Key points
- Bishop Carlton P. Minnick has died at age 96.
- He led conferences in Mississippi and North Carolina.
- Colleagues have been paying tribute, citing his grace-filled leadership and strong support for women clergy.
Bishop Carlton P. Minnick didn’t hesitate to preach about the demands of Christian faith.
“It’s so much easier to sing ‘My Jesus, I Love Thee’ than it is to love like Jesus loved,” he said in one sermon.
In his own risk-taking efforts to follow Jesus, Minnick championed women in ministry and helped lead the Council of Bishops to speak out against U.S. nuclear weapons policy. He also became known as a superb Bible teacher, and as a bishop who didn’t put on airs.
The Rev. Mary John Dye recalls trying to escort him to the front of the food line at a conference event, only to have him head to the back.
“He wasn’t going to cut in line because he was a bishop,” she said.
Minnick, who led conferences in Mississippi and Noth Carolina and served as president of the Council of Bishops, died at home in Raleigh, North Carolina, on May 4. He was 96.
As word of his passing has spread, clergy colleagues have been paying tribute.
“His leadership style was marked with openness and grace,” said the Rev. Belton Joyner, Minnick’s assistant in the North Carolina Conference. “It was clear what he felt but he had room in his heart for relationships with those with whom he did not agree.”
Dye doubts that she would have become an ordained elder in the North Mississippi Conference 40 years ago without Minnick’s strong support.
“I just thank God for him,” she said. “He was a prince of the church.”
Minnick, who went by “C.P.” rather than his first name, was born on Sept. 8, 1927, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, when he was a boy. He attended public schools there, then had a year at the University of Virginia and another at the United States Merchant Marine Academy.
He and Mary Ann Adams of Lynchburg wed at age 18. They would be married 66 years, until her death in 2013.
“They were quite a team,” said the Rev. Jay Minnick, the youngest of their four children and one of two who would become North Carolina Conference pastors.
Early in his marriage, C.P. Minnick worked for Appalachian Power company. He’d grown up Southern Baptist but joined his wife in attending a Methodist church in Lynchburg and helping with its youth program.
That experience, and Mary Ann’s support, led him to answer a call to Methodist ministry at age 23 and as a young husband and father. He finished his undergraduate studies at Lynchburg College with honors, then attended Union Theological Seminary (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) in Richmond, Virginia, studying Hebrew and Greek and earning two degrees even as he held student pastorates.
Minnick was ordained a deacon and elder by Bishop Paul Garber and became a member of the Virginia Conference. He served five full-time pastoral appointments, including St. James United Methodist Church in Ferrum, Virginia, where he also was chaplain and professor of Bible at Ferrum College. He became superintendent of the Alexandria District and twice was his annual conference’s lead clergy delegate to General Conference.
In 1980, Minnick was elected a bishop at the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference, and assigned to the Jackson, Mississippi, episcopal area, which then included the Mississippi and North Mississippi conferences.
Minnick had not put his name forward to be a bishop.
“If the church, in her collective wisdom, feels this is where I ought to serve, then I’m willing and excited about doing so,” he told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger soon after beginning his episcopal career.
In Jackson, he won the respect and affection of a young clergy couple, the Revs. Joe and Betty Reiff. She was the second woman ordained in the Mississippi Conference and the first ordained woman to lead a church in the conference — and she recalls Minnick’s strong backing.
He also endeared himself to the Reiffs by coming on a Sunday night to a rural Mississippi church to baptize their daughter Sarah.
“Betty and I loved and looked up to Bishop Minnick,” said Joe Reiff. “He was a plain-spoken preacher and speaker whose manner and approach let his listeners know he cared for them all. He was especially good as a Bible teacher because of his ability to communicate clearly some complex truths about the Bible in a way that laity and clergy alike could understand.”
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Mary John Dye felt Minnick’s support as she went through a frustrating but ultimately successful effort to become a North Mississippi Conference elder. Minnick also appointed her, a white woman, to serve an African American church in Indianola, Mississippi — something she and the church both wanted.
It was the state’s first United Methodist cross-cultural local church appointment, and Dye said Minnick stood by her as she faced hostility from some in the community. He also invited her church’s children to sing at annual conference.
“I brought 40 children and they rocked it,” Dye said.
After four years in Mississippi, Minnick was assigned to lead the Raleigh-based North Carolina Conference.
Among his admirers there was a future bishop, the Rev. Hope Morgan Ward. She recalls how at one clergy event she and her few female colleagues took their barbecue to a corner table, feeling the need for solidarity in an overwhelmingly male setting.
But the gender line was quickly broken.
“Bishop Minnick came to eat with us,” she said.
Minnick got pushback for championing women clergy in the North Carolina Conference but didn’t flinch.
“When God stops calling them,” he was known to say, “I’ll stop appointing them.”
Minnick also encouraged the North Carolina Conference to look beyond its boundaries for mission work. He did that himself, traveling to Nicaragua in 1985 with two other bishops. The delegation successfully proposed that the Council of Bishops issue a statement critical of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras seeking to overturn the Sandinista government.
In the mid-1980s, Minnick co-led an effort that produced the Council of Bishops’ pastoral letter titled “In Defense of Creation: The Nuclear Crisis and a Just Peace.”
“We conclude that nuclear deterrence is a position which cannot receive the church’s blessing,” the letter said.
Later in his North Carolina Conference years, Minnick served a term as president of the Council of Bishops. He also was president of the United Methodist Committee on Relief.
“He loved that,” Jay Minnick said. “That was his passion — outreach and social justice.”
After retiring from the active episcopacy in 1996, Minnick became bishop-in-residence at Duke Divinity School, a position he held for a decade. In 2000, he had a key role in the decision that Duke Chapel would be open to same-sex weddings.
Jay Minnick recalled his father and mother as both deeply involved in the raising of him and his siblings, despite their own busy schedules. He shared a memory of them standing in the rain at one of his ballgames, most of the other parents having run for cover or never arrived.
Late in life, Bishop Minnick continued his avid reading, turning to audiobooks when his vision deteriorated. He faithfully attended the church Jay Minnick has long led, Pleasant Grove United Methodist in Raleigh.
He sat up front.
“Without fail, every time I preached, no matter how bad it was, he would say, ‘That was great,’” the son said. “That’s what I learned from him more than anything else — extending grace to others.”
Minnick’s memorial service was held May 10, at Pleasant Grove United Methodist, with four bishops participating. Survivors include his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other family members and friends.
Memorial donations can be made to Pleasant Grove United Methodist Church, 4415 Pleasant Grove Church Road, Raleigh, N.C., 27613 (https://www.pgumc.org) or UMCOR.
Hodges is a Dallas-based writer for United Methodist News. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.
