The Rev. Matt Zimmerman offers members of the congregation at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church communion during his first Sunday at the church Sept. 13. Zimmerman helped recruit original members of the church when he lived in Lawrence in the early 1990s.

Members of the St. Margaret Episcopal Church congregation greet the Rev. Matt Zimmerman during a reception that followed Zimmerman’s first Sunday at the church on Sept. 13.

Sixteen years ago, Matt Zimmerman was making calls for St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church.

Now he calls it home.

The Rev. Zimmerman is the church’s newest rector — a fun twist of fate for a man who before the priesthood was ringing up as many people as possible to solicit visitors in the church’s infancy.

“If I remember correctly, we called virtually everybody in Lawrence and asked if they had a church home,” Zimmerman says. “And if they said ‘yes’ we said, ‘That’s great.’ And if they said ‘no,’ we said, ‘Well, we’re starting a new Episcopal church. Would you be interesting in coming?'”

Because of his work and the work of others back in the early 1990s, St. Margaret’s had more than 200 people attend its first service and by 1997 had moved to its current location, 5700 W. Sixth St.

Then, two years ago, the church lost the man who led it there — its last rector, the Rev. Darrel Proffitt, who left for Katy, Texas, in 2007 after heeding a call to the Houston suburb.

When St. Margaret’s was ready to pick his replacement, they gave Texas a call back — Bastrop, Texas, to be exact — and rang up the man who had once picked up the phone on the church’s behalf, Zimmerman.

His first Sunday was Sept. 13, and Zimmerman and the church will be celebrating his homecoming of sorts with a special celebration of new ministry featuring Bishop Dean E. Wolfe at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

The ‘Jonah’ route

Zimmerman, 54, first came to Lawrence in the 1970s for college at Kansas University, where he majored in the classics and ancient history. Before finishing his degree, he left to get married and ended up following his father into the plumbing business, eventually running Zimmerman Plumbing in Kansas City. He returned to Lawrence in 1983 and lived here until 1993.

In that time, he both left and came back to the Episcopal church, with a detour into nearly the Christian polar opposite of the church in which he was raised.

“From age 15 to about age 30, I was involved in a charismatic churches,” Zimmerman says. “So I did that for a while, but then that kind of played out for me, and I wanted to see how to keep going deeper, and I remembered the Episcopal church and its rhythm of prayer.”

That aspect connected to the same side of his personality that had found an academic interest in ancient history.

“In ancient history, we studied … all this ritual about life, and I was involved in churches that had no ritual. They actively avoided rituals. And then I stopped and realized that we had dating rituals, we have mourning rituals, we have eating rituals, we have all these rituals, why in the world wouldn’t we have religious rituals, because they help keep you grounded and centered,” Zimmerman says. “I remembered the Episcopal church was full of ritual, so I came back to the Episcopal church.”

The church he came back to was Lawrence’s Trinity Episcopal, 1011 Vt., which was the only one in town at the time. It took nearly a decade for Zimmerman to go from returning to the Episcopal denomination to wanting to be a part of it as a priest.

“It was always kind of on my mind, even as a teenager. I never could see how that would happen. I always say, ‘God wouldn’t subject the church to me in my 20s.’ I just don’t know if I would have been a very good asset,” he says, laughing. “I took the Jonah route — I fled the call and took the scenic route to ordination rather than straight through. Which I’m glad about — I wouldn’t have wanted to have tried (this) in my late 20s. It wouldn’t have worked for me.”

When he was ready, he left Lawrence and sold the plumbing business, finally going to seminary in Austin, Texas. He figured Austin was a “big Lawrence,” and the culture shock wouldn’t be as bad to his wife, Cate, and two daughters, Madelaine and Kelsey.

God’s choice

After going through three years of seminary, Zimmerman moved his family again, this time to Sedalia, Mo., for about four years before moving back to Texas and to Calvary Episcopal Church in Bastrop, just outside of Austin. He was there just over eight years. In the meantime, his daughter Madelaine had moved back to Lawrence and started a family.

Having family here obviously made him an interesting candidate when St. Margaret’s needed someone to lead their congregation out of a two-year period without a permanent rector after having the same leader, Proffitt for 10 years. The church lost members and was constantly tested, says Randy Ham, the junior warden of the church’s vestry, which takes care of the business side of things at St. Margaret’s.

“It was tough. This is my second term as junior warden, so the senior warden and I along with the vestry were leading this church,” says Ham, who explains the junior warden’s role as sort of like a vice president. “There was a lot of pressure on us to make the right decisions, and I think we did an excellent job. We held it together and got us through a very difficult time in what is now the church’s history. We started a new chapter and I guess you could title it ‘Father Matt’s arrival.'”

While the church averages about 180 people on any given Sunday, 240 were on hand for Zimmerman’s first Mass. Both the average and the spike in attendance are an improvement not only for the morale of the church from those dark days, but also possibly for the church’s finances, which took a hit thanks to what Ham calls a “perfect storm” of problems — the flagging economy, the loss of Proffitt and people attending and giving to the church just because of Proffitt and an overstretched budget. Ham estimates that after Proffitt’s departure both the budget and the attendance decreased 30 percent. Soon after, the vestry, looking at a drained budget, had to cut down the church’s staff from eight positions to just a priest and a part-time secretary.

“Certainly when you lose members, we had a budget reduction,” Ham says. “If Darrel had not left, we would still have to make these cuts. This wasn’t Darrel left and our coffers dried up.”

Church member Marsha Schwyhart, who was on the search committee, says that she believes God has pointed Zimmerman in the church’s direction and will be able to shepherd it in the right direction.

“I believe our numbers did go down, but … we have a core family that remained. Because we knew that God is at St. Margaret’s, he would bring … a good shepherd to us,” she says. “It was more God choosing Matt, than us choosing Matt. But I think (his Lawrence connections) helped us be an attractive place to go because of ties and family and I know that family is important to him.”