into the pulpit again.

An experienced pastor – and husband, house renovator, and clockmaker – has stepped in as interim pastor at Concord United Methodist Church.

The Reverend Richard Moeller accepted the request of the church, and of District Superintendent Chip Bennett, to take over the temporary leadership role in Athens after Olen Winfree resigned as pastor this summer.

Moeller is a full elder in the United Methodist Church, who served most of his 34 years as a pastor in north Georgia prior to his retirement in 2020.

He said that he found “a very warm congregation” when he and his wife Joyce made their first Sunday visit to Concord UMC. “We were greeted and virtually accepted from the very start when we came.”

He noted, “A year-and-a-half ago, I filled in at Bluewell, Brushfork and Bramwell for seven months. Chip (Bennett) had asked me if I would do that, and I said ‘yes.’”

“I went back into retirement after June,” he said. But that didn’t last.

“I knew that (Olen Winfree) had left, and I called Chip and said, ‘If you need me to fill in until December, for a mid-year move, or I’m available through June if you need me.’ He said he’s get back to me, and he got back to me a couple of days later and said if I was good through June, that was good with him.”

“It’s good to be back,” Moeller said. He and Joyce live just north of Athens in Speedway, prompting the observation that his commuting time is “five or six minutes, which is a good thing.”

Asked about returning to a pastor’s duties, he said, “It’s kind of like riding a bicycle,” he said, laughing. “You put the bicycle up for awhile, and then you get back on it. You quickly get back into the roll of things.”

“I pastored for 34 years before I retired in 2020. I really missed the pulpit for awhile, and then it got to the point where, OK, I’ve got a hobby now. And that kind of assuaged the urge.”

“So when I went to Bluewell and Brushfork and Bramwell, that was a good time to go back. And I felt good, and I knew it was short-term. Then, when Chip asked me to come here, (I said to myself), ‘I can do this. I don’t mind that.’

“I don’t know that I would want to do this full-time again. But filling in, part-time, for a few months, or one or two Sundays, that’s fine.”

After all, he said, “We travel a lot.”

He has mapped out a series of sermons for the next few weeks in Athens. He explained, “It’s so much easier to plan, three, four, five, six weeks ahead, so that you know where you’re going. The music folks have a heads-up on what they’re going to use.”

Preparation time, and background work, is also cut significantly if multiple sermons come from the same portion of the Bible, he noted. 

“I know what I’m preaching. It just makes it easier,” he said. “To do (a) series just makes more sense.”

Moeller grew up in the farmland of South Dakota. Meeting Joyce led to his decision to move to Florida to be nearer to her in 1973. Joyce had grown up in Florida. They soon married.

Moeller said, “Florida is a whole culture in itself. It was too hot and too humid for me. We moved to Georgia (in 1985), and we were going to go back to Florida after seminary.”

He said that after doing his seminary work in the Peach State, “We just decided, we had made so many friends and so many ministerial connections in north Georgia … we just decided to stay in north Georgia. (I) talked with the bishop, and  the bishop said, ‘Yeah, you can stay.’”

His accent from growing up in the Great Plains made him stand out in Georgia. He recalled, “I can’t tell how many times I’ve been asked, ‘Yew ain’t from around here, are ya?’”

A recent chunk of his pastorate was spent at Prospect United Methodist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., northeast of Atlanta.

“Then, when we got close to retirement, in 2018, we bought our home up here (in Speedway),” he said. “We sold our home that we had bought in 1976, when we went into the ministry, and we always lived in parsonages.”

“We were going to use this as a vacation home, and buy us a place in north Georgia somewhere. And we just thought, you know what, the kids are gonna hate us, but we’re gonna move up here full time. So we did, in ’20.”

Asked about the culture of living in West Virginia, he said, “I tell folks, if you want to know the difference, go to Atlanta for about six months and then come back here, and you’ll appreciate here a whole lot more.”

He does not lack for things to do in his adopted home. He spends considerable time working on one room after another in their “retirement” quarters in Speedway.

Then there’s the hobby of making clocks, in which he encases fanciful exteriors and clock hands around pre-assembled clock mechanisms.

“I don’t really know how I got started in it, but it’s just been a lot of fun to mess around (with),” he said. “I’ve made clocks out of the clutch plate in a Dodge truck, the pistons from a motor. Just almost anything.”

The interior of a clock “has too many parts to break,” he said. “I’m not trained how to do that, and I probably never will.”

“I actually took one apart, and it’ll never go back together again – because I don’t know how to put it back together.”

Responding to a question about the church denomination he’s served for more than three decades, he noted the disaffiliation of churches in the last couple of years has affected the West Virginia Conference and the whole church structure.

“I would like to see the Methodist Church continue on for a long, long time. And I have no doubt that it will. It’ll just be a little different than it used to be,” he said.