We should applaud ministry
of Bishop Janice R. Huie

Loud applause is due for Bishop Janice Riggle Huie of Houston. She became president of the Council of Bishops May 10.
I take this position to be the highest office in the United Methodist connectional system. She is one of the few lady bishops ever to attain that high honor and trust.
We in Southwest Texas knew her when her ministry was beginning and maturing.
Huie, a daughter of our own Southwest Texas Conference, grew up in Beeville, a county seat town deep in the heart of Texas ranch country.
We used to see Bob and Janice Huie in the early 1970s at Ministers Week at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They were earning seminary degrees at Perkins School of Theology.
In a score of years in the itinerancy, she earned an appointment to the San Angelo District and was elected to the episcopacy in 1996.
I was there when she came as conference preacher to the Texas Conference in the 1980s at First UMC, Houston. She had already achieved a cross-conference reputation for her skills and enthusiasm.
In the 1990s she came for a preaching mission to St. Andrew’s UMC, San Antonio, where I was on the staff. Her faithful exegesis and homiletic ability showed through as she shared the good news of the Christian gospel.
In 2004, when she was appointed bishop of the Texas Conference, she “hit the ground running,” vowing to visit every charge and circuit and every clergy family in that far-flung area. It extends from Galveston and Houston up through the Piney Woods to Palestine and Texarkana.
Her 12 district superintendents and others helped her schedule and coordinate that ambitious and unprecedented undertaking.
She made hundreds of calls across those several months, reporting in the conference newspaper the highlights of some of them. She has a passion to be the “chief shepherd,” to know and identify with every church and everyone within the scope of her vast area.
At the 2005 Texas Annual Conference session, she herself gave the clarion call-to-action sermon, challenging the vast episcopal area to rise up with evangelistic zeal to make the growth in every parish match the increase in population. The challenge was well-received, and that conference is now seeking to fulfill that dream.
Huie, at the high level of bishop, is achieving well the basic duties of being a minister of the gospel. The first is pastoral care and concern, a passion for helping and serving all people at every level of need.
The second is faithfully proclaiming the word, seeking to “unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.”
The third is enthusiastic administrative know-how, humbly being the preacher in charge, using creatively every committee, every talent, every resource, every detail, every dream, “one calling to fulfill.”
Huie’s labor of love has become a “heart-warming” challenge to every clergyperson and every lay member to go and do it better: seeking and proclaiming the grace of God and reaching toward his kingdom.