RICHLAND TWP, Venango County, — The Rev. Charles Campbell, pastor of New Zion Evangelical Congregational Church, on Route 38 five miles north of Emelenton, will be installed Sunday at the church as the Great Lakes Region Conference Minister.

He was elected to a five-year term as conference minister in January. His predecessor, the Rev. Gary Brown, will participate in the 3 p.m. installation, as well as conference ministers, the Rev. Gordon Lewis and the Rev. Gary Kuehner.

The bishop of the Evangelical Congregational Church, the Rev. Bruce Hill, will preside.

Campbell, who has been pastor at New Zion for 26 years, will assume his responsibilities at the end of June, when he will step down as pastor.

“It is difficult for me and it has been difficult for the congregation to come to grips with the change as well, ”said Campbell. “I have had a good relationship with the congregation. I have made a lot of friends, seen a lot of babies baptized and, unfortunately, have had to do funeral services, but that’s what I get for being there so long.”

Campbell will take up his duties July 1 and move to Youngstown, Ohio.

Campbell said a replacement pastor for New Zion’s congregation of 44 members and an average attendance of 75, hasn’t been chosen.

The Evangelical Congregationalist Church consists of 135 churches with 8,000 adherents in three regions: Great Lakes, Delaware and Susquehanna.

The Great Lakes Region is made up of 20 churches housing 1,500 congregants in northwestern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, Illinois and Kentucky.

Brown said Campbell was elected by the pastors and one lay delegate from each church in the region.

“It is my responsibility to be a pastor to the pastors and families under my care and to take care of the churches,” said Campbell.

“I’d also be responsible for interviewing prospective pastors and matching up pastors to churches as they become available,” Campbell said of his new role.

“He supervises the pastors in the churches and represents the national conference to the churches in the region. I think of myself as a field man. The bishop is in the headquarters and I am in the field,” Brown said of the duties of a conference minster.

“I put in 25,000 miles a year traveling to all the churches. I am the face of the conference,” said Brown, who put in three five-year terms as conference minister.

Hill said, “His basic duties are to support, encourage and assess healthy ministries in churches of the region, coaching pastors and providing resources to pastors and lay leaders. He will assist in developing lay leaders, as well as pastoral recruitment and accountability.”

“I think Campbell is very relational,” said Hill. “He will have strong relationships with pastors and lay leaders. And he has a heart for bringing people closer to Jesus Christ as seen in his ministry at New Zion Church.”

Campbell said that as conference minister, “I will try to bring more association and unity between the churches and the fellowship of the pastors of the three districts. And I think we need more personal interactions between the three regions.”

“I guess it would be believe in your pastors and that would basically be it,” said Brown of the advice he would give Campbell at the start of his first term.

“I’ve known him for 26 years,” said Brown of Campbell. “He’s been at Emlenton for 26 years. I was at another church in the area, from 1988 to 1992 in Knox at Grace Church.”

Campbell said he and his father built the house he lives in now, in Perry Township in Clarion County, when he was a teenager.

He was educated at United Wesleyan College in Allentown before serving as pastor of Penn Run Wesleyan Church in Indiana County.

Following an eight-year hiatus, Campbell said he became pastor at New Zion in 1988 and transferred credentials to the Evangelical Congregational Church shortly after.

Brown said when his term as conference minister ends, “I will assume a church, a church I have been assigned, but can’t say where yet, I can’t formally announce it. I will be returning to a pastoral ministry in the Great Lakes Region.”

Campbell described the Evangelical Congregational Church as “a moderately conservative church with doctrine and belief based on the teachings of John Wesley.”

“Our church is a conservative, Bible-based evangelical denomination. Our roots go back to the Wesleyan movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s,” said Hill.

“We would be an evangelical church in the senses that we believe you must be born again to go to heaven when you die, and we believe the Bible is the word of God,” said Brown.