Couples: Love in choir loft leads to Korean War, long life in ministry

From Sious City Journal: Couples: Love in choir loft leads to Korean War, long life in ministry

James Moores and Pat Mills made beautiful music together singing in the church choir in their hometown of Holt, Mich., and later as part of the church's Gilbert and Sullivan Society where James got all the G&S parts that called for special skill with the duo's rapid-fire, tongue-twisting lyrics. His smooth tongue also got him a date with his pretty choir mate.

"We were both by ourselves and we just went out one night," she said.

"We left the choir early to the chagrin of all the choir members. There were eyebrows raised when we did it, and we went to a movie," he said.

"I think we both were looking for a relationshp," Pat Moores said. "We were just attracted to each other. We felt comfortable, and I think we were both looking for someone to love and we found each other and decided that was for us."

One night after choir practice, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. it was that simple.

Pat was working as a bank teller while James attended Michigan State University, eyeing a career as a wildlife biologist. "We started going together in December, It was around Christmas time, and we were married in September.

The Moores' wedding took place at Brotherhood Temple Methodist Church in Holt on Sept. 1, 1951.

Sixty years later, their five children, 20 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, all from Iowa and Nebraska, commemorated the occasion with a surprise party just two weeks ago in Sergeant Bluff.

"It all kind of came together," James said of their quick courtship. "She was 19. I was 21. So we got married before I went overseas to Korea."

Three months after the wedding, James picked up his degree at MSU and, as an ROTC student, he was immediately taken into the Army that December. Within months, he was sent to Japan and eventually ended up on the front lines of the Korea War where he spent 11 months living in a machine gun bunker as a machine gun platoon leader, soon promoted to first lieutenant. It was a cold, brutal war and it changed the course of his life.

"I actually had a religious experience while I was over there. I decided to go into the ministry," James said. "I guess it came to a head when I had two of my officer buddies killed right in the trenches while I was in Japan on R&R. I came back and they were dead. I started thinking about it and I started talking to the chaplain there."

His first thought was to be a doctor but a visit to a local MASH unit dispelled that idea. Too much blood. Sickeningly so. The ministry, at least, didn't make him sick. And he had the calling.

Pat embraced his decison. So after serving as minister of education in some of Michigan's largest United Methodist churches, James graduated from the seminary and accepted an assignment in Alliance, Neb., eventually working his way back east to Dakota City and Homer, Neb., and Sioux City He also did some teaching over the years, taking other jobs as needed, selling insurance for two years when he took a break from the ministry. He did some substitute teaching the last 8-10 years. Coaching, too. But the pulpit always pulled him back.

Pat meanwhile raised their itinerant family and kept things together on the homefront while her self-admitted workaholic husband tended to his ministries.

James has retired seven times, but poor health made his last retirement in Sioux City stick.

Despite all the struggles they had in their life and in the ministry, they never stopped loving each other.

"I think our faith in God has helped us through it," Pat said. "And our love for our children and our children's love back was able to keep us in for each other because you are not part really of a community. You are always the minister's family. And so you more or less cling together for survival basically. And I think it makes your love grow. You depend on each other. And we have to depend on just ourselves."

Said James: "Our family was the only thing we had."

It didn't hurt, he added, that in the course of his ministry he counseled all of the 300 to 400 couples whose weddings he presided at, including those of his five children.