The Rev. Rob Baldwin will take the reins this Sunday for his first service as pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, 1027 Vt.. Baldwin comes to the Church from Piqua, Ohio, where he tripled the membership at St. James Episcopal Church.

It’s not often that a member of the clergy can say he once worked on a dude ranch, but the Rev. Rob Baldwin sure can.

The new pastor at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1011 Vt., Baldwin has done a lot of things in his 38 years, from that short stint at a dude ranch to working as a librarian, but it’s the stuff on his résumé that doesn’t stick out that’s what’s most important.

“Mostly, I’ve spent my time working in one capacity or another for the church in different positions, different kinds of ministry,” he says.

Now that ministry has taken Baldwin to Lawrence, where he will preach his first service at Trinity at 8 a.m. Sunday.

Finding his place

Baldwin grew up the son of “gypsies,” as he calls them — parents who moved to wherever the jobs were. He says that even as an adult he has a hard time deciding on a “hometown.” But wherever he went, be it Florida, Connecticut, South Dakota or Arkansas, the one constant was the Episcopal Church.

“My mother worked for the church, still does, in fact. She’s always worked for the church herself, so the church has always been a part of my life,” he says. “I was active a lot as a child in youth group, a church camp counselor and the whole thing. Definitely raised up through the ranks.”

He spent a lot of his pre-priesthood career working with the poor in the Appalachian Mountains and at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“I worked in Appalachia for many years doing church-related projects that are sort of … like Katrina-esque projects, where you go in and repair homes,” Baldwin says. “Instead of being devastated by a hurricane, they were just rundown, and I would bring in volunteer groups and we would work on homes in Kentucky, or West Virginia or Tennessee, as needed.”

After making the rounds, he landed in Ohio to be near to his wife’s family and settled into seminary before being assigned to a dying church, St. James, in Piqua, Ohio.

“He took that church from just nothing and made it into something,” says Jerry Hare, co-chair of the church’s search committee. “They had only 30 parishioners. And they had not had a priest, a live-there priest, full-time priest in maybe 20 or 30 years. And it was either (that they were) going to close it up or make something out of it, where the bishop said, you go and make something of it, and he did. In two years it was self-sustaining, and he really did a marvelous job.”

A new hometown

By the time he was in Lawrence eight years later for his interview with Trinity, Baldwin had tripled the church’s members and added a cable access show and a YouTube channel to further the church’s community outreach. And community outreach is a goal that Trinity, a church of about 500 parishioners, would like to focus on as well.

“Do I have any specific goals? For the church itself? They have their own goals,” Baldwin says. “I have to say, one of the things I was really impressed by was during the interview process they said, ‘Here is what our goals are,’ and while I don’t have them in front of me, of course, I would love to grow the size of the church, and introduce new people to Christianity, to the Episcopal traditions of Christianity.”

How he got to Trinity is another story entirely.

“It’s really complicated. Actually, the person who called me had been given my name by the music director of the church, who, in turn, got it from an old frat brother of his, who knows me in Ohio,” Baldwin says. “It’s like the six degrees to Kevin Bacon.”

By the time the church met him in person this summer, it had been a year since Trinity’s former rector, the Rev. Jonathon Jensen, had left to be the dean and rector of Trinity Cathedral in Little Rock, Ark. But in meeting Baldwin for the first time, Ellen Tracy, the church’s senior warden, who is the leader of its governing body, the vestry, was more than pleased. She calls the family man with two young children “the full package” and exactly what the church was looking for.

“During the year we (did) a fair amount of soul searching, trying to determine what it is that we really want in a rector,” she says, before singling out one important point. “One of the areas that we wanted help was in building our youth program. So we thought, how better to do that than having young children?”

Baldwin says he’s eager to grow the youth program, the church as a whole, and get the word out about the Episcopal faith, all the while giving his kids a place he hopes they can call their hometown.

“There’s a lot of different ways in which people express their faith, and the Episcopal way is a way that’s rich that is rich in history, but continues to grow and evolve as our understandings of things change,” Baldwin says. “You know, that sort of balance of being open to new discoveries and new ideas, while at the same time, sort of maintaining our historical inheritance, both in terms of liturgy and theology and understanding. It’s what makes us great.”