Photo by Jon Anderson
Richard Hunter, the new lead pastor at Riverchase United Methodist Church in Hoover, greets Joel Roberts as he leaves a traditional worship service.
Riverchase United Methodist Church had the same pastor for about 20 years, but now a new leader has arrived with the retirement of Jim Savage.
Richard Hunter took over the lead pastor job at Riverchase on July 1. He is a Birmingham native who spent most of his ministry years in the Atlanta area and the past three years as director of new church development for the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Hunter said Savage had a vibrant ministry and grew the Hoover church to about 3,000 members and an average Sunday morning attendance of about 1,600 people.
It’s unusual for a United Methodist pastor to stay at the same church for 20 years, but conference leaders felt the thriving Riverchase congregation needed continuity and decided to leave Savage in place until he was ready to retire, Hunter said.
In the past three years, Hunter helped start 148 new faith communities, from new churches to new worship services and satellite faith communities affiliated with existing churches.
But, at age 60, Hunter said he was ready to return to being part of a local church, like he did in his first three decades or so of ministry.
“This is my calling — to present God’s Word and to pastor people,” he said.
When you’re in a local church and get to spend time with people every week, you get to see spiritual growth and get close to people, helping them with their hurts and their hopes and watching them grow in their faith, Hunter said.
He’s excited to get to do that at Riverchase, he said.
Background
Hunter grew up in Woodlawn United Methodist Church in Birmingham, where his father was on the board of stewards and Sunday school superintendent and his mother was the church organist for 36 years. He was called into the ministry at age 16 and got his bachelor’s degree in religion and sociology at Birmingham-Southern College and a master’s degree from Emory University.
While at Birmingham-Southern, Hunter served two years as a youth minister at Hueytown First United Methodist. He later served as an associate pastor at Briarcliff United Methodist in Atlanta.
His first lead pastor role was at Allen Memorial Methodist Church, which was the campus church for Emory University’s Oxford College in Oxford, Georgia. Hunter stayed there six years, then spent five years at Due West United Methodist in Marietta, 10 years at Hillside United Methodist in Woodstock, five years at Snellville United Methodist and four years at Sugar Hill United Methodist. All of those were in the Atlanta metro area.
Now that he’s back at a local church, he wants to focus on taking the church to where the people are, he said. Thirty years ago, when people moved to a new community, they would look for a church, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore, he said.
“Now, when people move to a community, they may believe in God. They may not,” he said.
Instead of waiting for people to come to the church, he wants to go into the community more and minister to people where they already are.
Hunter said he also wants to find ways to reach the growing multicultural community in the Hoover area. “I see a lot of beauty and value in that,” he said.
Riverchase United Methodist already has one of the largest Spanish-speaking United Methodist congregations in the country, with about 400 people attending two Spanish-speaking worship services each Sunday, he said. He wants to find ways for the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking parts of the congregation to do more together, he said.
He also wants to continue the work of the church’s tornado and hurricane relief teams and expand its overseas mission work to five or six countries.
The church also just launched a $6.2 million building campaign that includes expansion of the worship and music building, construction of covered walkways to connect all the church buildings, and a conversion of the original fellowship hall into ministry space for children and adults and the church’s day school, which serves more than 200 preschoolers and kindergartners.
Hunter and his wife, Meri, recently moved into the McGill Crossings community in Hoover and have two adult children and two grandchildren.