New shepherd for flock

Although he recently moved to St. Regis, Thomas Hall, the pastor at the Plains United Methodist Church, is no stranger to Montana or to thinking outside the box.

“We’d have a service every Sunday in this tavern for about two or three years,” Hall said of a church he planted about five years ago in the outskirts of Philadelphia. “That was so much fun.”

“Anybody can get people in [a church] the first week,” Hall said. “But if you want to get them back in the second week, if you want to give them some meaning, you’d better be able to change the way you do business.”

Having recently moved to St. Regis for family reasons, Hall wasn’t planning on pastoring a church after settling in, but he didn’t pass up the opportunity once it arose.

“My wife is from Billings originally, we’d done our whole career on the East coast, but she lost her mom to cancer,”  Hall said. “We have one living parent left and he’s in Billings so it was time to come home.”

Hall credits this counter-cultural way of thinking to an epiphany he experienced while visiting several churches on an extended bike tour.

After sitting through more than one boring church service, Hall remembered thinking, “they [church goers] think this is what Jesus is all about. Doing things in order. And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, there’s so much more to this.’”

One of the ways in which Hall and his congregation attempt to reach out to others is by varying the music they play on Sunday mornings between jazz, rock and more traditional hymns.

More important than music, however, Hall says his congregation reaches out by “understand[ing] church as being something much larger than Sunday morning. They would say don’t just go to church, be the church.”

Hall thinks the church is about going out and touching those in the community that are hurting and in need, and not just sitting in a pew. He cites examples from the life of Jesus, who was in his community healing, touching, and feeding others as an example for him and his congregation to follow.

According to Hall, who had previously planted churches in Kentucky and Philadelphia, it takes about five years for a church plant to take off. First, it takes time to build numbers within the congregation, and then time for leaders to emerge and mature. 

Not only were both Hall and his wife making the adjustment from a big East coast city to a rural city in Montana, but also from starting up a new church to pastoring an existing one.

“They’ve responded very well to leadership, especially from an outsider,” Hall said. “They’ve been very, very good about that.”

The transition has been eased by both Hall’s gracious congregation and by the willingness of small town people to help each other. Hall has experienced something different on the East coast.

“Ministers get along better. They cooperate more,” Hall said. “Because everybody is a little smaller, we all team up together. In larger urban areas that’s not always the case. It’s been great that way.”

Hall was a university professor who taught communication theory, and public speech. His wife, a certified financial planner, spent 18 years working with a large mutual fund company called Vanguard. They have two children together.