LIFE

Grace Lutheran installing new pastor Jennifer Kopacz

Brent Kallestad
Special to the Democrat

Grace Lutheran Church will install Jennifer Kopacz as its new pastor at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 7, culminating its two-year search for a new leader.

Kopacz, a Philadelphia native raised mostly in New York state, comes to Grace from western Pennsylvania where she most recently served as pastor for three small rural congregations in Bloomsburg, Pa.

“The people there are all special to me. They taught me how to be a pastor,” Kopacz said. “It was time to move on to a new call.”

A call committee from Grace, located at 2919 Miccosukee Road, had already been looking for more than a year when Kopacz was identified as a potential candidate. The church council at Grace unanimously affirmed the search committee’s recommendation to pursue Kopacz, who had also received a call from a church in Washington state at the same time.

“We trust where the holy spirit leads us,” Kopacz said about the decision to come to Tallahassee and also be closer to her parents who live in southwest Florida where her father, Charles “Rusty” May, is the pastor at Messiah Lutheran church in Cape Coral.

Pastor Kopacz follows Pastor Rick Eckard who died on Veterans Day 2013 at the age of 66 following a three-year battle with prostate cancer. Eckard came to Tallahassee as Grace’s founding pastor in 1982, building a mission church that served the Tallahassee community as well in a myriad of ways.

“It is a larger congregation and offered new opportunities and new challenges,” she said.

“One of the biggest challenges is that I’m following someone who founded the congregation, who loved this congregation into being and raised it,” she said. “ To follow him is somewhat intimidating and somewhat exciting to see what’s next and see where we go.

“I’m never going to be Pastor Eckard, that is not something that I can do,” Kopacz said. “I do already love this congregation and looking forward to being part of all the milestones that are part of my tenure here.

Pastor Jim Bezaire, who nows heads an Evangelical Lutheran Church of America congregation in Groveland, Fla., served as the interim pastor at Grace for slightly more than two years.

Search committee member Don Blancett said Kopacz’s energy and enthusiasm were traits the congregation desired in its priorities for a new pastor.

“She looked you in the eye when she talked, there was an honesty about her,” Blancett said. “A real person.”

Pastor May will preside at his daughter’s installation service that is open to the public and will be attended by are Lutheran pastors, including Pastor Robert G. Schaefer, Bishop of the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA, and interfaith clergy from Tallahassee.

Kopacz will already have led five Sunday services by the time the celebration of ministry with the Grace congregation is observed at her July 7 installation.

“Ideas, thoughts and inspiration come from them, the people in this congregation,” she said. “It’ll be interesting to see what kind of ideas they have. One of the true challenges to ministry is to meet people outside the church.”

Growing up a preacher’s kid, a young Jennifer had little interest in following her father’s career path and spent 10 years in the social services arena before entering Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio in 2007.

“His concern has always been that I do what I really want to do and not do something because I think it’s going to make him happy,” Kopacz said. “When I finally made that decision, he was grateful.”

Being a football fan wasn’t on the congregation’s priorities for the new pastor, but it turns out that Kopacz is a longtime Buffalo Bills fan who has become familiar with a number of former Florida State players in recent years.

Kopacz, who turned 40 on Memorial Day, spent her formative years in Jamestown, N.Y., and became a Bills fan during the heyday of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed and the team’s four Super Bowl visits. She and husband Rob, who was born in Buffalo, are pulling for former Seminole EJ Manuel to become a successful quarterback for the Bills along with a handful of other Seminoles on the Bills’ roster.