Joe comes to First UMC after serving a four-year appointment as a Licensed Local Pastor at Tasso and Charleston UMC in Bradley County. He began his career teaching and shaping youth when he was a freshman in high school and was asked to help teach swim lessons at the Athens-McMinn Family YMCA. Now, he is our director of student ministry. Between those two book-ends, he has been a sometimes paid, sometimes volunteer youth minister to a group of over 100 youth all the way down to one. He has also been a Program Manager for Community-based residential treatment group homes. He served as Director of Youth Development and Healthy Living at a YMCA. He was Chaplain at Hiwassee College when that storied institution closed in 2019. Somehow, he has also earned a Master of Divinity from Wake Forest University, a Master of Science in Patient Counseling at Virginia Commonwealth University, and after finishing his dissertation, will have a Doctor of Ministry from Duke University. Joe has been married to his wife for 20 years and has three children. Sometimes, one may be able to find him out and about in the wild and not at a desk or in the church. If you are lucky, you may find him riding his bike at Enterprise South Nature Park, hiking somewhere above the Ocoee River, perhaps floating/kayaking in the Hiwassee, in a hammock at Indian Boundary, building legos, browsing books at the bookstore, eating fajitas at Chuy’s, or enjoying other kinds of shenanigans at the Creative Discovery Museum, the TN Aquarium, or questioning his life’s choices being strapped down in a roller coaster at Dollywood.
