Meet Pastor

My official office hours are Tuesdays from 9:00–11:00 a.m. I am always available for pastoral emergencies.

I encourage you to text, email, or call me if you want to schedule an appointment to talk with me either during office hours or at another time.

I’m experimenting with “Coffee with Pastor” on Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m. at a local bookstore, Books by the Bay.

I hope you’ll drop by! My workdays are Sundays through Wednesdays and my days off are Thursday and Friday. My Sabbath is Saturdays.

You can reach me by email at pastorkaren.humc@gmail.com or by phone or text at (541) 915-0335.

FROM OUR SHARED HEART:

I’m your new pastor, Karen Love Baisinger, a fifth-generation Methodist preacher from Tennessee. (I formerly used to say fourth generation but then I started re-counting on my fingers as I write this introduction!) My mother was born at home in rural middle Tennessee near a Methodist church started when my maternal great-great grandfather donated the land for a cemetery and a Methodist Episcopal church. “Tuck” Crowder was the first pastor of what is now Choates Creek United Methodist Church, a small white clapboard church between Lawrenceburg and Pulaski (the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan). My mother and two of my brothers, along with my grandparents, my uncle, aunt, and other relatives are resting in peace at that cemetery.

My paternal grandfather, “Charlie,” or “Ol’ Injin” as he was known, had a moonshine still and taught several of his sons how to run “white lightning’” on narrow two lane, very winding highways in the hollers of rural middle TN. When two of his brothers ended up spending a year in the federal pen for their “Thunder Road”-running activities, my father felt called to become a lawyer. Mom had no idea that was his dream and intention since he was driving a watermelon truck when they started dating right after WWII. After I was born at the closest hospital in Jackson, TN, and despite the abject poverty of his family, he was able to go to Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville on the GI Bill following military service in WWII.

After Dad finished at Vanderbilt, holding two, sometimes three, part-time jobs in addition to excelling academically and ending up on the Law Review, our family moved from Nashville to Memphis where he went into law practice. I grew up in Memphis and lived there until I moved to the WA in the PNW in 1988. I started college at Lambuth University, a United Methodist college about 75 miles from Memphis, and graduated from the University of Memphis in 1971 with a BSE, endorsed to teach high school English and history.

I began to experience a call to the ordained ministry in 1975. Against great resistance and with very minimal support, I began seminary at Memphis Theological Seminary in 1976 and what a glorious, exciting, stressful, and painful experience it was! As part of another big wave of women seeking ordination at that time, the four women in my graduating class were the top four academically. I graduated summa cum laude with my M.Div. in 1980. I was ordained in 1980. My first appointment was as an Associate Pastor at St. James UMC, a 700 member church in Memphis.

During seminary, I trained with a clinical psychologist and Teaching Member of the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA) for three years and became certified as a Clinical Transactional Analyst. When I started one and then two and then three “spiritual growth” groups at St James, I began to feel called to an extension ministry in pastoral counseling. I started a private practice under appointment by the Bishop. I was endorsed as a Pastoral Counselor by the regional endorsing board of the UMC for chaplains, counselors and other extension ministries. I was a Licensed Professional Counselor in TN.

In 1987, as I was meditating, I had a vision appear in my mind, an image of a map of the US with the PNW “lit up.” I quit meditating for about 3 months, but despite my “Do what??!!” I continued to feel called to move to the PNW. I was able to make that move to Olympia, WA in 1988. I was in private practice specializing in on-going weekly psychospiritual process groups, running as many as 7 groups a week and offering monthly weekend “Intensives” for a deeper level of emotional healing, mostly with clients in recovery. I have provided a lot of couples, family, and individual counseling as well.

In 1993, I moved to Spokane, WA to work as a Chaplain and EAP counselor for Addiction Recovery Systems. In 1995, I re-entered parish ministry, serving Stevenson UMC in the Columbia Gorge, Montesano UMC in Grays Harbor County in the PNW, Fircrest UMC in Fircrest, WA, a suburb of Tacoma, and Allen UMC in Skagit County north of Seattle.

In 2005, I received my Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. I was in the “John Wesley and the Poor” track and did my doctoral research and paper in “Coaching as a Ministry Tool.” In the OR-ID Conference, I served Florence UMC from 2019-2022. Additionally, in private practice, I have provided pastoral counseling and psychospiritual coaching in Eugene and here in Coos Bay.