HILLTOWNS — When Greg and Becky Town officially began pastoring at the Knox and Thompson’s Lake Reformed Church in January of 2021, church services were still not meeting in person because of the pandemic, and so the couple — who have lived in different parts of upstate New York for several years but originally hail from Michigan — had their work connecting with the church’s congregation cut out for them. 

“It was a little de-centering for us to move into a community where there were basically no in-person gatherings,” Greg Town told The Enterprise this week. “We started doing worship and that was completely over Zoom at the time, so we — my wife and three kids — were the only ones in the sanctuary. It was a little odd to be preaching to a computer screen.”

Town said that the robust support network for Reformed pastors in upstate New York and the flexibility and faithfulness of the local church were saving graces, but that the circumstances nevertheless stole what probably would have been a “honeymoon period” for new pastors.

“Pastors kind of have a term for when a new pastor starts. We call it the honeymoon period,” Town said. “It’s similar to a newly married couple in that your expectations are high, your hopes are high, you think everything’s going to be better from here on out. But I think what was different in this case was we had no honeymoon with this church. We basically hit the ground running.”

Together with church leadership, the Towns had to make decisions about Sunday worship, Sunday school for kids, and holding a summer Vacation Bible School entirely outdoors, which “was completely new and different for the church and for the families.”

“And just getting to know the congregation — the families, the individuals — was a little different, because everybody has a different comfort level about their own health and safety,” Town said. “We had to gauge that with everybody. Normally, by this time as a pastor, within the first year … we would have gone to ball games and soccer games. We would have joined with the community in different ways, with families in their own celebrations.”

The Towns are the first official pastors at the church — which used to be two separate churches but has been in the process of merging since 2019 — after the then-two consistories abruptly removed Timothy Van Heest in early 2019, who had been the pastor there for a dozen years, offering little explanation to the congregation. 

Van Heest’s removal was disruptive enough to reduce the number of congregants, The Enterprise reported six months after he left, but Town said this week that the average number these days is around 60, which was the estimated number prior to Van Heest’s departure. 

Between Van Heest’s removal and the Towns’ official arrival over a year later, the church services had been led by a number of guests. 

To find a new pastor, the consistory put together a search committee and embarked on its mission, eventually interviewing the Towns and inviting them to preach for the committee and church leadership in November 2020.

“Basically, from there, the congregation, Becky, and I came to an agreement and issued a call that the [Albany] classis approved,” Town said. “ … It wasn’t too much of a long, drawn-out process. There’s not a bishop or somebody who places pastors in congregations. It’s more of a higher educational spiritual leadership that’s based on calling and the leading of the Holy Spirit in between where the pastor feels called to be and who the congregation feels called to bring in as the pastors.” 

Immediately before this, Town had been with the Regional Synod of New York, working as a support minister for nearly 150 churches across the lower Hudson Valley and down to Long Island, assisting them with “revitalization and renewal.” Becky Town, meanwhile, was a pastor at a Reformed church in New Paltz.

The couple met at Hope College, in Michigan, which is a college with ties to the Reformed Church in America. And it was there that Greg Town, who was raised as a non-denominational Baptist and was studying biology and biochemistry, “began to understand the differences of theology and practice within the various denominations, and really did fall in love with Reformed theology,” he said. 

The couple married after graduation, and Town spent two years as a food microbiologist while his wife, who was raised within the Reformed church, “was doing all sorts of stuff in churches.” 

“We were in kind of different places at that time in our life,” Town said. “But through discernment and prayer, and our home church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we began to see that God was leading us into pastoral ministry, and we decided to go to seminary together.”

They first began pastoring in 2007, serving various churches, though not always together. They had worked apart while Town was at the regional synod, and when his tenure concluded the two underwent another process of prayer and discernment, determining that God wanted them to work together again, leading them, eventually, to the Hilltowns. 

As co-pastors, Town said that the format of their pastorship “is a little different in that we serve as the full-time pastors of the church here, so each of us is half-time. But within that, we are serving as a full-time pastor … That might be new to some folks.” 

As for the style of their preaching, Town said that, because he and his wife share the role and are parents of three kids of their own, they’re “pretty down-to-earth and practical about how we minister to folks, but also in our own theology.” 

Town described their theology as one that does not raise them over the heads of the congregation, which he suggests is important in maintaining relationships with their community.

“We believe and we preach that the grace of God meets us where we’re at no matter what,” Town said. “That’s in the good times of life, and in the bad times, and wherever we find ourselves. That’s where we want to meet people.”