Saying goodbye on Christmas: Methodist pastor retiring after 15 years at Lakeland church

A congregant recently compared the pulpit voice of Rev. David McEntire to warm maple syrup, capturing both his pleasant tenor voice itself, with its faint Southern inflection, and his soothing, mellifluous delivery.

The congregation at First United Methodist Church will receive one final serving of that pastoral syrup on Christmas Day before McEntire heads into retirement after 48 years in ministry and 15½ years at one of Lakeland’s largest churches.

Since his arrival in 2007, McEntire has overseen a $16 million campus expansion and guided the church through the COVID pandemic and a denominational spasm, all while encouraging the congregation to increase its charitable endeavors, both locally and overseas. In joining a now-lapsed annual tradition of blessing congregant’s pets, he directed his pastoral protection to dogs, cats and rabbits.

McEntire, 68, said he has been guided through his ministerial career by the philosophy of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement.

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“I think the best memories are related to people and just really helping this congregation become more loving and more outwardly directed,” McEntire said. “I've always had a real emphasis on — be very careful of being self-aggrandizing and self-serving and really focus on doing all the good you can, to quote John Wesley.”

McEntire’s predecessor, Rev. Riley Short, will come out of retirement to serve as interim pastor for a planning six-month period before the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church appoints a full-time successor, McEntire said. First United Methodist Church, founded in 1864, has an average weekly attendance of nearly 1,200 in four Sunday services, he said.

McEntire, an Atlanta native, first came to Florida as a student at Florida State University, where he met his wife of 46 years, Nancy. He began preaching at “a little country church” in Gadsden County while still in college.

After serving as a chaplain at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina and a student pastor, McEntire returned to Florida for a position at the first of five churches in the state. He left a church in West Palm Beach to become Senior Pastor at the Lakeland church, officially starting on July 1, 2007.

The national economy collapsed the following year amid the subprime loan crisis, but McEntire said his congregation didn’t waver in its charitable efforts.

“I told the congregation, I said, ‘Right now, with all the hurt that's out there, people losing jobs, can’t put bread on the table, we need to spend less on ourselves and more on others,’” McEntire said. “And they never stopped. They have a significant portion of their budget that goes to missions. I mean, when I say ‘significant,’ it's not an exaggeration. It’s as much as a third of the budget at times. And that ministry of helping others is locally, nationally and globally.”

McEntire said the congregation launched a church in Bulgaria and paid for its construction and has supported a sister church in Cuba. The Lakeland church has also supported ministries for orphans in India and Kenya.

Locally, First United Methodist has provided funds to replace an air conditioning system at Talbot House, a Lakeland ministry for the homeless, helped build a new housing complex for the Salvation Army and has donated supplies to the Peace River Center, a nonprofit focused on behavioral health.

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“Part of what I love about this congregation — they are exceedingly generous,” McEntire said. “And that's really been where I tried to lead them is to take that really eye-opening statement by James, ‘Faith without works is dead.’ So faith is important. But it's something that people can see. It makes a difference. It brings light into the world.”

David Bunch, a church member for 62 years, said he invited David and Nancy McEntire to meet with him and his wife, Jean, soon after the pastor’s arrival in Lakeland. They shared lunch at the office of Bunch’s real-estate firm, across Lake Morton from the church campus and discussed the needs of the church.

“The church had three services on Sunday mornings, and the three congregations didn't have any opportunity to mingle on the way in and on the way out,” Bunch said. “We never saw the other people. They could get to kids and they could go, and so it was just like three churches, almost. So we said, ‘You know, what we could use would be a gathering place.’ So he kind of took that to heart.”

The church soon began the planning of what became a 70,000-square-foot expansion, yielding a larger space for the children’s ministry, a new set of classrooms and a welcome center extending onto the lawn that slopes down to Lake Morton. The spacious lobby contains a gift store, book shop and café, which generates money for missions the church supports.

Weymon Snuggs, who has attended First United Methodist Church since coming to Lakeand in 1998, said McEntire took pains to involve the whole congregation in planning the expansion. The pastor met with all of the church’s committees to explain the details of the project, and every vote was unanimous in support of the plans, Snuggs said.

Bunch, describing McEntire as “a builder,” said the pastor paid careful attention to the construction work before the project was completed in 2014.

“He knew every worker in there and every nail,” Bunch said. “That’s just the kind of person he is.”

The congregation staged a capital campaign and funded the expansion without taking on any debt, Snuggs said. The church is now undertaking another major project, the renovation of its youth buildings.

Snuggs, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Citizens Bank and Trust, described McEntire in admiring terms as the church’s CEO.

“Sometimes you see preachers that they're really good in the pulpit, but they're really not all that great administratively,” Snuggs said. “Or you have, a really good administrative senior pastor, and they're not all that great in the pulpit. But David has done an outstanding job of both.”

Bunch, who served as an usher at the church for 50 years, made a similar point.

“There’s, I guess, two things I think of in that regard,” Bunch said in assessing McEntire. “One is a pastor and one is a preacher. And he is an excellent preacher, but he's an even better pastor. Pastor to me is somebody that oversees the church and the flock. So I would say he's been just an excellent pastor and preacher, which is not always the case. Sometimes you get one or the other.”

Bunch noted that McEntire presided over the wedding of his son and conducted funerals for his mother and, last year, for his 20-year-old granddaughter.

McEntire and his staff faced an unprecedented challenge with the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in the spring of 2020. The church was already broadcasting Sunday services online, and it shifted entirely to virtual services for months as most local churches, heeding the advice of health experts, halted holding communal worship.

McEntire and his fellow pastors endured the alien experience of standing in an empty sanctuary and delivering sermons only to cameras. The congregation had a combined weekly attendance of about 1,200 before the disruptions, McEntire said, a figure that dropped after regular services resumed but has nearly returned to the pre-pandemic level.

The United Methodist Church has faced another crisis in recent years amid debates over the denomination’s positions on same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBT ministers. Though the denomination hasn’t changed its 50-year-old doctrine declaring that "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching," many churches have moved toward greater inclusivity.

Meanwhile, some conservative churches, in Florida and elsewhere, have asked to leave the denomination, and an alternate denomination has emerged as a global decision on doctrine has been delayed during the pandemic.

“The disaffiliations are all around us, but what I'm very grateful for is that’s not our conversation,” McEntire said. “We've been very clear that all God's children are welcome here — everybody's welcome. And we're not talking about voting. First of all, you don't have to vote. And we just our focus is on making disciples of Jesus Christ, not on tearing our church apart.”

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Different ideas on doctrine are inevitable in a church as large as First United Methodist, but Snuggs said McEntire has maintained general unity through his practice of “listening to every single voice.”

“We’ve lost a few members because they thought we should go this way or go that way,” Snuggs said. “And I think David has just done a masterful job of just listening to the congregation, trying to communicate. We have not been a divided church. We're a very unified church.”

The congregation arranged a tribute to McEntire on Dec. 4, following Sunday services. The speakers included pastors whom McEntire mentored as youths, along with his three grown children — Molly McEntire, an official with the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Andy McEntire and Katy McEntire Wiatt, principals with Indie Atlantic Films in Lakeland.

The gathering filled the sanctuary and lasted about three hours.

“To be honest with you, it was it was overwhelming, how nice it was,” McEntire said. “We were just blown away and flabbergasted and humbled. They had a reception, and the receiving line took us two-and-a-half hours to shake hands. I was exhausted, but I couldn't believe these people — they came from all over to be here.”

After delivering his final sermon on Christmas Day, McEntire expects to do some traveling with Nancy. He said he will be able to devote more time to helping care for his mother, who lives in Lakeland.

“I'm looking forward to helping family with some projects and then, somewhere along the way, I'll know what I need to do,” he said. “But I'm not going to jump into something as much as I'm going to spend some careful time just kind of renewing and deciding — where do I serve best? I'm not gonna sit around and have bored time. I have plenty to do.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: McEntire retiring after 15 years at First United Methodist in Lakeland