Note: This story was updated June 18 to correct the name of the church where Doug Plumlee is senior pastor.
Charlotte Williams was at her father’s deathbed, mulling her future.
“I had had him — good, bad and ugly — for my entire life,” she said, thinking back.
He told her it was time for her to step up, she said. He meant taking care of family in Chattanooga — but there may have been more he was getting at. She said the district superintendent of the United Methodist Church in the Chattanooga area came by to bid her father farewell, and he, too, told her that it was time to make a decision.
Her father was senior pastor at Eastdale Village Community United Methodist Church, a long-dormant institution he’d revitalized in the 1990s.