Our Pastor
Rev. Janice L. Sutton was appointed to the Trinity UMC in Highland Park in June 2006 after serving five years at the Wantage United Methodist Church as a Licensed Local Pastor. While at Wantage, Janice enjoyed a fruitful ministry in the beautiful rolling hills of Sussex County. She lead 16 youth to their Confirmation, focused on deep spiritual experience based in the Holy Seasons and the Christian calendar, and gave birth to Faith Talks, an ongoing ministry of theological dialogue. She developed transformative personal relationships in Wantage and gives thanks for the privilege of having served as their Pastor.
Pastor Janice celebrates that the church has always been sanctuary and safe space for her, and that the call of the Divine Spirit has been both present and palpable. At the same time, she mourns that "churches, and the conduct therein, have not been safe for everyone." She believes that confessing such truth about our present reality and our history (and the complicity of our silence) might set us all free.
Pastor Janice grew up at the Bridgewater United Methodist Church in Somerset County, NJ, "one of God's many houses about the earth". She has been blessed by the gifts and insights of many amazing and powerful women, and many teachers and preachers and pastors.
Janice worked for fifteen years in publishing, specializing in automotive, fashion, and department store advertising. She worshiped at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church while living in NYC and working for the New York Times. She began preaching at the Bowery Mission on the lower East Side of Manhattan and continued working in those special communities while a member of the First United Methodist Church of Downtown Dallas. She transferred to Dallas with the Times. It was there she met her dear friend and mentor, the Rev. Wallace Chappell, who planted and sowed the seeds for her preaching ministry while in seminary.
She returned home to New Jersey in 2001 to fulfill a lifelong dream, vision and call to enter the ministry ---and to be close to her mother, the amazing Dolores W. Sutton, who entered eternal life in January of 2004.
Janice's first Sunday in a local church pulpit was ten days after 9-11. "It was indeed a different time. For a moment that lasted a couple of months, it seemed that people actually needed the church again."
She received her Master of Divinity from Drew Theological School and graduated magna cum laude in May of 2006. She was commissioned for Elders orders in June 2006 and Ordained as an Elder in Full Connection at the Greater NJ Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in June 2010.
Our pastor has a vested interest in theologies of liberation and inclusion, feminist studies, and ministries of healing. She takes great pride in what it means to be a United Methodist.
Pastor Janice serves on COSROW - Commission on the Status and Role of Women with the Annual Conference as well as the Christian Unity and Inter-religious Concerns Committee. She is an active member of the Metuchen-Edison Area Clergy Association. She has a vested interest in Interfaith Dialogue and believes from a very deep place.... that this is where, and how, God is calling.
Pastor Janice traveled to Puerto Allegre, Brazil in 2006 to attend the World Council of Churches. She traveled to Greece and Turkey in 2009 to trace Paul's second and third missionary journeys, and is headed to Spain and Portugal and Morroco in 2011 and finally to the Holy Land in 2012.