GUILDERLAND — The police department has a new volunteer: a pastor. A former paramedic who was injured on the job, Geoffrey Ekstein is returning to the work he has loved for many years, supporting families through tough times. He will also be available to provide counseling for officers and civilian staff and their families as needed.

In 1999 Ekstein had been a paramedic for about five years, and had been working full-time at Guilderland for about a year, when  he was hurt.

One evening Ekstein got out of his vehicle with all of his gear and started toward the house where he had been called, without noticing the deep gully in between him and the house.

He slipped down, injuring his back.

This led, he says, to a period of soul-searching. “My identity as a person had been working as a paramedic.” After surgery, he tried to go back to work as a paramedic, but was no longer able to handle the physical demands.

In 2000 his first child was born, and he was invited almost a year later to a Father’s Day service at a friend’s church, which he was excited to attend, expecting to bask in words of praise and admiration for the important role that fathers play in their children’s lives, he said.

Instead he heard about the role of “our Heavenly Father” in the lives of believers, and about the way that His son, Jesus Christ, makes it possible for people to have a personal relationship with God, Ekstein said.

Ekstein grew up Jewish. “I had been bar mitzvahed; everybody in my family was Jewish,” he said. As a young person he had longed for a closer relationship with God, to mirror those he had read about in the Torah. But no one around him could answer his questions, he said. The faith of his youth had been ceremonial and had not touched his deeper being, he said.

He was surprised, at that church service, to hear about the steps that a person could take to have the kind of close relationship with God he had wanted. So, he said, he “gave my life to Jesus Christ in 2001, and was baptized in 2002.” He wound up at his present church — Bethlehem Community Church — in 2002.

For the next five or so years Ekstein worked as a business consultant and in “insurance and investments,” closely involved with “the home-building community,” he said. He experienced another reversal when the real-estate market crashed, and his wife had a medical scare soon afterward.

“Again I felt the rug pulled out from  under me,” Ekstein said.

It was then that he decided to focus more on the church, becoming first a discipleship leader, and then, in 2012, an ordained pastor.

Since 2012 he has been an associate pastor at the Bethlehem Community Church, which he describes as an evangelical church not affiliated with any particular denomination.

His reading of the Bible, he said, is literal. He believes that the Bible means precisely what it says, he told The Enterprise. So when, for instance, the Book of Genesis says that Sarah, Abraham’s wife, got pregnant when she was 90 years old, then that’s what happened, he said.

Asked if he would have any problem counseling survivors, for example, of a bombing of a gay bar or an abortion clinic, Ekstein said, “No, I think that connecting behavior to the value of a person is not right. Certain bad behaviors are not a reflection of who God made me to be.” Ekstein said that he may not approve of a particular behavior, but that that doesn’t influence his love for the person who engages in that behavior. “This is not about changing anything,” he said.

Ekstein lives in Guilderland with his wife, Tracey — a nurse-practitioner at the Stratton Veteran Affairs Medical Center — and their three children, daughter Sydney, son Noah, and daughter Chloe, who range in age from 15 to 11 and who all attend the Mekeel Christian Academy in Scotia.

He looks forward to being able to help fill a need in the police community, he says, for “someone who understand just what kind of sacrifice these folks are making, which extends, in the case of officers, even to a willingness to sacrifice their lives to help others.”

There is always “a cost associated with this kind of work,” he said.

Often, officers feel so burdened by some of the things that they have seen and experienced that they, not wishing to burden others, feel unable to talk to their families and friends about the trauma they’ve witnessed. So, Ekstein said, they can sometimes begin to shut down and withdraw. He hopes to listen to troubled officers and understand them.

One of his responsibilities will also be to go with police on various types of calls to the families of victims, including death notifications. His goal here, he said, will be to ask how he can extend the “extraordinary care” that first responders give.

His role, he said, will be to figure out how he can best connect the family in need to those who can help. It may be just calling other family members or a neighbor, he said, or it may be contacting the family’s own faith community, to make sure that it knows about the traumatic situation and can step in to help, “so that I don’t leave the family to fall back on their own resources.”

The chaplain position is not new. Deputy Chief Curtis Cox said that the police department had as its chaplain Reverend Allen Jager of the Helderberg Reformed Church, until he retired from the ministry almost a year ago.

Ekstein started in his new role on June 9 when he offered prayers at the beginning and end of the ceremony at Town Hall to honor the sacrifice of former town resident and Army Specialist Rafael A. Nieves Jr., killed in Afghanistan.

Town Supervisor Peter Barber said, “When you have a remembrance event like this, it’s traditional to have invocations and benedictions. We’re mindful of the distinction between church and state. Our plan would be only to use a chaplain at memorial-type events, in keeping with the traditional approach that governments take.”

Deputy Chief Curtis Cox of the Guilderland Police said that he is confident that Ekstein can reach across faith boundaries to be of service to individuals who have a variety of beliefs.

“It’s all-inclusive with him,” said Cox.