Meet the Staff at NPPC

Pat Townsend has been Pastor at North Park Presbyterian Church since June 2004. She works part-time at the church as a Commissioned Lay Pastor. That means that when the Session of our church invited her to be our Pastor, the Presbytery of Western New York commissioned her to do almost everything that a called Minister of the Word and Sacrament would do. This is an exciting new program that trains elders to serve churches while continuing in their primary career rather than going off to seminary and changing careers. When she was called to North Park, Pat was serving as an Elder at North Presbyterian Church in Williamsville, working hard as a volunteer to develop their adult education program. She also serves on the Eco-Justice and Small Church committees of the Presbytery.

Pat is an anthropologist known especially for her books Environmental Anthropology and Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective (with Ann McElroy). She sometimes tells stories from her experience of doing field research while living in a remote village of Papua New Guinea. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan. She is married to Bill Townsend, a civil engineer, and has a grown daughter, Alison, who is a Physician Assistant.

The strength of a lay pastor is in encouraging people to think about how their faith relates to the rest of their life and work. As an anthropologist who is also a pastor, Pat is especially interested in exploring issues of social and environmental justice on both the global and local scale. About being at North Park she says, “After belonging to one large Presbyterian church (in Los Angeles) and one middle-sized Presbyterian Church, I am delighted with the new experience of being in a small church where everyone knows and cares for everyone else. We laugh together a lot and we pray for each other through thick and thin.”