GUILDERLAND CENTER — In Minnesota, where she’s from, said Reverend Lindsey De Kruif, people tend to consider it unusual that she’s a pastor and a woman, but in the Northeast, she said, they are surprised not so much by her gender as by her age. She is 30.

“I’ve heard, though, that more and more young women are starting to attend seminaries,” she said recently by phone from Minnesota. She was home Thursday with family, getting ready for her wedding, on Saturday, Oct. 8.

De Kruif — the second syllable rhymes with “knife” — will start Nov. 1 as the new full-time pastor at Helderberg Reformed Church in Guilderland Center. She will have a formal installation on Nov. 13.

She brings three-and-a-half years of experience to the job — first, one year as pastoral resident at Calvary Reformed Church in Hagaman, New York, and then two-and-a-half years as associate pastor at Christ Community Reformed Church in Clifton Park, where she finished on Oct. 2.

One thing she really likes about the ministry, she said, is “how you get to be part of so many different parts of people’s lives.” You baptize their children, are with them through different struggles that they have in life, and are able to care for them in their later years. “It’s really significant to be part of those major life events,” she said, “and to help them to be aware of God and how God is working in their lives.”

The worship service itself has also always been, and continues to be, now that she leads it, a comfort to De Kruif. The ritual of coming together to worship “helps to remind you of God’s constant presence in your life, even though you’re going through all these other things in your life,” she said.

De Kruif got her undergraduate degree in Christian education and ministry at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, before going on to Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan for two master’s degrees, in divinity and theology.

She was ordained in January 2013. “On Epiphany, Jan. 6!” she recalled.

De Kruif grew up attending church every Sunday, and religious-education classes every Wednesday, but “had no concept of being a minister.” She was “probably 12 or 13,” she said, “before I realized that that would be a possibility,” for her as a female.

Her denomination — the Reformed Church in America — has been ordaining women for about 40 years, but she struggled initially with the idea of becoming a pastor because, in the rural area where she grew up, “I still didn’t really hear positive things about women serving in the ministry.”

Chandler, Minnesota was “pretty traditional and conservative,” De Kruif said; many people in the area thought that women should just “lead ministries for children and other women.”

It was in college that her views began to change, she said, because of very supportive college advisors and professors. “In college, I had more role models,” De Kruif said.

One turning point was when she saw a video featuring Episcopal minister Barbara Brown Taylor, and was, she said, “struck by Taylor’s powerful preaching and her composure as a woman leading worship.” Watching her, De Kruif immediately thought, “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing!”

Women comprise about 12 percent of all pastors in the Reformed Church in America, according to the church’s Commission on Women. Women make up 28 percent of the church’s elders and deacons, but 63 percent of church members.

De Kruif’s new husband, Stephen Dukenski, is publisher and owner of the weekly publication, Capital Region Coffee News, which is distributed to coffee shops and other establishments in the Saratoga and Clifton Park area.

They met through an online dating service and “dated at a distance” for about a year before he moved to the area in 2015, De Kruif said.

The couple will live in the parsonage down the street from the church.

She will keep her name. “I like to joke,” she said, “that Steve’s mom was Reverend Dukenski, so I will stick with being Reverend De Kruif.” His mother was an Episcopal priest.

The Helderberg Reformed Church has been without a pastor since Allen Jager retired in June 2015, said Ellen Root, the church’s administrative assistant. Reverend Gary DeWitt served as interim pastor for a year, and the church then had various pastors fill in as they could.

Helderberg Reformed has about 100 members, De Kruif said.

Asked if her parents were proud and excited about the many changes happening in her life at once, De Kruif said, “Unfortunately, my mother passed away a little before I was ordained, almost a year before. I think my dad’s really proud of me.”